750 word essay: Should you disclose your mental health issues at your agency?

The jury is out on whether it is in your best interests to share what medications you’re on with your workplace. Like most people crippled by anxiety and debilitating depression, I have been on Flunil (which is Indian for Prozac), Clonazepam and a few drugs in between. Waklert was the one my workspace should have been thrilled for. It would pop me open at first light and for those few empty hours at dawn, I used to be “productive”. I’d take my coffee on time, I cram in my breakfast and jump into a cab at work. But it wasn’t for long. You know how they clock would strike 12 and Cinderella’s chariot would turn back into pumpkin and rats. That’s how it’d be at around 4pm. And that was three and a half hours before I could swipe out. But for me, the day’d be over. I was out of juice long before it was time to hit the open mics.

Now, open mics are a thing you have to subject yourself to if you are any kind of comedian. It’s batting practice. You bat some ideas at an empty wall of belligerant audience until something sticks. Then you go home and rewrite until you turn those grimful disgruntled tight lips into at least one begrudged smile in that same room. Far from the ideal response (full throated, unabashed laughter). But this is comedy. It’s a slow and painful tragedy to be replayed day after day because the audience has seen it all and there is nothing you can do to surprise them into mirth. This is the process and you have no choice but to run with the motions.

My employers ask me why I do this. I do not owe them an explanation as long as I swipe in and swipe out for the hours I am paid to be at work.

But if you’re interested, I’d like you to know that if you are any kind of writer (and I am a bad one, because I lean on paranthesis, but I am still a writer) – If you are any kind of writer… You cannot afford the luxury of questioning the purpose of it all. There is really no reason to be doing any of this. If you write copy (and I do write copy, poorly sometimes), you know that the world moves without you labouring over the keyboard. As Don Draper put it in one of the later seasons of Mad Men (I must mention “later” because you’ll say you don’t remember it but the reality is you just watched the first two seasons you pleb and now I am making at reference three people reading this will get and my writing, just like my comedy, will sink into oblivion) – Don Draper said, about copywriting at an ad agency is “the least important most important thing.” It’s going to die a well-timed death in the sinkhole of metrics and analytics and AI and Chatgpt. And this job and this title you hold – Creative Lead, Creative Director, Assistant (To The) Creative Director – you can gentrify it all you want. Will there be another Piyush Pandey? Industry grapevine tells me, he was once bitten on the face at a party. That should tell you everything you need to know about what we are expected to survive past. Because that face-biting incident is the (chef’s kiss) pinacle of the Great Golden Age of Indian Adverstising. Not the Cadbury Girl, not the Amul Butter Girl, not the Parle-G Girl. It’s some guy who bit his CD’s face.

But I digress. I warned you – I am a bad writer. I have no focus. No discipline. I don’t write. I channel the fullstream of my consciousness and I REFUSE TO REWRITE. This is the only space where I don’t have to tune myself to “client feedback”. Work. Comedy club. It’s all the same – someone very disappointed leaning back in his chair (it’s almost always a he), completely convinced that if he had the mic or the keyboard, he’d do better than the monkeys taking stage, presenting, pitching.

Did they send the face-biter to therapy? I don’t know. All I know is that he was back at work like nothing happened. And that is, to this day, lauded as peak ‘success mindset’. It’s a glorious Linkedin anecdote. An unrule team member and his magnanimous leader who had the grace to accept ki “aise badi badi agencies mein, aisi chhoti chhoti baatein hoti rehti hai.”

I’d tell you what I think of it but my 750 words are over.

Thank you for coming this far with me. I’ll see you tomorrow.