Sometimes I wonder if it is just me. Or if something fundamental broke inside every one of us the moment Covid arrived.
I had a baby in 2020, and somewhere between the raw survival of newborn nights and Long Covid illness, the world slipped out of alignment.
Now I can’t tell what changed more, me or the rest of humanity.
I still try to build friendships. They begin warm, effortless, almost luminous. Then something falters. A tone lands wrong. Or a silence between us stretches one heartbeat too long.
And just like that, they vanish from my life.
I replay the fracture endlessly, searching for the exact instant it gave way.
Was I too honest?
Too heavy?
Or have I become something so altered I can no longer see it clearly.
People tell me I am kind.
They fill my workout classes and smile across the room.
Yet the connections never hold.
They thin, then evaporate, as if some essential gravity has failed.
Nothing anchors anymore.
And I can’t shake the feeling that Covid did not just pass through us.
It altered how we process emotion.
How we read one another in the space between words.
It shortened patience.
It thinned empathy until it moves through us without weight or warmth.
The invisible threads that once bound people together now fray the moment they begin.
Sometimes the whole thing feels unreal.
Artificial.
My instincts keep catching something just beneath the surface, a faint repeating signal, like an echo of a broadcast that was never meant to survive.
We are all still here.
Talking, smiling and continuing to live.
But something vital that allows humans to truly connect has been quietly hollowed out.
We are all just trying to love one another with damaged wiring now.
And every time I look into another pair of eyes, the same quiet question arises.
Is the person in front of me still fully there?
Or am I only speaking to what remains after the rewiring?
I had a baby in 2020, and somewhere between the raw survival of newborn nights and Long Covid illness, the world slipped out of alignment.
Now I can’t tell what changed more, me or the rest of humanity.
I still try to build friendships. They begin warm, effortless, almost luminous. Then something falters. A tone lands wrong. Or a silence between us stretches one heartbeat too long.
And just like that, they vanish from my life.
I replay the fracture endlessly, searching for the exact instant it gave way.
Was I too honest?
Too heavy?
Or have I become something so altered I can no longer see it clearly.
People tell me I am kind.
They fill my workout classes and smile across the room.
Yet the connections never hold.
They thin, then evaporate, as if some essential gravity has failed.
Nothing anchors anymore.
And I can’t shake the feeling that Covid did not just pass through us.
It altered how we process emotion.
How we read one another in the space between words.
It shortened patience.
It thinned empathy until it moves through us without weight or warmth.
The invisible threads that once bound people together now fray the moment they begin.
Sometimes the whole thing feels unreal.
Artificial.
My instincts keep catching something just beneath the surface, a faint repeating signal, like an echo of a broadcast that was never meant to survive.
We are all still here.
Talking, smiling and continuing to live.
But something vital that allows humans to truly connect has been quietly hollowed out.
We are all just trying to love one another with damaged wiring now.
And every time I look into another pair of eyes, the same quiet question arises.
Is the person in front of me still fully there?
Or am I only speaking to what remains after the rewiring?
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