“It’s Been Hard Not to Roll My Eyes” - Slate

That, in turn, is setting off some frustration and impatience among people who have been going into work all along and have dealt with the risks of in-person work for more than a year now.

And they wonder why they’ve been left out of so much of the national narrative about what this year has been like for workers.

They haven’t been stuck at home baking bread or going stir crazy from being cooped up with family members; they’re out risking their lives working with the public and/or in close quarters with colleagues every day, and they feel invisible in much of the conversation about pandemic life.

Here’s what some of them have written to me about what this time has been like, and how this particular cultural moment—with many remote workers gearing up to return—feels like a slap in the face.

I know my office wasn’t the only white-collar office in person, and I know millions of essential workers or other service industry workers were in person either the whole time or since April 2020, so this event really drove home for me that most national media is hindered by being based in only a few communities.

For those of us that keep your lights on, your furnace running and your water hot (energy workers) there was no such thing as work from home.

We have forgone time off in the last year because you need to have enough people working to cover those that cannot work.

As an RN who’s been at work this whole time, on my downtime when my family has had Zoom calls, etc., it’s been hard not to roll my eyes when people who have been holed up at home and never actually needing to venture out into the pandemic talk about how hard this experience has been on them.

I get that it’s not easy, but I don’t feel that my experiences as an essential worker are even remotely comparable to someone who has been able to work from home, and there is often an element of self-awareness that is badly lacking when nonessential workers talk about their experiences and anxieties.

All I hear about is people are bored at home, sick of their houses, they’ve read every book and watched every show, and I’m like, I would kill to have even a few days at home doing absolutely nothing!

We have been working at what feels like a dead run for over a year now, and it’s only just now finally starting to settle into something resembling normal.

And now that things are safer, the idea that I’m supposed to continue doing that extra work on top of my job because people don’t want to deal with it.

I haven’t gotten to hug my mom in over a year, and while I don’t want to make this the suffering Olympics I do want some acknowledgment that the people who were able to take advantage of working from home were able to do so because I made that sacrifice.

And we have been doing so for over a year, much of that time when there was no end in sight.

Many of us have not only been dealing with this fear and stress, but have also been working grueling hours and/or doing emotionally exhausting work at the same time.

A lot of my friends are working from home, and many of them just don’t understand.

And that ignores the massive, significant, measurable damage to mental health this year has been for on-site workers, and I feel neglected and ignored again, because I don’t have as good a job.

But can we please stop pretending that the trauma of working from home and not wanting to go back is the same as the trauma of never being able to be home in the first place.

It is defeating at best to hear from people who have been safe at home for an entire year talk about how nervous they are to go back and the level of unawareness in some of the responses is dumbfounding.

People not wanting to leave their home offices is not the same and the more that we pretend that it is, the more we ignore the burden put upon those out and working every single day.

It’s been frustrating to read about people who’ve been able to work from home this entire time and are now acting like returning to the office is their worst nightmare when it’s been my life for a year.

I can certainly sympathize—I don’t want anyone to be in that position, but it makes me so jealous that other people have had the privilege to not feel that panic until now, with the vaccines rolling out, when for the last year I’ve been deemed essential (I’m not) and forced to work with an elderly population that can’t stop taking their masks off to hear better and won’t stand in front of the plexiglass unless forced.