February 9, 2025

What do you need to say?

I spent this weekend mostly asleep because in America, RTO has also meant a return to people coming to work while coughing and sneezing and wheezing and sputtering. And for people like me, people whose immune systems tend to fall over at the slightest challenge, that has meant a return to being sick all the time.

So here’s my perennial plea: if you’ve the luxury of paid sick days, please take them. If you’ve got no choice but to be out and about while sick, please wear a mask.

Those of us for whom every cold has a tendency to become bronchitis and every flu, pneumonia will be most obliged.

Attribution

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
— from The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action by Audre Lorde