Help! I Can't Find My Therapist

In my corporate career, I learned about vision and mission, goals and pillars, KPIs and OKRs. I diligently reviewed and analyzed numbers, linking Stories to Epics, pointing out patterns via Gantts and Burndowns.

There is one Key Performance Indicator I've neglected through all of this, and by the time I slapped my forehead and pulled up the figures, the numbers shook their heads and laughed in my face.

The pandemic years really took a toll. Working from home is not a vacation. As the sole income earner, I've learned to throw all the balls up in the air and then run around like a headless chicken hoping to catch them as they fall; I simply do not have enough arms to try to juggle.

At home, I am the founder and the investor, the big boss and the intern, the project manager, the engineer, the UX designer, the copywriter, accounts payable, admin assistant, buyer, IT, and the cleaning staff.

The pandemic snowball continued to roll, and picked up logistics issues and social injustices along the way. When the boundaries between work and home blurred, so did the ones separating "Me" from the rest of the World.

I am someone who gives 200% of myself to everything that I do. During the last three years, I gave 200% even when I was not at full tank. I created community, I was promoted into a new role, I made connections I otherwise would not have made.

I also cried for no reason, had no restful sleep for months, and most days I forgot to eat.

So naturally my body got sick, and sick of me. "You want numbers? Here, quantify this!".

In my last post I talked about staring at my carpet for six months. During three of those months I was on medical leave to try to collect my horcruxes for my imminent return as You-Know-Who. It was my first time on leave in my entire life, and trying to navigate it was as exhausting as the illness itself.

To start, my long-time therapist could not be found.

They are someone who knew me and my situation for years, and someone I've confided in about going on leave. Yet when I asked for help for documentation, it turned into a huge project which I had to project-manage. My therapist was difficult to reach. During that time they would respond after three days, sometimes three weeks. There was also a technology gap that I had to bridge between my therapist and the agency handling my company's medical leave process.

Second obstacle - above mentioned outsourced medical leave agency.

There were a lot of phone calls with my case manager, a call from their behaviorist, many emails asking for more and more proof to show that I needed to be on this medical leave.

For someone who was drowning in a sea of depression, anxiety, and declining executive function, even answering a phone call or email cost a full day's worth of energy.

But I tried, I had to, nobody else was going to do this for me.

The demands for "proof" kept piling up. The handwritten and signed document from my therapist (when I eventually found them) was apparently not enough. I also looped in my EAP therapist to provide additional context. I was asked to request detailed session notes from both. I signed endless Release of Medical Information forms, I gave permission to contact my primary care provider, and my secondary providers. I basically told them, "Yes please take all the personal and private information you want from me. I just want to rest".

and that was not enough.

Per their request, I downloaded my entire life's worth of medical records, dates of every medical appointment I had, every lab test, every ob/gyn appointments, and sent the files over email to some stranger who told me they worked with my company.

All just so I could receive short term disability benefits and be approved to go on leave to rest.

Needless to say, I had no rest during the three months I was away. In fact, I became worse.

At some point, the agency stopped following up, so I contacted them.

"Oh yes, you were approved for medical leave as of ..." a hurried voicemail message informed me that I received final approval of my medical leave a month ago (when they stopped following up).

I received this call a week before I was due to return to work.

Is medical leave supposed to be like this? I'm not sure. I never got all the paperwork from my therapist or agency in order to qualify for short term disability, a benefit which I spent my whole life working for and paying into.

and then I had to make a really difficult decision - to leave my "successful" career so I could stay alive.

-------------------------- # To Be Continued # --------------------------

This is Part 2 of my on-going series about Mental Health.

Follows and Reposts are much appreciated.

Questions for You:

• Did a medical leave help you through a rough time?
• What are you most anxious about right now?
• How are you tracking your health KPIs?

Take Home This:

No matter how much we plan and practice and prepare, life's curveballs tend to hit harder than we expect.

Sometimes we want to give others advice and suggestions (I do too), but once we become the main characters of the story we realize that just having someone who listens is good enough.

Speaking up is something more of us should do, but not at the cost of our own health and safety. There have been times when I was asked, "did you bring this up to HR?". I would, had I not been only capable of staring at the floor and then the ceiling for six months.

Compassion doesn't always mean having to sacrifice ourselves to do something for someone else. It is a quality of having the willingness to listen, to acknowledge, and to wholeheartedly believe in someone else's lived experiences.

Keeping you all in my heart. Until next time!

With Love,

Katrine