Lara Abdel Baki | Staff Writer
I sleep enough, maybe too much. I drink enough coffee. Yet, I still wake up tired. Not the kind of tired that goes away after a nap, but the kind that nestles in and creates a home inside you. In a country where instability is part of our daily life, exhaustion doesn’t wait until you’re a full-fledged adult; it settles in early. This can all directly affect how we study, how we love, and even how we connect. So nothing is wrong with you; you’re just emotionally exhausted. When did all this become the new normal for people in their twenties?
This kind of burnout does not come lightly—it’s like a virus. It slowly spreads to every aspect of your life. While every disease may have a cure, emotional exhaustion is harder to treat, especially when it starts to affect relationships, when loving someone feels heavier than it should. Simple conversations, like asking about your day, start to require effort. Vulnerability starts feeling risky. Even showing up stops being a priority. This doesn’t mean you lack the ability to care, but lack emotional capacity.
Applying this to our daily life as students can look like unanswered messages, frequently cancelled plans, or just friendships that fade from lack of effort. Under the weight of emotional exhaustion, connection is what we need the most, and we push it away. Ironic, isn’t it?
Specifically in places like Lebanon, the sad reality is that anything “emotional” is rarely considered valid. Feelings are neglected or compared to “bigger” problems. Tell a traditional Lebanese mother that you’re feeling depressed, and she responds with, “Some people are living on the street; be grateful.” Emotional pain can’t be measured through comparison. Mental struggle and other forms of hardship are not competing experiences.
Compared to our generation, our parents grew up differently from us. They were raised through multiple wars and all kinds of instability, leaving little room to acknowledge emotional pain.” While we did also go through a similar experience, we are more aware of emotional pain through social media. This awareness gave us a language to speak our feelings, but not always permission to express them. All this left us in a space between understanding our emotions and feeling guilty for having them.
We didn’t choose this, but we learned to survive. Somewhere along the way, survival replaced living, and this became the norm. Survival mode became the default and projected its way onto relationships. We learned to love cautiously and held ourselves back in case things fell apart. Emotional distance starts to feel safer, and detachment becomes a form of self-protection. In this case, letting someone in can mean risking disappointment, loss, or some type of emotional responsibility that we don’t feel ready to take on. That becomes settled halfway: present, but always on guard. The walls have been put up, and you’re unsure why. I’m glad to let you know that when you’ve been through enough emotional instability to the point of burnout, you’re allowed to feel like this; the wall is here to protect you. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t trust anyone again. It does not work like that. It is just like trying to find out if a pool is deep or not; you put one foot in at a time until you feel safe enough to let go.
Sometimes you have been hurt too many times, to the point where love has been sworn off, to the point where you start to think that you are the problem. However, this is part of the experience. Would you rather love and get hurt than not love at all?
Everyone should experience this feeling at least once, and having a wall up at all times will not allow that. Yes, vulnerability invites pain. But choosing not to go through it again slowly erases you. How is that any better than taking a leap? The short answer is that it’s not.
Be that as it may, even the way our generation approaches relationships is problematic and maybe a bit too modern. Situationships have become the norm, which is a place between friendship and commitment where people act like a couple without the label. This traces back to emotional burnout because commitment requires emotional energy that we just don’t have anymore. Setting expectations or asking “what are we?” can feel heavier than simply letting things exist as they are. We settle into ambiguity, just close enough to feel something and far enough to protect ourselves. It’s safer. But this safety comes at a cost. It can take away trust, the very foundation of a relationship. In a nutshell, emotional burnout makes us accept ourselves, not because we deserve less, but because we don’t have the capacity to demand more.
Despite all this, the emotional exhaustion we carry is rarely acknowledged for what it is. It’s easier to throw labels at ourselves, such as “emotionally unavailable,” rather than admit how tired we really are. We internalize the idea that struggling to connect is a personal flaw when in reality, it is just a reaction to carrying so much for too long. Healing doesn’t mean tearing down every wall overnight or trusting blindly. It begins with recognizing our limits and giving ourselves permission to feel without guilt.
Maybe the goal was never to be unbothered or endlessly resilient. Maybe it was simply to stay feeling and be connected, even when it’s heavy or feels risky. Emotional exhaustion doesn’t mean we are broken; it means we’ve been carrying more than most people our age were ever meant to. While survival may have taught us to build walls, living will ask us to let some of them down. At our own pace, on our own terms.