I Think I Have Been Living So Long in Burnout That It Has Started Borrowing the Clothes of Personality

Dear Delyara, I’m scared of how familiar it has become. The flatness. The need for too much quiet. The emotional numbness by evening. The reduced patience. The shrinking appetite for plans, people, noise, movement, spontaneity. It would be so easy now to describe all of this as who I just am. But I don’t think it is. Not originally. I think burnout changes the emotional shape of a person slowly enough that they begin mistaking its adaptations for character traits. “I’m just not very social.” “I just need a lot of silence.” “I’m just practical.” “I’ve always been like this.” No. Not always. That is what frightens me. That depletion can become so domesticated inside a life that the woman living in it starts building identity around symptoms instead of relief. I do not want to become someone who has adapted so fully to chronic emotional overuse that she forgets what her fuller self once felt like.