Tea, Quiet, and the Person Behind the Badge
During my lunch break, sitting alone with tea, I remember who I am beneath my professional persona. The careful mask of workplace competence dissolves, and my actual thoughts emerge—worries about my son’s school performance, gratitude for morning light through windows, the specific quality of tiredness that comes from performing productivity for six hours straight.
Work requires us to be partial selves; breaks allow us to be whole selves.
The person I am at my desk is efficient, focused, pleasant but not too personal. The person I am during breaks is more complex—sometimes anxious, sometimes dreamy, always more honest about the internal weather that work requires me to hide.
Professional life demands emotional regulation that personal life doesn’t require.
Breaks reveal how much energy we spend maintaining our work personas.
In those ten minutes between meetings, my shoulders relax into positions I didn’t know they’d left. My face settles into expressions that feel more natural than the ones I wear during professional interactions. I remember what my voice sounds like when it’s not carefully modulated for workplace appropriateness.
We perform ourselves at work; we simply exist during breaks.
My colleagues become more interesting people during coffee breaks—sharing concerns about aging parents, excitement about weekend plans, the small human details that professional boundaries usually exclude. These brief moments of authentic interaction remind me that we’re all people pretending to be employees rather than employees who happen to be people.
Workplace relationships are authentic people filtered through professional requirements.
The self that emerges during breaks is often the self we’ve forgotten we miss.
Why does stepping away from work remind us who we are? What parts of ourselves do we suppress during professional hours? And what would change if we brought more of our break-time authenticity into our work-time interactions?
Perhaps the goal isn’t better work-life balance but finding ways to be our whole selves even while meeting professional obligations—integrating rather than compartmentalizing our humanity.
