All things considered, I think it took about a week and a half before I realized that self-isolation was getting to me. I’d known before that that I was feeling off; I was more tired than usual, finding it harder to concentrate and just generally slower. But, overall, I told myself, I was holding together pretty well.
That’s probably true, in the grand scheme of things — certainly, judging from what I could see on social media and the internet in general, there were those dealing with things far worse, and in far more dramatic manners than I — but I was ignoring, or perhaps simply entirely unaware of, a tension growing inside me the entire time.
This isn’t a story of how I snapped, though, because I didn’t. There wasn’t one dramatic moment where I threw everything on the ground and yelled that I couldn’t do it anymore. (Sorry; I’m sure it would’ve been exciting.) Instead, I just had this slow moment of realization through other people’s behavior that, hey: everyone needs to give themselves a break right now, and that includes me. Somehow, that was enough.
It doesn’t seem to make sense, I know, and dramatically, it’s a disappointment. Yet, it’s what really happened. I had this realization that I was more overwhelmed and overloaded than I’d actually accepted, and that realization in itself somehow felt like a release of pressure. Just thinking about it made it better, counterintuitively.
I’m not entirely sure what happened, if it was simply that I allowed myself the imperfection of being overwhelmed, or whatever — it’s not that I prided myself in having it altogether during all of this, but perhaps I felt good about not losing it entirely — but just the thought of, if I need to, I’m allowed to admit this is a lot and do something about it felt like something big and important nonetheless. That alone meant something, and still does.
Honestly, that’s probably for the best; with everything that’s going on right now, it’s not as if there’s much alternative to feeling better about things. I can’t exactly go out and see a movie while eating a shitty burger and good tater tots to decompress or anything.