Body of Work: If Humans Matter More Than Machines, Our Bodies Belong in the Conversation

A Body of Work essay on uteruses, migraines, "TMI," and the quiet rules about what we can't say at work

Years ago, I was scheduled to have a medical procedure that would keep me out of the office. I told colleagues, “I’ll be out on medical leave.” At the time, I thought I was modeling something healthy as a school leader.

I wanted to normalize that sentence. In schools where I’d worked, some colleagues had been on leave for mental health reasons. Some had been out while grieving a loss. Others had undergone treatment for diagnoses they weren’t ready to say out loud. I wanted “I’m on medical leave” to be enough. No explanation required.

I am entirely comfortable talking about my physical and mental health. I would have told anyone who asked about the noncancerous tumors growing in my uterus and that this was my second surgery to remove the clumps of excess tissue that had made themselves at home inside my body. I would have talked about how common fibroids are, especially for Black women. (Among my Black friends and colleagues, fibroids are part of the shared health vocabulary in a way that had rarely made its way into professional conversation.)

When I returned to campus, a colleague pulled me aside and said, “I’m so glad you’re okay. I had assumed you were on mental health leave given how crazy everything has been around here. So glad to hear it was just surgery.” Another admitted she worried I might have been diagnosed with cancer. When I finally mentioned that I’d had surgery for benign uterine fibroids, they both looked relieved.

Not talking about it had made them more uncomfortable, not less.

Their reactions helped me name something I hadn’t fully seen before: in many workplaces, we casually share the “neutral” details of a sprained ankle or a root canal, but we go quiet around mental health, reproductive health, or serious diagnoses. If the only time we don’t talk about the reason for a leave is when it’s serious, stigmatized, or taboo, then silence itself appears to be red flag.

As a leader, that realization sat uneasily beside my intention. I absolutely believe people deserve privacy and that no one owes their colleagues a medical chart. At the same time, I don't want a culture where "I'm on leave" is automatically read as code for something serious or secret. The tension between protecting privacy and building a culture where leave – for any reason – is genuinely unremarkable is where I live a lot of my leadership these days.

It didn’t start at work. Like many of you, I was raised not to talk about bodies at all. I came of age in a time when people didn’t say the “c” word (i.e. cancer) in polite company. If someone had been hospitalized, I was taught not to ask why. We had stock scripts instead: “How are you?” “Fine.” The body could be falling apart, but the conversation was expected to stay safely above the neck.

Years later, when I began working as a leadership coach, that earlier conditioning was challenged. Coaching asked me to pay attention to what was happening “below the neck.” When I ask clients what they are feeling, many answer by telling me what they’re thinking. It is so much easier, and more socially acceptable, to report on our thoughts than to sit with our feelings or physical sensations.

It took me a long time to realize that my own body had been sending messages I didn’t yet know how to read. As a college student pursuing internships, I didn’t know my nerves lived in my stomach; I knew only that before interviews, my stomach felt unsettled. Later, in a job that looked great on paper, my neck and back seized so intensely I could barely hold up my head. On vacation, they finally relaxed – only to tense again on the flight home as I began to read the work emails that had piled up during my respite. It clicked: my body wasn’t the problem. The situations I kept placing my body in were the problem.

By the time I went on medical leave for fibroid surgery, I’d begun to trust my body as a messenger. I was comfortable naming what was happening; I also knew I lived and worked in cultures that often weren’t. I chose not to share the specifics widely because I wanted to normalize going on medical leave without explanation. Many colleagues take leave for mental health, fertility treatment, pregnancy loss, or other deeply personal reasons. Those reasons deserve the same respect as any orthopedic surgery.

What I didn’t anticipate was how quickly the blank space would be filled. In a culture that reserves silence for the taboo, my silence became its own signal. When that colleague said he was relieved to learn I’d “just” had surgery, I heard a lot in that “just.”

When I did name what had happened – “I had surgery to remove fibroids from my uterus” – I could feel other people tense up. It wasn’t the word surgery that seemed to bother them; it was the word uterus. In those moments, the story I was trying to tell about heavy bleeding, disrupted sleep, anesthesia, and recovery would suddenly shrink down to one body part. I could almost watch people decide, mid‑conversation, that this was TMI, even though I hadn’t said anything graphic. All I had done was name an organ.

