Since the pandemic, I’ve been hemorrhaging energy. Like a faulty wind-up toy, awkwardly marching my way forward without stopping for a proper rewind. But I didn’t know how to stop. There was catastrophic news in my periphery and what seemed like the inevitable breakdown of civilization (I was a really dramatic teenager) blurring into one another. Dangling in front of me, there was the constant stimulation of jumbled-up media that severely lacked context to amount to anything relevant. I was a car speeding recklessly down the tunnel, subtly cautious of my dysfunctional brakes and unclear destination, but being too young and unguided to do anything about it.
So I’ve been burned out for a long time, but the true fault was suppressing it. It’s not a wise idea to turn your back on such a ticking bomb. The emotional anguish and utter fatigue metastasize into every last corner of your being until – boom. It just blew up in your face.
This is precisely what happened to me on the last day of 2024. My immune system gave up on me and I was diagnosed with a gnarly viral infection. With a doctor’s prescription of antivirals and two weeks of good rest, I was forced to sit and account for all that I’d neglected.
The first thing I did was delete all social media. The duality of devastating news and brain-rot hamster wheel content was a knife, one that twisted itself deeper into my spleen. I wanted to wipe my prefrontal cortex clean. I refused to be force-fed consciousness of any type. The second step of my cleanse was catching up on all the activities I missed during the semester: good, soul-nourishing activities, a hearty soup in the depths of winter. I read cozy books and discovered that my favourite Wes Anderson film was The French Dispatch. I did yoga and sat with the emptiness that took over like a tsunami once I eliminated the noise. It required a lot from me. It felt nice to be challenged like that.
After abstaining from media overconsumption’s empty calories, it bred room for hunger, and then room to hunt for truly life-giving sustenance. My sensitivity to nature’s subtle beauty was heightened, and everything on my daily walks left me in a trance. One evening as I walked out of a coffee shop, the astonishing tone of cerulean blue that made up the sky hit me like a truck. Its intense airiness seared right through the retina of my eyes and directly into wherever is the soul’s centre. The icicles in the snow bed shined like embedded diamonds against the streetlight’s reflection. I sat on a bench and watched the geese carry out their morning, evening and night routines. It mainly consisted of squawking and swimming around. But I felt a deep connection to these proud birds like never before.
I pondered on the life I was momentarily suspended from. One of constant neurotic reaching for the next hit of dopamine, vaguely disguised as some attainable optimized self or grandiose achievement. If you want it enough, if you could put in the so-called work, then you’ll be set, right? It’s all good inspiration.
But you never genuinely wanted it, and you never put in the work, you just scrolled to the next reel and forgot about everything you consumed by nightfall. It was a life measured in big split-second moments, quantifiable with purchases and metrics. It doesn’t help that these ambitions and methods of avoidance are tied to society’s positive feedback loop. But did it ever truly amount to anything? At the bright brilliant young age of 19, I couldn’t care less about my fig tree. I hated knowing that there could be so many figs. Sylvia Path was wrong, I just wanted silence.
My burnt-out sanity poses a question on which one must speculate. Who isn’t burnt out right now? All of this constant tumbling forward, what is it amounting to, for me and for you?
My two-week cleanse had clarified a renewed intention for 2025. I want to go back to the basics. Where gap-filling time is spent in a righteously, mind-numbingly boring way. To sit in silence and not fear it or push it away. To put enough space between this moment and the next. It will feel scary, like a traitor to my own ‘potential’ and self-optimization. However, it becomes increasingly clear that the only correct way forward is clearing out space for something that won’t wither away, or feel as empty as split-second commercialized glamour. This might be the only thing that would amount to anything.
The soul that lies in me like it lies in you screams to reclaim life. I don’t want to be accounted for by any labels or titles or as a consumer. I want to be a breathing creature under the sun, on this piece of burning rock. I want to sleep, to create, to eat bread, and to love. I want prose, not content. There is hardly anything glossy or grandeur about it, but the simplicity of it must drown out all the other voices. I want to write on real paper. I want to listen to the same 3 albums on a loop. I want to shed it all away. Until I’m not just channelling my inner child until I am the child.