I feel like my hatred for checking emails accidentally rewired my entire career and I still cannot wrap my head around how something so stupid ended with me getting promoted and my coworker getting fired. It has been sitting on my chest for days and I cannot tell if I should be relieved, ashamed or just confused about the whole situation.

The truth is that I have a real problem with emails. I am not talking about normal work annoyance. I mean a deep, physical kind of dread that hits the moment I see more than three unread messages. My brain shuts down. My chest gets tight. It feels like burnout and anxiety all mixed together. So when a massive project at work started crashing a few months ago and everyone was firing off long reply all messages at two in the morning, I bailed instantly. I opened the first message, saw that the drama was already boiling, and closed my laptop like it had personally insulted me. My whole strategy was basically that if I did not read it then it could not ruin my day.

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Not brilliant. But it is how I survive.

While I was minding my mental peace and quietly focusing on my assigned tasks, everyone else dove headfirst into the chaos. People were arguing, blaming each other, looping in higher managers, writing angry paragraphs and turning the inbox into a battlefield. There was this one coworker, I will call him D, who apparently got into it with one of the managers and sent a pretty aggressive message while everything was spiraling.

I knew none of this. I did not read a single thread. I was just floating peacefully on my little island of ignorance like a clueless monk trying to protect his sanity.

Then one day my boss pulled me aside and told me how impressed they were that I stayed calm through the disaster. They said I avoided unnecessary conflict and stayed focused on deliverables instead of feeding the drama. I stood there nodding, pretending I understood what they were talking about, while inside I was thinking I am only calm because I had absolutely no idea what was going on.

Then last week everything blew up for real.

D got fired. Management decided he was a source of negativity during a critical moment and that I was some shining example of how to handle pressure. They literally said they wished more employees worked the way I did. Meanwhile I am standing there thinking I handled nothing. I just refused to open the damn emails.

And then HR congratulated me on the promotion that D was originally being considered for. A whole life changing decision fell into my lap because I am terrible at reading messages.

I cannot stop thinking about it. I feel like I accidentally tripped into success while someone else’s whole life burned down. I keep replaying it and wondering if my avoidance really caused this or if the company was already looking for a reason. Everyone thinks I am calm and collected but in reality I am just someone who shuts down to survive and this time my coping mechanism changed someone’s career forever.

I do not know how to process it. I feel guilty. I feel lucky. I feel awful. And I feel like no one around me knows the truth except me.

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