Part of what makes words like uterus or breast uncomfortable in professional spaces is that we’ve sexualized the reproductive system so thoroughly that we forget its organs can hurt, heal, and serve purposes beyond the sexual. Say “breast cancer,” and many people picture breasts before they picture chemo. That shows up in awareness campaigns that lean on sexualized language, like “Save the Ta‑Tas,” “Save Second Base,” emphasizing the body part more than the person living with the disease.

Linguistic Modesty and the Sanitized Body

I’ve started to think of this as linguistic modesty: the way we soften, blur, or skip over the words for what is actually happening in our bodies. We say, “I’m not feeling well” when what we mean is “I’m having a migraine and I can’t look at a screen.” We say, “my stomach’s a little off” when we’re in a full GI flare. We say "I'm a little tired today" when the truth is "I'm in the middle of a depressive episode and getting here took everything I had."

Linguistic modesty showed up in my own leave story. “I’m out for a procedure” landed more smoothly than “I’m having surgery on my uterus for fibroids,” even though the second sentence was more accurate. The word uterus made people more uncomfortable than the fact that I had been under anesthesia.

Over time, this adds up to what I’ll call the sanitized body at work: a version of ourselves that has headaches but never migraines, “tummy trouble” but never Crohn’s, “female issues” but never periods, fibroids, or menopause. The sanitized body is more welcome in professional conversation, but it’s not the body anyone actually lives in. And it’s hard to lead humans well if the only bodies we’re allowed to name are the cleaned‑up ones.

AI, Disembodied Brains, and Human Work

All of this is happening while many people are panicking about artificial intelligence at work. We read headlines about AI replacing whole categories of jobs and making human skills feel suddenly redundant. The irony is that long before AI entered our inboxes, many workplaces had already begun treating human workers as if they were almost machine‑like: valued primarily for speed, efficiency, and availability, rather than as living bodies with limits.

When the ideal professional is imagined as a disembodied brain in front of a screen, it becomes easier to believe that another, cheaper brain – a digital one – could simply take their place. If your worth at work has been framed mostly in terms of how many tasks you can complete, how quickly you can respond, and how seamlessly you can perform without interruption, then yes, AI can start to look like a very close competitor.

The same mindset that erases bodies from our language – the linguistic modesty and sanitized worker body I've been naming – also makes it easier to imagine that humans and machines are almost interchangeable. When our conversations never quite name the body, our policies and expectations follow. We design schedules that assume no one will need the bathroom, workloads that assume no one will have a migraine or a miscarriage, evaluation systems that treat days lost to treatment or recovery as a failure of commitment. We end up organizing work as if human beings were just slightly messier machines.

There is another way to imagine professionalism. In whatever space you lead – a team, a classroom, a project – you can begin to build a culture where people can say, in plain language, “I’m having a pain flare and need to step away,” or “While I recover from surgery, I need a modified load,” or “I’m managing a chronic condition and some days will look different.” Policy changes help, but they grow out of something more basic: the recognition that bodies are not a side issue, but the medium through which our work and our communities move. They are how meetings actually happen, how lessons land, how relationships are tended, how program launches and hard decisions are experienced by real people. We are not only our bodies, but our work still has to travel through them.

If we want to insist that humans still matter in an age of AI (and to be clear, I do), we have to let human bodies exist at work in more than whispers and euphemisms. That might start with something as small, and as radical, as letting the word uterus sit in the air of a staff meeting without flinching. It might look like managers who know how to say, “Thank you for telling me what your body is going through; let’s figure out what support looks like,” rather than “Let’s keep that to yourself.”

Questions for your work with bodies in mind

• When did you last soften or sidestep language about your own body at work? What did you say instead?

• Is there a body part or condition you consider unsayable at work? What made it that way?

• In your context, what does it look like — or what would it look like — to treat people's bodies, not just their output, as part of how you hire, schedule, lead, and design for the future?