Maiaelizabeth.com

I’m 26 years old. Most of those years I’ve spent doing exactly what I said I was going to do.  Relationships, raises, promotions, horses, dogs, houses, travel, life.  Most of those years saw equal parts pain, exhaustion and growth, a life martini that has been dirty & intoxicating.  I’ve never been one to spend too much time celebrating my wins, I’ve always been more likely to fixate on whichever way I fell short or whatever is the next thing to conquer.  That mindset has has left me tired.  Not the kind of tired that goes away with a week off, the kind of tired that I can feel in my bones, deeply penetrating and not infrequently debilitating.  This kind of tired manifests physically because of my inability to take time off, driven by my constant need to be turning hours into income.  But the tiredness I feel mentally and emotionally is the intangible equivalent to the fatigue in the 25th mile of a marathon.  So close, but you don’t dare tell yourself that you’re almost there, because “almost there” isn’t there, almost there can be an excuse to relent if you’re too tired to use it as motivation to push harder. It’s a perpetual state of “almost there,” because the finish line is always moving further away while I set new goals, two steps forward, two steps back.  The tiredness I feel makes grocery shopping and doing laundry feel like an olympic sport.  I think that’s also called depression but you don’t have time to be depressed when you’re “almost there.”

Every once in a while this tiredness bubbles over.  Usually it results in choked back tears at an intersection on the way to or from work or on the couch while you sit, trying to drain some serotonin out of your phone before you set yourself to tedious tasks that need to be completed but won’t bring you any sense of fulfillment.  But one thing remains constant when the tiredness finally pulls you under, you’re alone.  Letting the tiredness take over in front of someone else wouldn’t be fair, because in your head you think you’ve done this to yourself.  Your exhaustion has come from self destructive tendencies and there is no one that needs to share that burden with you, no one forced you to pick it up and wear it on your shoulders the way you have, to tell someone that you can’t hold it alone would be admitting that maybe you aren’t capable of everything you promised yourself you would achieve.
I’m not writing this because I’ve figured out how to make the tiredness disappear.  Nor am I writing thi

s because I really have any intention of trying.  I guess I’m going to live with tiredness because I don’t really know what else to do and to some extent, my tiredness is a badge I’ve pinned on my metaphorical Girl Scout’s vest, secretly proud to be tired because that somehow means I have achieved and I will achieve.  I fully acknowledge how unhealthy this is and I hope that at some point I figure out how to live a life that is more fulfilling and less exhausting.  

But in the meantime, to all my tired friends- you aren’t alone