When everything feels haywire, pause, assess, then move forward.
Have you ever walked out of a workplace and told yourself, “I just need a week off”—only to realize months later you’re still carrying the weight of it all?
That was me. Sam. Same guy who recently had karma take control of my fate, teaching me lessons I didn’t even know I needed—just in a different battlefield this time, the corporate one.
Back in the day, I thought life’s lessons were limited to parties, weddings, and the occasional birthday surprise. Turns out, workplaces can be their own version of unwanted guests too—loud, suffocating, and overstaying their welcome in your head long after you leave the room.
I was stuck in what people politely call a “toxic workplace.” But here’s the thing: you don’t realize how toxic it is while you’re inside. You normalize it. The passive-aggressive emails. The 11 p.m. “urgent” calls. The boss who mistakes fear for respect. And you start believing this is just how work is supposed to be.
Meera, one of my best work buddies, once gave me a survival hack: when someone’s being rude or talking nonsense to you, just imagine them as a cartoon character. It works like magic. Instead of fuming at the garbage they just spewed, picture Donald Duck flapping around, doing quack quack. Trust me, it’s very hard to take insults seriously when you’ve got a quacking duck running through your head.
Like this one time—
“Sam, why didn’t you reply to my mail last night?”
“Because it was 2 a.m. and I was asleep?”
“Well, you should’ve kept your phone on loud.”
“Oh, my bad. Next time I’ll cancel sleep altogether. Who needs rest when we’ve got endless SAP codes, right?”
Of course, I only said that last part in my head. Out loud, I smiled and nodded like a good employee. But that was the routine—sarcasm in my head, silence on my face.
The only thing that kept me sane were my best work buddies—Rohit, Anjali, and Meera. The three of them were the reason I didn’t pull my hair out on most days. We had this unofficial tradition of sneaking off for cutting chai at 4 p.m., and we even scheduled a “technical meeting” with each other so nobody else could book that time. Rohit always had a new office meme ready, Anjali had the sharpest comebacks for our boss (which, sadly, never left the cafeteria), and Meera was the calm voice reminding us that someday, all of this would just be a funny story.
Those chai breaks felt like oxygen. They didn’t fix the toxicity, but they reminded me that I wasn’t losing my mind—that there were good people stuck in the same storm, paddling beside me.
By the time I finally left, I wasn’t just quitting a job. I was quitting a version of myself that had learned to survive instead of live.
So I took a break. At first, I told myself it would be a month. Then another. And then another. And each time, the guilt crept in: Am I being lazy? Am I falling behind? You know that guilt—society, LinkedIn updates, relatives at family gatherings—it all tells you that rest is weakness. That if you’re not constantly “hustling,” you’re losing.
But here’s what I learned the hard way: healing doesn’t care about your calendar.
My break didn’t make me lazy. It made me human again. At first, I felt restless—like I should be doing something. But slowly, I started doing little things that reminded me I was more than just an employee ID. I picked up books I’d left halfway. I started going for evening walks without the constant buzz of emails in my head. I even learned how to cook a decent dal—something I’d sworn was impossible for me. And somewhere in between, I built myself a new ritual: one movie every week. Two hours where I didn’t owe my attention to anyone except the story on screen.
With time, those small wins stacked up into something bigger: positivity. I wasn’t surviving anymore—I was actually living.
And somewhere in the middle of this pause, I remembered something Meera had once said during one of our chai breaks:
“When everything seems haywire, it’s better to pause, assess, and then move forward.”
Back then, I brushed it off as casual wisdom over a cutting chai. But during my break, it started to sink in. She was right. The pause wasn’t wasted—it was necessary. It gave me the clarity to choose myself, improve myself, and step into whatever comes next without carrying the poison of the past.
Because the truth is, healing doesn’t come with a deadline. What matters isn’t how long the break is—it’s whether you come back as yourself again, not just as another survivor of a toxic workplace.
Turns out, the most important project you’ll ever work on is you.