There are times when life forces you into a bubble.
In the bubble, regular life fades into the background. Work becomes something you can’t even think about. Plans stop mattering. The usual worries don’t fit in your head anymore. Your brain will not let you hold anything except the one thing that’s consuming your life right now. It’s like your mind becomes a one-room house. Nothing else matters.
Sometimes the bubble is made of joy. A wedding. A new baby. A simcha that swallows your whole life for weeks. You’re buried in guest lists and sleepless nights and “who’s picking up Bubby from the airport?” You’re running on adrenaline, excitement, and too much coffee. Work is piling up, and you don’t care. The rest of your life is on hold because this one thing is everything right now. You’re exhausted and exhilarated and completely in it.
Sometimes the bubble is made of pain. A health crisis. A loss. A phone call that splits your life into before and after. Time does something strange. Hours feel like days, days blur together. You’re not thinking clearly. You’re not yourself. Sometimes you’re moving fast — doing, calling, running, trying to control what you can. And sometimes you’re frozen — because there’s nothing you can do. You’re just getting through. Putting one foot in front of the other. Going through the motions. Living in a fog.
Both bubbles pull you out of regular life. Both make the ordinary world feel far away.
When you’re inside a bubble, you look around at everyone else, and you can’t understand it. People are grocery shopping. Complaining about traffic. Posting about their lunch. Living their regular Tuesday. And you’re standing there thinking — how? How are they just doing that? Don’t they know the world stopped?
But it didn’t stop. Not for them. Their world is still spinning. They’re living their regular life, focused on their own stuff.
I was in a bubble for a few weeks recently. My mother, A”H, was in the hospital for 6 weeks, critically ill. Then she passed away, there was the week of Shiva, and then another week of me walking around in a daze, trying to get back to regular life.
During that time, people reached out to me as they normally would. About shidduchim, coaching. Regular work things. And at first, I couldn’t understand it. Couldn’t they see I wasn’t there? Couldn’t they feel that everything had changed?
But of course, they couldn’t. They didn’t know. How could they?
Bubbles don’t announce themselves. We never know who’s in a bubble right now. The woman ahead of you in line. The friend who hasn’t texted back. The coworker who seems off. They might be in the middle of the best week of their life. Or the worst.
And we never know who’s trying to come back from one, like I am right now. The shiva ended, and I was supposed to just… come back. Pick up where I left off. Meet with clients. Answer emails. Write my newsletter. Be normal again.
Except coming back down to earth is not automatic. The bubble doesn’t simply pop. It fades slowly. You’re technically back in life, but you’re not really in it. The world is moving, but you’re standing there trying to remember how to move with it.
People expect you to return to work, return to conversations, return to yourself — and you want to, you really do — but you can’t find the switch. You sit down to do the things you always do, that you used to do without thinking, and it feels impossible. Your brain is still in the other place.
And this is the part that makes you feel crazy, because from the outside, you look fine. But inside, you’re still foggy.
Still slow.
Still delayed.
It doesn’t matter which kind of bubble you were in. Whether it was a crisis or a simcha, your brain hasn’t yet caught up to the fact that it is over.
After a crisis, you’re still braced, still in emergency mode even though the emergency has passed. (I still wake up in the middle of the night to see if there are any updates on my mother’s condition.)
After a simcha, you were running on a high for weeks, and now you have to switch back to regular life. It’s like coming back from vacation or a summer away; there’s an adjustment. You still have to find your way back into the rhythm of normal.
Your body is present, but your mind is somewhere half a step behind, trying to catch up to a life that restarted without asking if you were ready. Self-judgment creeps in. Why can’t I just function? Why am I still like this? What’s wrong with me?
Nothing. Nothing is wrong with you. This is what it looks like when something big happened, and you’re trying to return from it. Whether from the bubble of joy or grief, it’s still a re-entry. Intense moments and situations pull you into a different reality, and normal life feels strange for a minute when you return.
I don’t have a neat lesson to wrap this up with. I’m not going to give you five tips for reentering after life took a detour.
But I will say this:
Someone you know just came out of a joyful bubble and is finding their way back to regular life. And it doesn’t show.
Someone you know is in a painful bubble right now, just trying to get through. And you have no idea.
Someone you know is in the reentry stage, where people have stopped checking in, but they’re still not back to themselves. And you’d never know.
And many people are waiting. Hoping. Davening to enter a bubble – the good kind. The shidduch. The baby. The news they’ve been waiting for.
And that waiting? That’s a bubble too. It takes up everything. It’s all you can think about. Regular life keeps happening around you, but part of you is somewhere else, lost in the future you’re hoping for.
We’re all carrying something. We don’t always know what someone else is in the middle of. We don’t always know how to ask, but we can be a little gentler.
A little slower to judge.
A little quicker to assume there’s something we can’t see.
