My nervous system is about to crack.
I feel a deep, aching longing to be alone.
Not in a dramatic way. Not to disappear.
Just to hide away for a while.
To close my door and lock it.
To shut off my phone.
I want to turn down the noise—the constant hum of to-do lists and shaming and shoulds and musts. The endless inventory of commitments, guilt, responsibility. The sense that no matter what I do, something else is waiting, tapping its foot.
I find myself drawn to the clutter in my house. The drawers I avoid. The closets that won’t close properly. The piles of paper—bills, lists, reminders of things I haven’t handled yet. I have this insatiable need to organize and clean and throw things away. To create simple systems. Clean lines. Empty surfaces. Organize my life a little. Orient myself.
I want to sit for hours and write and think without judgment—from myself or anyone else.
Maybe if I begin on the outside, clearing away the things burying me, overwhelming my visual field, I can begin to work on the parts inside that feel just as cluttered. The thoughts stacked on top of each other. The mental tabs left open. The weight pressing down on my brain.
I want to shout, I love you—but leave me the hell alone for now.
Because I can’t think.
I can’t make decisions.
I can’t enjoy anything.
I feel stress.
I feel frustration.
I feel anxious.
I feel hopeless.
What I need feels simple, almost embarrassingly so.
I need to be alone.
I need to think.
I need to de-stress and decompress.
I need to create without criticism—
without anyone telling me what to do, how to do it, or that I’m doing it wrong.
The voices I hear—I hear them, they are everywhere, work home children husband family parents but I also invent them, I own them perhaps internalized them. They live in my head now, even when no one is speaking.
This is burnout.
I don’t want to go to church. Or work. Or the gym.
I don’t want to set an alarm, answer a call, talk, or see anyone.
I just want to be me—minus expectation.
Maybe this is the normal human experience. Maybe everyone feels this way and just pushes through. But I know myself well enough to know this: if I don’t allow this pause—if I don’t listen—I am headed for a nervous breakdown.
And the hardest part isn’t admitting that.
The hardest part is the noise of but.
But you need to go to the gym to stay in shape.
But you need to go to church—to set a good example, to stay plugged into the body of believers. What might happen to your faith? You’ll go secular for sure.
But you have to work.
You don’t want to lose the vacation house.
Or your reputation.
You can’t abandon those kids.
But you have to go on the trip—even though you’re exhausted.
You have to say yes.
But it’s prayer—what will the others think?
There is a constant, continuous stream of buts forging my path daily. Corralling me forward. Deciding for me. Steering my life with invisible reins.
No more obligations.
No more commitments.
Just let me be.
Please.
I need rest the way I need water right now.
And then come the quieter ones. The softer voices that cut deeper because they sound reasonable.
But everyone feels this way.
But what are you so stressed and overwhelmed by?
You work part-time.
You have a vacation house.
Why can’t you just keep going like everyone else?
But you have to.
Life isn’t that hard.
You have it much easier than—
And this is where I feel myself disappear. Where my reality gets negotiated down, explained away, compared into silence. Where my need for rest is treated like indulgence, my limits like a moral failure.
All I am asking for is room.
For quiet.
For space to come back to myself.
Not forever.
Just long enough to breathe.
Kim Blenkhorn
My Faith Place 