I know exactly why I’m tired. That’s not helping. I can give you the mechanism, the trigger, the pattern, the probable cause. I can tell when I’m overextended while extending myself through the thought. I know when to eat. I know when to sleep. I know what boundaries are for. I know all of this in a very impressive amount of detail. Anyway I moved “take a break” to Thursday. Again. I keep making difficult things look reasonably manageable, which was useful right up until everybody including me started believing it. Got the language. Got perspective. Got the coping skills collected. Got the warning signs indexed, cross-referenced, alphabetized and neglected. Reasonably manageable. That’s what I called it right before it wasn’t. Reasonably manageable. Keep it moving. Keep it useful. Keep it looking under control. Got the language. Got the toolkit. Got extremely good at making bad look normal. Reasonably manageable. Until somebody asks who’s managing who? High-functioning dysfunction with excellent diction, clean little summary of deteriorating conditions. Identify avoidance while actively avoiding, turn self-awareness into surveillance and call that evolving. Regulated, educated, emotionally literate, still spectacularly sick of being good at articulating it. Turn rest into a task, then optimize recovery. Schedule spontaneity. Put leisure under productivity. Take a day off, spend half of it assessing whether I’m resting correctly with sufficient intention. That’s funny. No, seriously who gave exhaustion a performance review? I can deconstruct the metric and still flinch when I don’t meet it, critique the machine while feeding it data, hate the expectation and secretly try to beat it. Apparently resilience has quarterly projections. Still catch myself wondering if I could’ve fallen apart more efficiently. Know the system? Built the chart. Know when to stop? That’s the hard part. Take a day off. Make it productive. That defeats I know. Don’t start. Reasonably manageable. That’s what it looks like from somewhere safe. Reasonably manageable. Keep it moving. Keep it useful. Don’t let anybody see the weight. Got perspective. Got the toolkit. Got extremely good at translating overload into “busy.” Reasonably manageable. Sure. Until it isn’t. I don’t need another lesson about resilience. I have survived enough things to understand the concept. I don’t need to find the growth opportunity. Sometimes the opportunity can go fuck itself. Sometimes I want one ordinary week that doesn’t require a recovery period. Maybe I’m not failing to maintain balance. Maybe there is simply too much shit on the scale. What if “I’m tired” was the whole sentence? No thesis. No deeper meaning. No personal growth waiting in the wreckage. No silver lining with excellent branding. No beautifully articulated scar I can turn into evidence that everything was worth it. Maybe I had a bad day. Maybe life was a little too fucking much. Maybe that is all the analysis required. Sounds irresponsible. Good. Reasonably manageable. Maybe that’s the problem. Make it look survivable long enough and everybody stops noticing you’re surviving it. Reasonably manageable. No lesson. No breakthrough. No beautifully articulated scar. I’m tired. That’s the whole sentence. Reasonably manageable until it isn’t. No thesis. No takeaway. No optimization. Just give me a fucking minute.
