Atmospheres and Other Invisible Weights

I've talked to a number of people that have been feeling this particular phenomena lately, and I'm going to do my best to try to explain it.

So, the atmosphere is always weighing down on top of you.  Layers and layers of air and vapor held to the Earth by gravity, cumulatively putting 760 mm Hg of pressure on top of you or, appropriately, one atmosphere.  We're used to this pressure, this weight, so we don't tend to think about it much.  

When we travel to somewhere of a higher elevation, we feel it differently, the pressure lessened slightly and certain properties are similarly altered, such as boiling points and freezing points, and one may struggle to adjust to the difference in combating lightheadedness among other symptoms.  After literal weeks of adjustment, your body will find more efficient ways to manage your oxygen, but this takes time.  

Right now, the pressure of the pandemic, our political climate, our literal climate, etc., feels like instead of losing atmospheric pressure by changing to a higher elevation, we've managed as a world to figuratively double the pressure of the world around us, changed it from one atm of pressure to two, maybe even three.  We can still do everything that we would be doing normally, but this invisible weight now means that everything takes just that much more energy to accomplish.  Things that we used to be able to do in a normal day now feel like an impossible load, because the world weighs just that bit more.  

We're carrying a lot of things about now, and the invisible weight of those things is hard to quantify, yet they're embedded in our atmosphere at the moment.

That's grief.  Grieving the loss of normal; grieving the certainty of tomorrow; grieving the missing security; grieving the opportunities lost.  And it's heavy, coloring and weighing down those "normal" tasks.  

I mean, kind of, Doc?

Yes, that invisible weight has been settling on other people, too.  Yes, your normal tasks are harder to do when you're carrying extra invisible weight.  It's not a failure to acknowledge that or that you are differently capable at other times when there is less anxiety and dread circulating around us.  When we're unconsciously picking up on the emotional weight, it is as though the air is heavier around us.  This in turn requires more effort, and we're exhausted for it.

If you've been feeling this sensation and/or have been upset with yourself for not being productive enough in these last few months, I have two points I would want to stress to you:  firstly, your worth is not tied to your productivity; secondly and more importantly, you're not alone in feeling this way right now.