Saner at Home? Season 1, Episode 01

 Paradoxes

One of the greatest ironies in life happens when some of your utmost wishes become true, but the reality of their fruition oscillates between unfulfilling and disappointing. 

Take telecommuting, for example. In the midst of the COVID-19 health crisis, my employer has afforded me the opportunity to work from home, yet, my interpretation of the experience has not been the glorious event I expected. As a mental health therapist, one aspect for such dissatisfaction, of course, has to do with the absence of human connection. I understand that it is clearly possible to develop such connection over the telephone –or even through letters, as magnificently fictionalized in Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera.  Indeed, as an immigrant, for most of my life the only way to maintain familial connections has been telephonically or through video conferencing. Certainly feasible, but definitely not the same.

Another aspect of frustration has been the redundancy of documenting my telecommuting activities. Not only have I been required to create novel ways of performing my work, but also of documenting it twice, through regular means and through daily logs. This issue is compounded when supervisors seek corroboration for some activities, even though some of these activities are never questioned in a regular setting. As an undergraduate student in Social Psychology, Industrial and Organizational psychology caught my attention and I learned about the benefits of telecommuting in rising productivity and worker satisfaction. These are outcomes that several dotcom industries corroborated in the 2000s, so much so that a new problem developed: the lack of person-to person contact among workers minimized group cohesion, potentially affecting productivity. As such, companies required employees attendance to the office at least one day per week. Ideally, the researched-supported inherent trust of telecommuting should be afforded in this unprecedented health crisis, perhaps as much as the blind faith granted to evidence-based practices, a fashionable trend within my field.  I can only hope for prompt managerial adjustment in this new reality to minimize projecting their anxieties onto their workforce.

Perhaps the primary reason for my maladjustment to working from home is the fact that I am working from home. I have never subscribed to clichés about home being a sacred place or similar ideas. Throughout life, my home, whether in the form of a college dorm room or an actual house, has always been open and regarded as unconventional (no television but a working turntable system in every room, for example). The issue is that I do not want to associate my house and its spaces with work. As much as I have transformed my office into a home-like place, leaving clients and coworkers astounded at how a juvenile hall cell can feel so relaxing, I do not want to reverse this practice to my home.

 For this purpose, during the Covid-19 health crisis, I have relegated a specific telecommute area at home with limited space and tools to minimize associating it to my job as much as possible. In this way, when the health crisis is over, perhaps the only triggers my home will provide would be those associated with weeks of confinement.