The weight gain, the fatigue, the brain fog; they were all real, and they still are. What unsettled me wasn’t just that they were happening, but that I couldn’t place them anywhere familiar. Nothing about what I was experiencing fit neatly into a category I recognized, and that made it harder to trust my own read of what was going on.
At first, I tried to make sense of it the only way I know how. I told myself I was tired, burnt out, maybe depressed. I told myself this was situational, that anyone would feel this way given everything life had been throwing at me. I wasn’t dismissing it; I was normalizing it. I was intellectualizing what was happening, contextualizing it, convincing myself that this was a reasonable response to unreasonable circumstances.
But my body didn’t respond to my reasoning.
I started waking up exhausted, not in a sleepy way or a low-motivation way, but in a depleted, hollowed-out way that didn’t lift as the day went on. Getting out of bed became physically difficult, not emotionally dramatic. My body felt heavy in a way I couldn’t override, and that confused me more than it scared me at first.
Until it didn’t.
I’ve always had strong willpower. It’s been one of my defining traits. When things get hard, I decide, I push, I move. That muscle has carried me through most of my life. And suddenly, it was useless. I would lie in bed fully awake, knowing exactly what needed to be done, and feel completely unable to generate the force to do it. Not resistant. Not avoidant. Just empty of propulsion.
I couldn’t reconcile that with who I understood myself to be.
Then the cognitive changes started. I began losing words I use every day. Not forgetting names or details, but losing entire thoughts mid-sentence.
It started happening often enough in my weekly leadership meetings that my team got used to it.
I’d be talking through something, usually moving quickly from one thought to another, and then suddenly stop.
I completely forgot what I was going to say.
We’ll have to come back to it.
And we’d move on.
A few minutes later, sometimes in the middle of an entirely different topic, the thought would come back. I’d interrupt. Wait. I remember what I was going to say before. And I’d pull everyone back into a conversation we’d already technically finished.
Once or twice, maybe I could have laughed that off. But it kept happening.
That was when I started worrying about meetings with people outside my company.
My leadership team knew me. They knew how I thought. There was nothing particularly risky about telling them my brain had just gone blank and asking them to move on until it came back.
I couldn’t imagine doing that with a potential client or partner.
So I started entering those meetings differently. I became hyperaware of my own cognition while I was trying to have a conversation. I’d write things down as soon as they occurred to me, because I was afraid the thought might disappear before I had a chance to say it. If I felt myself losing the thread, I’d try to improvise my way out of it.
And underneath the actual conversation was another one.
Please don’t happen.
Please don’t happen.
Sometimes it did.
I don’t know if the person across from me always noticed. Maybe what felt enormous to me looked like an ordinary pause to them. Maybe my improvising worked.
But I noticed.
I was used to trusting my brain in rooms like that. Thinking on my feet, connecting things quickly, holding several threads of a conversation at once. Those weren’t things I had ever needed to consciously manage.
Now I was taking notes partly so I wouldn’t lose my own thoughts.
And I think that was when the brain fog stopped feeling merely frustrating and started feeling frightening.
Around the same time, my emotional regulation fell apart. I started crying suddenly, disproportionately, over things that would never have touched me before. It didn’t feel like sensitivity or vulnerability. It felt like something inside me had lost its governor. My mental health was a wreck, and what made it worse was that I didn’t understand why.
That’s when fear entered in a real way; not fear of illness, not fear of dying, but fear of not being able to return to myself. I kept trying to talk to myself the way I always have. Snap out of it, Paola! Come on. You’re strong. You’ve handled worse. But I physically couldn’t. And that was new.
No one around me really understood what was happening, not because they didn’t care, but because they weren’t used to seeing me this way. They were used to me being the one who holds it together, who powers through, who figures things out. I wasn’t that anymore. Or maybe I was, and it no longer mattered.
What frightened me most wasn’t feeling weak; it was realizing that my strength had always been a mechanism, and that mechanism had stopped responding.
I stopped trusting my energy, then my cognition, then my emotional responses. I didn’t know what was a symptom and what was a reaction. I kept waiting for the old formula to work: try harder, sleep more, eat cleaner, reset next week; but nothing moved.
This wasn’t a conversation I could reason my way through. It wasn’t a mindset problem or a discipline problem. It wasn’t something I could outwork.
My body didn’t break.
It refused to keep taking orders.
And I don’t yet know how to live inside that truth.
Paola
Every essay starts with my own life: my experiences, journals, voice notes, questions, and conversations. I write multiple drafts, rethink my assumptions, and revise relentlessly until the piece says what I actually mean. I use AI as an editorial partner to help organize ideas, improve clarity, and challenge my thinking. The experiences are mine. The perspective is mine. The final judgment about every word is mine.