The Exhaustion of Always Being Okay
Let me tell you about the morning routine.
Not the one on the wellness blog, not the one with the gratitude journal and the warm lemon water and the ten minutes of mindfulness before the day begins.
The real one.
The one that starts before the alarm, in the dark, in the space between sleep and waking, where the body knows things the performing self has not yet had time to manage.
The body knows it is tired.
Not the kind of tired that a weekend fixes. The kind of tired that has been accumulating since somewhere around year three, when she first understood that this was not temporary, that the precarity was not a phase, that she was going to have to find a way to live inside the uncertainty without letting it show,
because letting it show was a kind of weakness she could not afford in rooms that were already measuring her.
So she learned the routine.
Coffee first. Then the face. Not makeup, though that too, but underneath the makeup, the other face, the one that says I am fine, I am more than fine, I am exactly the kind of person who belongs in this room and is grateful to be here and has no complicated feelings about any of this.
She has been putting on that face for so long that it now comes on without effort. That is the most frightening part. How easy it has become.
She walks into the building.
Someone says, how are you?
Fine, she says. Really well, actually.
And she means it in the moment she says it, or she means the performance of it, which has become indistinguishable from meaning it, which is its own kind of loss.
Four words covering a parking lot morning, a two a.m. waking, a contract that expires in April, a rejection letter she has read enough times to have memorized its careful language, its warm tone, its devastating politeness.
Really well.
The performance has a texture.
She performs well in the meeting where they discuss the course she has taught for twelve years, as though it were hypothetical, as though anyone in the room could walk in tomorrow and do what she does in it.
She performs fine on the committee she did not want to join and joined anyway because she understood, without anyone saying it, that visible commitment was part of the performance, that being seen to invest in the institution that was not investing in her was somehow still required.
She brings the agenda items. She does the follow-up. She volunteers for the subcommittee.
She is very, very fine.
But here is what fine looks like from the inside.
Fine is the shower that runs a little longer than it needs to because the shower is the one place where the performance is not required, where the face can do what it actually needs to do, where the grief gets its ten minutes before being folded up and put away for another day.
Fine is the car parked a little longer than it needs to be, engine off, hands in her lap, gathering herself for the walk across the car park that has to look like a woman arriving, not a woman deciding whether she has enough left to make it through another day of this.
Fine is the student who asks, in passing, “Are you okay?“
And she says yes, of course, just busy, end of term, you know how it is,
and she sees in their face that they almost said more, that they saw something she did not mean to show, and she pivots, efficiently, back to them, back to their needs, back to the performance of the woman who is here for everyone else and fine, always fine, about herself.
She has been performing fine for so long that she has almost forgotten what the alternative looks like.
Not fine lives in the parking lot. In the shower. In the middle of the night, when there is nothing left to manage it with.
Not fine is the body, the body that has been keeping the actual record all along, the body that does not perform, that cannot be convinced by professional language or institutional appreciation or the warm handshake of the person who will not give her the job.
The body knows. The body has always known.
I want to say something about the wellness programmes.
The institution had them. Of course, it had them. The workshops on resilience. The mindfulness sessions at lunch on Wednesdays. The employee assistance programme with the phone number she never called.
She did not call because she understood, without anyone telling her, that needing help within a system that was deciding her value was a risk she could not afford.
The wellness programme was in place, and she performed well through it. Everyone felt good about the Wednesday lunch, and nothing changed about the conditions that were making her unwell.
This is what she would later understand as the perfect performance, the institution’s performance, of caring without changing anything.
She recognized it because she had been performing for so long herself.
She is learning to stop.
Not all at once. That is not how you stop something that has become the texture of a life.
But slowly. In the small moments first.
When the student asks if she is okay, she pauses for a half-second longer before saying “fine.”
Just a half-second of letting the question actually land.
In that gap, small and fragile and very new, she is learning to let herself be not fine,
to let not fine be survivable,
to let one true thing through at a time.
She will not always be fine.
She is already not fine, and she is surviving it, and the surviving is starting to feel less like performing and more like living.
which is its own kind of beginning.
Which is, after all of this, enough.
Aquí estoy. No siempre bien, pero aquí. Y eso es suficiente por ahora.
Here I am. Not always fine, but here. And that is enough for now.
Translation Note: Spanish phrases in this poem were assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.
