Being Tired

I don’t mean sleepy. Sleepy has a fix — you close your eyes, you wake up, you’re fine. This is the other kind. The kind where you can sleep nine hours and still open your eyes already behind, already owing something to the day before it’s started.

It’s not really in the body either, even though the body’s where it shows up first. Heavy limbs, a jaw that won’t unclench, coffee that stopped doing anything useful a while ago. But that’s just where it’s visible. The actual tired is further back — behind the eyes, behind the thoughts, in whatever part of you is supposed to want things. That part’s been running on fumes for a while now, and fumes don’t refill overnight.

What gets me is how ordinary it looks from outside. I show up, I do the tasks, I answer when spoken to. Nobody can see the part where every single one of those things costs more than it used to. Getting up is a decision now. Replying to a text is a decision. None of it looks hard because I’ve had a lot of practice making hard things look small.

I keep waiting for the day where I catch up — sleep in, take it slow, and come out the other side reset. It never quite works like that. You rest and you’re a little less tired, not un-tired. The debt doesn’t clear, it just stops compounding for a day. Then Monday shows up and starts charging interest again.

The thing I’ve stopped doing is fighting it with willpower, because that was never the right tool. You can’t argue a battery into holding more charge. Some days the only honest plan is to do less, badly, and call that enough. It doesn’t feel like enough. It rarely does. But pretending otherwise is how you end up more tired than when you started.

So that’s it, really. I’m tired. Not dramatically, not in a way that makes a good story — just tired in the long, unglamorous, everyday way that doesn’t have an ending scene. If you know this kind, you already know there’s not much more to say about it. You just carry it and keep moving, a little slower than you’d like.