What they offered was a paradox. Stay at home, officials said, but stay connected. Not everything had to stop, not if we got creative. We could all be #AloneTogether.

So we did - in earnest. We held meetings online; physical bodies became a grid of digital faces. After work, we made our own drinks, found some nice light, opened our computers and went to happy hour, just like we used to. (Though not at all like we used to.) We sang "Happy Birthday" to friends from afar, watched them blow out their candle. We cleared space in our bedrooms and danced to DJ sets like nobody was watching because nobody was watching. There were online games and a long list of apps for online hangouts - Zoom, FaceTime, Twitch, Houseparty and on and on.

It seemed we were more connected than we had ever been. Technology was our friend. Until it wasn't.

"There was definitely this time at the start where you saw this massive push toward 'Let's make sure that we stay connected'," said Andrew Schwehm, a clinical psychologist based in Manhattan. "Then after about two or three weeks of that, I started hearing from people, 'It's getting really tiring'."

The Internet already has a phrase for this: "Zoom fatigue". It's more than that, though. More than Zoom anyway. There's no real recent precedent for a stay-at-home order, so we overcompensated and overextended. "At the beginning," Schwehm said, "we didn't know what this would look like long term."

The shutdown came with some relief for Bay Area author Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. "Not about the pandemic, don't get me wrong, that's been terrible, depressing and tragic." But she'd just released a book, and she had planned events every week of March and April. "I'm always happy to have it. But I always slightly dread it because I have to leave the kids and it's a lot."

So, she embraced this stillness, an opportunity for reflection. "There are all these seasons in life and we have to respect these seasons."

Then the Zoom requests came, both professional and personal. She was in more contact with people than ever before. "I think it's because there's this loneliness and we're trying to cover it," she said. There was some pressure, too. "People know you're not busy. You're home."

Suddenly Sexton started to notice conflicts in scheduling. "That's just crazy," she said. "Conflicts over Zoom? That was my first signal. I was like 'No, I'm not getting back into that. This is not the time for that'."

There's a few things at work here, say mental health professionals. And as they name them, they all seem obvious enough. We're all operating at a new baseline of anxiety, one full of ventilator counts and rolling shutdowns and daily death announcements, said Simran Bhatia, an associate marriage and family therapist based in San Francisco. "It could be leaving people more drained than they normally are." Maybe, he said, there's also something about letting people into your home, into a private space you normally wouldn't.

There's a physical aspect, too, said Courtney Hartman, a San Francisco clinical psychologist. We sit and stare at screens all day. "I have a headache right now because I've been sitting with clients all day, and it just wears on my vision and my body," she said. "I imagine that's coming up in the social realm as well."

Subconsciously we may know none of this is normal. We know it is not normal to stare at our reflection while staring at 20 other people or to haltingly take turns to join in a conversation. This is frustrating whether we acknowledge it or not.

"There also something about just being physically with somebody's body and also the potential for touch that can just feel so good and be replenishing to us," Hartman said. "Yeah, it's really nice to connect (digitally) with friends and loved ones, but it might also bring up feelings of sadness and longing because I can see you, but I can't be with you."

The four-hour Zoom "birthday party" she was invited to was not a party at all, said Gisela Pérez de Acha, a journalism student at UC Berkeley There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to flirt or share a cigarette or a joint. The party was a video chat, and there was no way of escaping that. Not even with a "breakout room".

"It's OK if you call it a call," said Pérez de Acha. "But to call it a party - it just makes the interactions really awkward."

The topography of a party - or a happy hour or a family dinner or whatever else we've moved online - is forever changing. Zoom's grid is static and so is its format.

Pérez de Acha made it through the "birthday party", though. It was the Burning Man Zoom "party" where she drew the line. Organisers provided an itinerary, with lists of break-out rooms - one was future-themed, another was water-themed. There was a space theme, too.

"That was like, 'I'm just never using this platform again'." No more Zoom cocktail parties, she said. Though she still loves a phone call.

Randy Ribay, a Bay Area high school teacher and author, describes it all as "this narrowing of the world".

"I spend my morning writing on my computer, then I teach at my computer, then if I hang out with people it's over my computer," he said. He does school visitations through his computer, attends book festivals through his computer and plays board games through his computer. His wrists hurt and he has a lower back pain he hasn't had in a long time.

It's not that he doesn't want to talk to people. But he feels like his life has been reduced to his laptop, and it's not the same.

"The longer it's gone on, the more tiring it's become," he said.

He and other teachers talk about this a lot, he says, about the futility of wanting to do more, "but knowing that this is the best we can do for now."

Sooner or later, we must all learn, as Sexton said, to respect the season.

 - TNS