Return to Work

I’ve just finished my first day of work since March, and I’m shaking like a leaf. It was okay though. Far more mundane, much less daunting, than I expected.

It was only a four hour day. I’m doing a phased return, so I’m working four hour days for the rest of this week, then six hours every day next week, and back to normal hours on the third week. Although I don’t have to start before 10 a.m. for the next two months, so that I’ll  avoid all the hustle and bustle of the early mornings.

My work have been pretty good about this actually. They seem to actually want to help me get better, unlike when people are physically ill, or injured, and they’re piling on the pressure for people to do things they’re not really capable of.

I had a little meeting with my manager – and they’ve given me a female manager because of the sexual assault element of the PTSD – and she looked at my note from the doctor and asked if there was anything else I needed them to do to help me.

I don’t have to deal with any clients for at least a week. My manager is off on vacation and she wants to be sure that I’m okay and ready before I get back into things. So in the mean time I’m coordinating the Olympic pod decorating competition and trawling through the one thousand six hundred and fifty emails in my inbox. And then I have to do my workplace induction again.

On the one hand having another induction kind of makes sense. I felt like the newbie again this morning, when I couldn’t access my computer because the time limit had expired on my password while I was away, and I couldn’t remember the codes for anything. But I’m really hoping that I won’t have gone back to the beginning in terms of my knowledge and experience. That’d really put the kibosh on all the plans that I’ve got for developing and moving forward with things.

Catching up on my emailing and the intranet has provided me with a whole host of ideas for material though. I’m thinking of setting up a professional blog and writing articles about issues in my field. Writing seems to have been helping me with my nerves so far, might as well carry on with it into the work area.

Everyone was a lot nicer than I expected. No-one asked where I’d been for the last five months. I’d basically been building myself up with worrying about a thoroughly unthreatening morning. If things carry on like this I might eventually get back to some semblance of being okay.