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I have cried in office buildings more times than you could imagine. Sometimes in quiet corners, or empty meeting rooms, but most often inside toilet stalls.
My tears were not always about work. Sometimes they were about heartbreak, family problems, money stress or grief that had nothing to do with death. The office just happened to be the place where those emotions surfaced, because there was nowhere else for them to go.
We leave for work early in the morning and return in the evening, often late at night.
By the time we get home, many of us are too exhausted to sit with our thoughts or properly process our feelings. Emotional reflection requires time, stillness and energy, all of which is usually spent by the end of the day. This is why emotions often surface during working hours.
After crying, I usually wash my face and retouch my makeup so no one will notice what just happened. I hide it because work hates vulnerability. Everything must meet a deadline. Everything must be predictable and measurable, but we all know emotions don’t work like that.
It’s not me, it’s corporate
Since the very first moment I cried silently at the office, I thought the problem was me. I thought crying in toilet stalls meant I was weak, that I was failing at life and being unprofessional. I assumed everyone else was handling life better than I was, while I was the one falling apart in secret.
It wasn’t until I saw content on TikTok and Instagram of people doing the same thing that I realized this was a collective experience. What I thought was a personal weakness was actually a shared experience shaped by a system that was never built to accommodate emotional reality.
To hide our feelings, suppress our emotions and prioritize our work is a symbol of professionalism, they said. Yes, I understand business is business. It measures time, energy and efficiency. But sometimes I feel the idea of professionalism is built on denial. It assumes we can pause our emotions the moment we clock in.
Unfortunately, emotions are not tools we can put down at will. Asking people to feel nothing at work is asking for something impossible.
There are many examples of how the professionalism we know today was not designed with the full human experience in mind. In many workplaces, grief is only acknowledged in cases of death. Anything outside that narrow definition simply does not exist in the system.
But in real life, loss takes many shapes. The end of a relationship, divorce, the loss of a beloved pet or sadness over unmet expectations. These experiences are valid sources of grief, yet they are invisible to corporate rules. So we carry them quietly, because the system has no category for what we are going through.
Emotions vs the system
I remember a time when I had to take sudden leave after losing my dog. I informed my manager, and he said yes. But days later, I found out that my salary had been deducted because I failed to submit the required form three days before, as written in the code of conduct. The loss happened suddenly, and I was deeply grieving. But the rigid system didn’t care about context. It acted like emotional crises could be planned and submitted in advance.
Even when grief is officially recognized, it’s often reduced to a timeline that makes little sense. Bereavement leave is usually limited to three days. Three days to arrange a funeral, deal with paperwork, face relatives and then return to work as if nothing happened. But who actually recovers from loss in three days? Are we expecting miracles? As if grieving people were Jesus, able to rise again in three days.
The problem becomes even more complicated when grief returns later, which it always does. Grief does not arrive once and then leave. It revisits us in waves, often long after the official leave has ended.
When we try to take annual leave, we are still required to explain where we are going and why we need time off. But emotions do not always come with explanations that are acceptable in a professional setting.
How do we tell our boss, “I need a day off because I am grieving someone I lost three years ago,” or “I need time because I just broke up last night”? Would those explanations ever be considered valid?
When life happens during office hours
Life inevitably brings suffering into every space we occupy, including the office. There will always be moments of surprise in life that force us, whether it is office hours or not, to accept the loss of whatever is temporarily given to us, including its bitterness and its pain. To be able to feel is the core gift of our humanity. Working shouldn’t require us to numb that part of ourselves.
As children, we were told that once we grew up we should stop crying. But adulthood was never meant to be the absence of sadness. Taking care of our emotions and giving them space is not a sign of weakness, but a form of wisdom. Ignoring what we feel does not make us mature — it does the opposite.
Growing up should not mean “Stop crying, you’re grown up now”, but “You’re grown up now, so you have to sit with your feelings, make space for them and be responsible.”
We can grieve while performing at work. One does not automatically cancel the other out. Showing up to work while carrying sadness does not make us incapable. What weakens us is the constant expectation to silence what we feel. When emotions are pushed aside for too long, professionalism slowly turns into emotional numbness. And numbness has never been a sign of being fully human.
But until the corporate system starts recognizing the complexity of human grief, allowing ourselves to sit with those emotions will likely find us crying in the office some days, maybe in a quiet corner or an empty meeting room, but most often inside a toilet stall. It does not mean we’re unprofessional. It just means we are human beings trying to regulate our emotions in limited situations.
