I Kept Waiting to Snap Back

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. I would be speaking and suddenly the idea would vanish, as if someone had pulled the plug. I started worrying about meetings, especially with people outside my company. It was embarrassing. I could feel the panic underneath the conversation: please don’t happen, please don’t happen; and sometimes it did.

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.

xoxo💋
Paola

P.S. As I was writing this, Co–Star sent me today’s horoscope:
“Don’t cut corners with your body. It keeps the score.”
Apparently the moon also has thoughts about my body today.