I Think I Have Been Living In Burnout Long Enough To Start Mistaking Its Symptoms For Personality Traits

Dear Delyara, Flatness starts looking like practicality. Irritability starts looking like being direct. Numbness starts looking like maturity. Withdrawal starts looking like independence. Exhaustion starts looking like being a person who just “needs a lot of quiet.” That is what frightens me now. Not only the symptoms. The adaptation. I think I have lived inside depletion long enough that parts of it are beginning to disguise themselves as who I naturally am. And that is dangerous, because then the problem becomes harder to name and even harder to interrupt. I don’t want to become a woman whose diminished aliveness is mistaken — by others or by herself — for simple adulthood. Still, I can see how easily that happens.