In our regular mental health spot, a few thoughts about what we don’t put on an email signature, and the challenge of projection.
Hello, and welcome to the spot on the Film Stories site where we stop for a bit to chat about mental health. The things that may be affecting you, or people around you. Not everything we write in this weekly column will be of use to everyone, but hopefully, over the archive of articles, there’s something in here that might just be a little bit of use.
This time, a few thoughts on, of all things, email signatures. You know, those little bits that are appended to the end of emails, that may offer some contact details, or information about where you work. They all look very posh, important and formal. What they cloud, of course, is whatever you have to get through to get to them in the first place.
Most of us to a degree, I’d suggest, put on a fair amount of projection at work. We might be covering up that we’re really tired, that we’ve had a massive row somewhere, that there’s worrying news to contend with. Or it gets even deeper. I know plenty of people whose email signature and general work projection is – usually successfully – obscuring some extremely difficult challenges in their personal life. The kind that, without work, would be filling in pretty much every spare hour they have.
Can you imagine if our email signatures were a little more open? I might list a job title, a logo of the company I work for, and then a few lines explaining that I might not be able to get to the email in question in speedy time, due to the cavalcade of pressures closing in around? That some days, it feels like an achievement and a half to get to 11 o’clock without curling up in a ball in the corner of the room?
The reality is that so many of us are carrying around so much stuff of which most people are unaware. Too much transparency and it’s seen as some kind of weakness, too little and you’re assumed to be coping and able to deal with everything by return. It’s a strange system where we each have to find some kind of line through that, no matter how challenging it may be.
I’ve long contended that the best answer is to consider the person I’m interacting with, should they be difficult or elusive, might be having one of the worst days of their life. It doesn’t excuse everything, but it does lead to me to pause, and appreciate I’m interacting with a human being, who might be as flawed and messed up as me.
Thanks as always for listening. And this column will return…
