“I’m okay, I’m just tired”

I’m writing this after two consecutive days of getting the appropriate amount of deep sleep at night. This is unusual. I feel like a cartoon version of myself, slightly unburdened from the fatigue of having a body. Tiredness and energy is something that’s on my mind pretty much consistently these days (months? years?) - and that’s something I’m a little bit ashamed about. I’m in my early 30s, have no children, and I’m on a break from work. I felt like I could justify being perpetually exhausted in my undergrad, when I’d drink three large coffees per day to compensate for sleeping fewer hours than commuting some days, and during 2020, when I was working a demanding job at one of the big three consulting firms while doing a master’s degree in analytics (and having several personal crises, to put it mildly) during the start of the ongoing pandemic as an immunocompromised person. Now, the “shame-based competitive capitalist ideas” part of my mind holds those memories up for me on a pedestal: you did THAT - how can you possibly say you’re tired now, on a sabbatical, doing less of everything, with no set schedule and a soft place to land and rest? You got weak.

I’ve been unlearning some narratives that kept me going during those peak “productivity” times, and plenty of exhausting times in between. The truth is that even though I got through life when “things got hectic,” I was certainly not unscathed. To be clear, it is my strong belief that regardless of identity and “success,” nobody leaves capitalism unscathed, we are simply groomed to accept a reduced quality of life for the “hustle” or at the very least for the “cost” of “living.” (I am mostly preaching to the choir here, but if you’ve never thought deeply about the phrase “cost of living,” I invite you to do so now.) But beyond the universal injury of living under capitalism, I am looking back without rose coloured glasses to identify ways in which I am particularly maladapted to the pace of our world - and not only am I not the only one, but with my relative privileges I’m also far from the most impacted by these inequities. 

I never understood how people could be in seemingly good spirits at work and say “I’m so tired today” - to me, the word tired seemed to always carry a stronger connotation than what I observed it did to others. I remember the first time I discovered, through lots of therapy, that the regular months-long periods when I was “just tired” were severe depressive episodes. I remember realizing just weeks ago that usually when I feel “off” enough for my partner to ask if I’m doing okay, and when my intuitive response is “I’m okay, I’m just tired,” that often means I am one step away from an autistic shutdown, meaning the rest of my day is about to be spent in recovery. I remember coming back to work after time off and saying “I need a vacation after my vacation,” coming off as joking but secretly feeling like I could cry about being in an office the day after landing from a different time zone. Sometimes I would cry, though never in front of others.

I look at these examples now and see that not everyone becomes “tired” in the same way and by the same things. First of all, when you have a hammer everything is a nail, and right now my hammer is my recent self-realization that I am autistic. An autistic with anxiety moving through this world, are you kidding me? I wish I could transcribe the amount of information I absorb and process on a minute by minute basis on a good day, and the amount of mental planning it takes me to prepare for the ordeal of being out in the world for the simplest and most regular errands. More objectively, here’s a years-old study that shows that autistic brains create more information at rest. 

Stepping away from my current hyper fixation of neurodiversity, there are obviously other prevalent reasons for being tired, and if you’re the kind of person to read my writing, I hardly have to elaborate on them for you. Microaggressions sap energy from marginalized folks on a daily if not hourly basis. Recently I went to a community art class where during a silent moment in a room of a dozen people, a cis woman looked at me, at my name tag, at me, back at my name tag, and said verbatim: “So, pronouns. They’re so difficult!” We had a pretty productive and kind conversation but next time I have to do this I’m plopping a tip jar onto the table for every quiet cis person in the space to contribute to while I talk. As a white semi-cis-passing person in a majority-white small town, I can only imagine (but never feel first hand) how this work multiplies for further marginalized folks. (And this is true regardless of how many “safe space” posters get put up onto every store front in gentrified neighbourhoods.) 

Microaggressions grow into macroaggressions, as my trans femme friends navigating daily life are vigilantly aware of, as Nex Benedict and Alex Franco knew before they didn’t get to grow up, as we consider when we assert that policing leads to inequity and incarceration but not safety. Even when things are going fine for less burdened segments of the population, exhaustion presents in other ways, like targeting parents in our nuclear family oriented world - how do you even bring a human being into adulthood without a village of support? I’m continually awed and baffled at parents I know who manage their day-to-day.  And I can’t talk about tiredness and fatigue without thinking about the yet-unknown but increasingly obvious long term population impacts of long covid. We are growing exhausted in physical ways as a virus is allowed to mutate pretty much unchecked through the globe for the fifth year now, in the name of capitalism and “getting back to a new normal.” The impacts are already being felt universally but will be especially impactful to already disadvantaged segments of our population. So much for banging on pots and pans for essential workers back in 2020.

When our energy is sapped, what do we lose? First we lose quality of life, regardless of how well off we are aside from the consistent fatigue. When Mary Oliver asks us what we plan to do with our one wild and precious life, the answer she’s seeking isn’t anything outrageously ambitious, she’s actually encouraging us to enjoy a summer day and examine a grasshopper. This resonates more and more with me as I get older. What is the point of living if I can’t get to know the caterpillar on a trail or look at the sky for a few minutes every day? Leisure and play isn’t a reward for work, it’s our natural state as human animals, and fatigue can cut us off from the ability to partake.

What else do we lose aside from leisure? I think we lose a lot of good work that never comes to fruition. And I really mean good, messy, angry, joyful, organized, transformative work. What would you do if you had the energy to do more than just get by? What if you had the space to plug into what we are going through collectively, instead of being stuck in barely managing your individual life? What opportunities for work open up when you have the capacity to feel into a collective heart? 

If these questions are helpful for you that’s great, but the reality is that for many of us these questions are redundant and irritating. We already know what we would do if we were less beaten down by the world. I’d write more, I’d make more art, I’d show up to every in-person action I hear about, I’d translate, I’d learn and teach history that’s under represented in the English language western world, I’d participate in diaspora culture more deeply, I’d travel to my ancestral lands and partake more urgently in building a better future for my people. I think we’d all manage to be better activists for a stronger progressive world, and I think we’d be better at organizing cross-struggle. I think about this latter point constantly these days. I think if the most marginalized of us were less exhausted we’d have greater empathy for each other and we would be better at seeing the bigger picture, at understanding that all liberation struggles are connected, at understanding that transformative justice is difficult and requires us to be softer on each other than our oppressors are on us. 

It is my observation that the people who are most impacted by inequity are the most exhausted and still do the most showing up for positive and progressive change. The most complacent people I know are the ones who thrive (or think they thrive) under neoliberal capitalism, have fewer intersectional identities, feel less existentially exhausted, and are the ones who think individual hard work will save them and accept this vision of mandated achievement as a version of a world they want to live in. They don’t realize, or more likely don’t want to realize, that this isn’t a universal strategy. Our world is designed in a way that most people simply and literally can’t and won’t “individual achieve” their way into stability, much less into opulence.

This breaks my heart. Everyone should have the ability to live reasonably well, contribute to community, and watch a grasshopper. I don’t have the answers on how to get there. I think some of the pieces include building community (online but also crucially offline and in our own neighbourhoods), rethinking what material needs are actually real for us and how many are manufactured (I have too many thoughts on this nuanced topic to include in a sidebar so perhaps this will be a future post), and reinventing our boundaries and rest requirements to the best of our ability and circumstance. There’s so much to be said about the accessibility of these strategies, and there are so many other ways of trying to get by. When we are tired we are forced to get inventive with our limited energy. Today I might manage mine by hitting publish on this, taking a walk in the sun, and letting my mind escape thinking about the things I wrote via the accessible and unimpressive thing - scrolling my socials for a while.