Last Friday was officially declared a Wellness Day at work.You know the kind where the company thoughtfully encourages everyone to rest, recharge, log off, hydrate, breathe deeply, and reconnect with your inner calm. A noble idea. A beautiful concept. Naturally, it was the exact week I felt the sickest I have felt in the last five years.

For the past two to three weeks, I’ve been hosting a lingering cough that refuses to leave my body like an overstaying relative. At first it was polite. A small cough here and there. Manageable. Now it’s a full production.

Somewhere along the way I also lost my voice, which is deeply inconvenient if your job happens to be building products, where the entire operating model is built around speaking. Strategy meetings. Product reviews. Leadership calls. Hard to inspire confidence when you sound like a haunted harmonium with occasional cough that now sounds more like braying.

On Zoom calls I’ve now reached the phase where people lean into their laptops trying to decipher whether I’m explaining product roadmap priorities or whispering my last words.

So while the company envisioned employees hiking, journaling, meditating, and drinking something green and vaguely leafy, I spent my Wellness Day aggressively coughing and chat GPTing whether vocal cords qualify for medical leave.

But the universe wasn’t done.

Obviously given the geo political situations, no one in my family is letting me even go to the international airport forget about getting on a plane, which is particularly cruel timing because Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel era is about to begin, and any responsible person understands that such moments require in-person observation. You can’t properly evaluate the mood of a new Chanel chapter through Instagram. One must be present. One must feel the leather. One must respectfully consider a bag.

But no. Instead, here I am.

Coughing. Whispering product strategy. Monitoring flight paths like a logistics coordinator and checking X to see if there is even a slight hope of peace.

So to summarise my Wellness Day experience:

• My company encouraged rest.
• My lungs staged a coup.
• My voice resigned without notice.
• Global tensions complicated my travel plans.
• And Chanel may have to debut without my personal oversight.

Frankly, it’s been a lot.

For now I’ll continue sipping ginger tea, whispering product roadmaps like a mysterious oracle, and hoping the cough, the chaos, and the flight routes and the world stabilize soon. Preferably before the first drop runs out across the globe!

Because if the universe is going to disrupt my wellness, it should at least leave my handbags out of it.

Till later!