Make it last no more than 10 minutes
Photography Delina Goxho
To be constantly on the verge of burnout, but never quite there: brief story of a low-key breakdown.
By Delina Goxho
The list of trinkets is long – fairy lights naturally being the most crucial – then a new shower gel that smells of Iranian roses, a facemask, organic granola, pink Himalayan salt, Chanel lipstick (the irony!), pillows with golden pillowcases, earrings, fancy coffee (it’s a treat) some new blankets and an iPad (it’s all a treat).
My left eyebrow jumps up when I say it’s ok, it’s fine really, just stressed, I have a lot of work these days and then I forgot to wear gloves earlier and was on calls for a few hours, then got home and forgot to moisturise and now my lips are burning. I can’t smile very well (but I can’t cry that well either).
I can however wrap my hands in sterile bandages, and as the skin cracks, I feel like that pilot in Dresden who thought that he was doing it all for the right reasons, self-assured, satisfied, decisive, just needing to get it done.
You look at me, we know it’s coming but in lockdown, in cold and darkness, it’s harder to fight it. And so I now own innumerable candles, reeking of different stages of solitude, jasmine, and possibly salted caramel? You wouldn’t believe it, but it’s very reassuring. Like a massive grave of an apartment on the 4th floor of a former sheet warehouse with only me inside, typing and telling the phone that I’ll have a wonderful time over Christmas, I promise! I say I won’t bring work, that would just be crazy (I say as I stack piles of fine printed paper in that secret little pocket of my Ikea backpack).
Constantly on the verge of burnout, but never quite there, fingers tingling — and this low-key exhaustion is only low-key after all, nothing to truly worry about. The whole mental health conversation is turning into a thing, that’s what my mum says because she doesn’t believe that it was a thing before. Some afternoons it makes no sense to get home and have soup and feel healthy, nor does it make sense to have cake and feel guilty, so I just stand there, next to the cigarette-packet corner store on Louise, endlessly scrolling and ending up feeling guilty anyway. That’s exactly when the little refrain starts to dance around my brain like a dusty Christmas decoration and it now has a name – it is a bit of a portmanteau name – it’s called Coping Mechanism, which feels fake, like a surrogate expression. I need to chase this little fake thing away, so that I can feel whole again — because we only get one life and so many in this world don’t have homes and warmth and food and company. Like that time that we fought on the phone over some pretty vital topic and you were a complete idiot and I hung up and in retrospect I should have just dealt with it, been sad, gotten really drunk maybe I don’t know, cheated, but instead, 10 minutes had passed and I had decided that life was too short to get angry over something so vital. So now that vital something keeps lurking and it is still vital and I keep it there because I have a home and warmth and food and company and.
Lockdown #2, the Unexpected Lockdown, is exactly like this low-key burnout; here in Brussels some shops are open but not all and not all the time. We can go to a few museums, provided that we are distant, very distant and also not all of them are open and not all the time anyway. This friend told me the other day that the first thing she will do as soon as we are back to the future, will be to get drunk, go to a concert and jump up and down for hours and smell other people’s breath in her breath. And be disgusted but in a sweet way.
