I am allowed to say no

In a bad season the requests keep arriving, and some of them come from people being kind. The neighbour who wants to visit on Saturday. The friend who needs you to explain, again, exactly what happened.

Declining is not ingratitude. There's a finite amount of you in circulation this month and the arithmetic is brutal — every hour spent reassuring somebody else about your situation is an hour not spent inside it, resting. A short no, with no paragraph of justification attached, is one of the few levers still fully in your hands.