I didn’t have an answer yet, but I knew I had to find out.

I was halfway through my medical leave when I sat down for my first appointment with the psychiatrist who had become part of my care team. By then, the shock was beginning to wear off. There was nothing for me to return to—not really. The professional self I had been was gone.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I think I need to study the Yoga Sutras. Do you know what they are?” I asked. “And start pranayama. And meditation. There’s a Buddhist temple next to my house. Can you believe it? What are the odds?”

Was I rambling? Did I sound like a kook?

The psychiatrist listened with the softest, kindest expression.

“I think that’s a very good idea,” she said. “I think that’s your Plan A. I can give you a Plan B, but you may not need it.”

Plan B was medication.

What strikes me now is how sure I sounded. Had I somehow duped my psychiatrist? Was I manipulating my own care? Who turns away from medical intervention in favour of spiritual guidance?

When the call ended, I felt as though I had been seen for the first time in months. For a brief moment, I felt understood. And with that came the reassurance that perhaps I was going to be okay.

But deep down, I also knew I wasn’t solving the original problem: what kind of work I was going to do, and how I would continue in my profession.

In a strange way, my psychiatrist had given me permission to ask a different question: What did I need? Not: What did the company need?

It was almost antithetical to what I had expected. Here I was, incapable of productivity. Dead weight to a company. On medical leave, with a professional care team subsidized by an insurance company working on behalf of my employer—and yet every person I worked with seemed intent on restraining my eagerness to solve myself as the problem and get back to work as quickly as possible.

None of them were trying to solve the contradictions of my job, the demands of paper records, or the bureaucracy of the corporate process. As much as I tried to explain the impossibilities of the role I was in, I knew there was no way they were following the plot.

They were simply asking me to heal.

And to accept that my priority was me.

This was not something I was comfortable with.

I had spent years orienting myself outward - to the work, the problem, the expectation, the next thing that needed to be done. Even my instinct on leave was to treat myself as another problem to solve. To get better. Become functional. Return stronger. 

But what did I have to return to?

I was beginning to understand that getting better could not simply mean reconstructing the professional identity that had collapsed. There was nothing there for me. In one email, I had even been referred to as “clerical management.” I certainly wasn’t going back to that identity.

If I was going to return anywhere, I would have to return to myself.

The trouble was, I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant.

And maybe this is where the certainty I had shown the psychiatrist begins to make sense. Somewhere beneath the grief, loss and confusion of my circumstances, I seemed resolute that the question in front of me was no longer a career question.

It was a question of Self.