“You don’t seem like yourself.”

A dear friend said that to me about 16 months ago.

She’d noticed something. Or, rather, the culmination of many smaller somethings – me snapping at people, forgetting things both little and large, agitated, and awash with a weariness and wariness.

Her comment was a cannonball to the gut, shot with kindness and concern.

This was—and still is—an era of crisis upon crisis, from a pandemic, through wars and an economic omnishambles. So much death – some far away, some so close to home. My job is to make sense of chaos for a humanitarian charity that responds to emergencies like these. The crises weren’t stopping so neither could I. I had to keep shining searchlights and laser beams to illuminate this darkness.

We’d talk in carefully measured ways about thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people who needed to forgo meals so their children could eat, who couldn’t get to a hospital, who hadn’t seen another person in months, who were too scared to leave their homes, who were forced to flee their homes. However abstracted, statistics are stories about people, and suffering on that scale can’t help but seep into your bones.

Zoom calls obscure many things. The deep breaths needed just to maintain a neutral expression; nails digging into your palm under the table; a dry-heave of a sob in between calls, trying to drive out feelings you can’t quite put a name to. Sallow skin and dark rings under the eyes disappear with the click of a filter.