I’ve always loved coffee, anything caffeinated really. Not even for the purpose of the caffeine but simply because I enjoyed drinking it. However, that innocent pleasure I got from a cup of coffee quickly turned into a never-ending dependence. Towards the end of my sophomore year I started to feel overwhelmed and strung out. I told myself I was just tired so I would drink one, or two or five, cups of coffee and then face the day, only to drink a RedBull for lunch and dinner. That, to me, is when my burnout began.
Between the end of sophomore year and the middle of junior year I started to devolve. I would oscillate between autopilot and manual control. Whenever I felt overpowered by anxiety and stress, I would just switch on autopilot and go about my day on my own “default setting”, meanwhile, in my head, I was focusing on not completely falling apart. Eventually I stopped going back in forth. I would stay in autopilot for days, then weeks, then months at a time. I figured that if I just told myself I was fine and kept pushing forward then it would manifest itself into reality. But it never did.
The week before spring break is when I really started crashing down. I was late to school three days that week and I didn’t even care that I was missing class. All I wanted was for life to just slow down so I could stop to take a breath. Life was draining me and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. About a week later, I found out that school was canceled due to COVID-19. My initial reaction wasn't shock, joy, sadness, it was relief.
I was relieved that I didn't have to compromise my own sanity anymore. I didn’t have to drink a fatal amount of caffeine to feel alive. I could finally recharge. Autopilot switched off and I felt like I had just woken up from a bad dream. It blows my mind that it took the entirety of the world to stop for me to realize I was allowed to hit the brakes.