How I Rebuilt Myself After a Mental Burnout

The town hadn’t changed much—same chipped-paint bookstore on the corner, same ocean breeze carrying salt and pine through the cracked windows of my rented apartment. I was back after six years, not to find anything or anyone, but to lose the noise. The city had been too loud, both inside and out. And I was tired. Bone-tired. Burnt out in the way no sleep could fix.

I hadn’t planned on seeing her again.

I was standing in line at a tiny record store that somehow still existed, flipping through the jazz section when I heard her laugh. Low, familiar. Like a warm echo I hadn’t realized still lived inside me.

My fingers froze on a Chet Baker sleeve.

I turned before I was ready, and there she was—Claire. Older, of course. Her hair a little shorter. Still wearing that threadbare leather jacket I once told her made her look like a film noir detective.

“Hey,” she said, soft and cautious, like we were both standing at the edge of thin ice.

“Claire,” I said, and for a moment, that was all I could manage. My throat tightened. “Wow. It’s been…”

“Too long,” she finished.

Awkward silence. One beat. Two. I felt the air between us fill with old memories we couldn’t name out loud. The argument outside that coffee shop. The note I never responded to. The time we danced to a scratched Nina Simone record until the power went out.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, breaking the silence.

“Trying to remember how to breathe,” I said before I could stop myself. It sounded more poetic than I intended, but it was the truth.

She didn’t laugh. Just nodded.

We walked down the boardwalk together without deciding to. The sea air was cold on my cheeks, the wind stiff with the kind of silence only ex-lovers know. My fingers tingled with the sting of winter air. I shoved them deeper into my coat.

Claire kicked a pebble with her boot. “You still write?”

I hesitated. “I stopped for a while. Burned out, I guess.”

“Burned out from writing?”

“No. From trying to live like I wasn’t falling apart.”

We paused near the old diner that used to be our weekend ritual. It looked smaller now. Or maybe we’d just outgrown it. I thought about that night we sat in the corner booth, mapping out our futures on napkins. None of it came true. Not the shared apartment. Not the Paris trip. Not the novel I swore I’d finish by 27.

“I kept one of your stories,” Claire said quietly. “The one about the lighthouse keeper who forgot how to sleep.”

I smiled faintly. “That one was about me.”

“I know.”

The sky was turning the color of bruised plums. We stood there in the fading light, and I realized how much I’d changed—and how much I hadn’t. There was still that part of me that wanted to apologize for everything I did and didn’t do. But what would it matter now?

“You seem better,” she said gently.

“Some days, yeah. Others… I just fake it a little better.”

She looked at me the way she used to, like she saw past the words I said into the ache behind them.

“I should go,” she said, and there was no bitterness in it. Just a quiet resignation, like a page being turned.

“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”

We didn’t hug. Just nodded, like two people who had survived something together—even if it wasn’t enough to keep them from breaking.

That night, I sat by the window of the apartment, knees pulled to my chest, sipping cheap tea and listening to the muffled crash of waves. I didn’t feel fixed. Not even close. But for the first time in months, I didn’t feel entirely lost either.

Sometimes, rebuilding doesn’t look like a grand gesture. Sometimes it’s just showing up in your own life again—one small moment at a time.

And sometimes, it’s running into someone who once knew you, and realizing they still do… just enough to remind you that you’re still in there, somewhere.

Thanks for reading ❤️❤️