Mostly Fine, Just Tired

On heaviness, opting out of urgency, and the things I haven’t put down yet

Lately, when someone asks me how I’m doing, my go-to answer has been, “I’m tired.”
So much so that it annoys me to hear myself say it.

It would be easy to chalk that up to the physical. My body does feel run ragged. I’m a morning person. I haven’t needed an alarm clock to wake up early since before COVID, but waking up and getting out of bed have become two very separate things. Especially this past week.

I wake up and lie there, negotiating with myself. How long can I stay horizontal before I absolutely have to get up? And when I do, it feels like there’s a weight hanging off my limbs, like I’m moving through knee-deep sludge.

I joke with the younger folks on my team that I’m old. I say it lightly, but I feel it more often than I’d like to admit. Still, I don’t think that’s really it.

I think I’m tired in a deeper way.

I’m tired because the world feels heavy, and some days it feels like I’m carrying more of that weight than I know what to do with.

I’m tired because I’ve stepped away from hustle culture, at least in spirit. I take pride in what I do, but I also know that in marketing, nothing is truly urgent in the way we pretend it is. I’m not saving lives. And yet, my nervous system doesn’t always know the difference.

I don’t rush the way I used to. I try not to treat everything like an emergency. But watching everyone else operate at that pace, watching urgency perform itself over and over again, is its own kind of exhausting.

I’m tired because I haven’t been showing up for my creative practice.
And I haven’t been showing up for it because I’m tired.

A perfect, self-sustaining loop.

I’m tired because I can see too clearly the cracks in the systems we’re all living inside of, the ways we keep going, keep producing, keep performing stability just to stay afloat. Knowing that doesn’t free you from it. If anything, it makes the effort of participating feel heavier.

I’m tired because
I just am.