Dear Employee - you are not necessarily fine simply because you still have a job. You are not necessarily ok because others are sick and dying. This whole situation is F'd and we are all experiencing loss. We are all suffering./1

We are grieving the world we used to know. We are mourning the routines that anchored us, our sense of safety, our understanding of how life is supposed to go./2

We're not simply working from home. Let's name this what it is: collective trauma. When we do that, we can work through it together without all of the meta-emotion of feeling bad about feeling bad./3

Viktor Frankl said that "suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the 'size' of human suffering is absolutely relative." As @IamDavidKessler says, "the worst loss is always your loss."/4

As @BreneBrown says, we shouldn't compare suffering but we can suffer with perspective. We can leverage our own emotions to build emotional drawbridges ( @GlennonDoyle) with others./5

So dig into how much this utterly sucks for you. Display emotional courage by resisting the temptation to maintain a facade. When my teammates ask how I'm doing, my new response is either "I'm doing fine... except for everything" or "Surviving, which is the goal right now."/6

Leverage that insight to reach in to your colleagues. When you ask them how they're doing, make sure you have enough time to really hear their answers. And resist judging how others show up - we all grieve differently./7

This virus has catapulted us into a fluid dance between self and others: From an epidemiological perspective, we must hold ourselves to account in order to protect our broader community./8

From an emotional perspective, the same is true. Please take care to process all you're experiencing. You deserve it and the personal benefits will cascade into your relationships. That's a contagion I can get behind./end