I’M CURRENTLY IN Burnout Recovery. What this means is that I hurt myself working too much or too hard – although the worldly evidence for either of these claims is scanty. Recovery looks, at the moment, like the lifestyle I lived when we were first driven into our homes during Covid. I go to bed at strictly 10 pm, hugging a weighted animal, and I wake up when my body wakes me up (at 3 am, then 4 am, then 5 am). I work on the couch or in bed. My key outing is the one-hour-long walk that I take every day, tracing the same path down the Cooks River, waving my outstretched arms in little circles to reconnect with the present moment – dissociation, which has always been a skill of mine, has become my primary mode of being, and makes me feel foreign in my own skin. I try to focus on noticing my envi-ronment, scanning for things I find interesting: runners with strange gaits, grandparents pushing their grandchildren on a swing set nearby, gnarled branches and the canopies of trees. The first time I try to train my attention in this way, I have to give up instantly because there isn’t anything that I like: I can’t, through sheer will, see things that I find horrible as beautiful instead. I gaze at rotting logs, crushed leaves, and think, it’sallsoawful.I take to wearing sunglasses both indoors and outdoors, pleading migraines – in reality, I can’t stand to look at the world at the moment.

Later, I take mercy on myself and downgrade the task from ‘What am I interested in?’ to ‘What do I see?’ It takes me six weeks to stop, finally, and take one measly photograph of a stray keyboard key, a small yellow thing in the environment that pokes out in a bed of leaves, washed up from the river onto the concrete path by recent rain. I have taken to describing my new lifestyle as ‘Doing Covid II’.