For a long time, I felt deeply alienated from my own work. My days were fragmented into a series of emails, spreadsheets, and meetings. I was a cog in a machine, completing small parts of a larger process I never saw the end of. It created a psychic split, a feeling that my "real life" was something that happened outside of work, leaving me drained and unfulfilled. My cure came in the form of a small, hand-painted ceramic cup I bought in Crete. The shop owner told me his wife