This from Mandy Brown was exactly what I needed to read this morning:

… the dissonance that can happen when you come back to work after some time away is a kind of messenger. It’s so easy when caught up in the day to day to become complacent about your own needs; it’s nearly a necessity, in a lot of ways, because regularly coming face-to-face with how an environment or circumstance isn’t enough can be so dispiriting. And as coping mechanisms go, this isn’t a bad one: no workplace is or can be perfect. But part of what a lengthy break can do is rid you of the fog you summoned to blunt your peripheral vision, so you can now see clearly what’s missing or what’s broken.

Yesterday had strong first-day-back-at-school vibes—and given I worked from home, that’s an impressive amount of dissonance to have achieved without enduring the whole office environment. I guess what I’m taking from this is that my thoughts’n’feels about my work circumstances, as partly and messily articulated a few days ago, can be graded as “necessary, but not (yet) sufficient”. I know what’s wrong, but my direction of travel is as yet defined only in the negative (i.e. “away from this”); maybe it’s time to be a bit more concrete, more ruthless in my prioritisations.

After all, if you don’t set your own priorities, someone else will be only to glad to do so on your behalf.