Fifteen years in the UK. Only the first five were truly office-based; the rest drifted into mostly remote, some hybrid. Then a new role in the UAE, and with it something I hadn't done properly in a decade: full time in an office.
I'd have told you the office was the easy part. Muscle memory. You just turn up.
It wasn't. A decade rearranges you quietly. Somewhere in it I'd built my whole working rhythm around the quiet hours being mine to allocate. Take that away and the day belongs to other people again, in fragments, with a commute at each end. The work is the same. The shape of the day is not.
Nobody warns you that being in the office is a thing you can get rusty at. I was rustier than I expected.
It's coming back. And it's helped by the part I didn't see coming: partially hybrid now, Fridays from home.
One day. You'd think one day in five wouldn't move the needle much.
It moves it enormously. The week suddenly has somewhere to land. The relief is out of all proportion to a single day, which tells you most of what you need to know about what the decade had quietly given me.
It was never the building. It was the hour I got to decide what to do with.