On Exposure Fatigue and the Need to Be Held

This morning, when my alarm went off, my first thought was: I can’t do this.

Not in a dramatic way. Not in a way that wanted to disappear. Just a quiet, heavy refusal that lingered in my body before my mind could catch up. Usually, I get up. I make the bed. I move forward. Some days are filled with excitement, some are neutral, some are difficult — but today felt different. Today carried dread that began yesterday and followed me into sleep.

Last night, my dreams were chaotic. We were preparing for a show, but nothing was working. I was struggling with my costume. Other people couldn’t find theirs. There was running, confusion, missed timing — a sense that the performance was imminent but no one was ready. Then I entered a room and saw my best friend from childhood. She was there, already in costume. She told me she wanted to surprise me, but also didn’t know how I would feel seeing her.

I’ve recently deleted her from my phone, along with many other contacts. I’ve whittled my life down to very few people and performance itself — partly by instinct, partly to reassure my therapist, who fears isolation. In the dream, her presence felt layered. Familiar. Tender. Unsettling. Like an earlier version of myself stepping onto a stage I no longer know how to share.

When I woke, I didn’t want to open the curtains. I didn’t want to open the doors. I stayed in the dark, wrapped in the thickest hoodie I own, still wanting to be enveloped by something more. Not hidden — held.

The irony is that this all began with something so practical: sleeves. I fell asleep watching sleeve tutorials, thinking, this isn’t hard — press, cut, sew. What I lacked wasn’t skill; it was a template. A block. Something that fit me. Yesterday, I went through old pattern pieces I had made over the years. I had recently given away a box of commercial patterns — patterns don’t work for me. They never have. I stopped trying to make myself fit them and finally removed them from sight.

That decision — to stop forcing myself into forms not made for my body — is older than I realized.

In fourth grade, I daydreamed about beautiful dresses. I was poor. I made do. I makeshifted. Even then, fabric was language to me. In junior high, people noticed my style. In the 80s and 90s, I was ruching, shaping, inventing. This relationship with textiles is not new. It is part of my lineage. Perhaps that’s why my old friend appeared in my dream — a witness from a time when creation was instinctual and my body was not yet a battleground.

What is new is my body.

Menopause arrived quietly, then insistently. I noticed my skin losing elasticity. Gravity pulling harder. My body shifting in ways I didn’t invite. My teeth needing attention. Aging becoming visible. I am aging in a world that treats aging as a failure of discipline or will. A world where we are not supposed to change, soften, descend.

I think about celebrities now — scrutinized for weight loss, for “plastic” surgery, for faces that don’t match frozen images from decades ago. We watch films over and over, and the characters never age. They become fixed in us, untouched by time. Then we see the real person and feel shock — not because they’ve changed, but because we forgot that bodies move through time.

We all live under this now. Not just actors. All of us. We are recorded. Archived. Performed. Expected to curate a coherent, attractive self indefinitely. And I realize something important: what I’m feeling isn’t insecurity. It’s exposure fatigue. Performance fatigue.

I wasn’t aware my body was flawed until my mother began pointing it out. She was round. My grandmother was round. But I was told I should have fought genetics harder. I thought I had made peace with much of this — until this morning’s dread and last night’s chaos revealed something deeper.

I don’t want to be evaluated right now.

I don’t want to manage an exterior.

I don’t want to perform coherence while my nervous system is tired.

And yet — I am not collapsing. I am not lost. I am still here. I am still creating. I am still thinking, observing, understanding.

This feels like a stage of development we don’t talk about because it embarrasses us. A moment when the psyche asks for an offstage interval. When the body asks not to be corrected or admired, but simply accommodated. When the desire is not to be beautiful, but to be comfortable in one’s form. Accepted. Allowed.

All of this arose from the simple need for a garment that fits. A form that doesn’t fight me. And I see now how deeply that need runs — through memory, through body, through history, through culture.

This is not a failure of confidence.

It is a request for mercy.

For rest.

For a different rhythm of being seen.

Today, I don’t need answers. I don’t need to fix my body or my life or my future. I only need to acknowledge that something real is happening — and that listening to it is not weakness, but wisdom.

And maybe, I should work on some sleeves.

A song for this moment: https://suno.com/s/2E6VWHxRmC5MWz4Q

A playlist for this season, still in the making: https://suno.com/playlist/1373d585-de06-4092-8fbc-d3817128b49e

January Sewing