Functional Despair

Functional despair is meeting deadlines, showing up. From the outside, nothing is wrong. From the inside, nothing is right. The despair is functional because you are. Capacity is the thing that hides it. You can carry quite a lot before anyone notices the weight, and your noticing it does not make it lighter. Naming functional despair is a small act of refusing to be only your function. It is allowed to be true that you are doing the work and that the work is not the whole story.