I think people mistake my competence for wellbeing, including me sometimes

Dear Delyara, The forms are signed. The work is done. The food happens. The children are loved. The messages get answered. The house runs. The face passes. And because all of that is true, the quieter truths get pushed aside. The thinning joy. The emotional flatness. The way ordinary tasks cost more than they should. The way I am less alive inside my own competence than anyone sees from outside. Sometimes even I mistake my ability to keep functioning for evidence that I am not as depleted as I actually am. That is the danger. Burnout does not always arrive as collapse. Sometimes it arrives as reliable numbness in sensible clothes. And I am afraid of how close that description has started to feel to my own life.