She said: I know.
Not as dismissal. Not the I know that means: yes, yes, stop talking about it. The other I know. The one that comes from having seen you for long enough to have the full archive of you, to understand that when you say tired you mean something with a specific gravity and a specific texture that ordinary tired does not have, that you have been precise in your use of the word tired for years and when you use it now it means what it has always meant when you use it, which is: I am at the place where the body and the mind have run out of the reserves and what is left is the essential, the bare continuing, which is still something but is not the thing I want to be surviving on.
She said: I know. And then she did not offer a solution.
That is what I needed. Not the solution. I know the solutions. I know that I need to sleep more and eat better and exercise and reduce my stress load and say no to things and prioritize the things that restore me over the things that deplete me, I have read the literature, I have written some of the literature, I know the solutions and I did not need them listed in the voice of a person who thinks I have not thought of them.
What I needed was the I know.
The witnessing of it. The being-heard in the specific register of the tired, the acknowledgement that the tired is real and is the size I am saying it is and does not need to be immediately reframed into something more manageable before I have even finished saying it. The I know that just sits with me in the tired for a moment before asking anything of me.
She sat with me in it for a while.
We did not fix anything. The tired was still there when we stopped talking. But I was different inside it after the being-witnessed, slightly less alone in it, slightly less certain that I was the only one who knew the size of it, which is the particular medicine of being genuinely heard, not solved, not redirected, just heard, and which I am still trying to offer others with the same quality she offered it to me.
I know. I know. Two words and the whole room changes.
