I see you in the meeting with your folder and your prepared remarks and your careful management of the expression on your face that says: I am fine, I am competent, I am not as tired as I am.
I know that expression. I wore it for years. I wore it so consistently that it became something close to my face, something that required a deliberate decision to remove rather than a deliberate decision to put on, and the removing of it was its own kind of work, the undoing of something that had started as a strategy and become, over years, a second skin.
I want to tell you some things.
The tiredness is real. I know you know this and I know you are not acknowledging it in the way it deserves because acknowledging it in the way it deserves would require a space and a time that the current situation does not offer. I am acknowledging it here, from this side, where I can see the full shape of what you are carrying: the tiredness is real and it is large and it is not a personal failing and it is not a sign that you are not strong enough for this work. It is the correct response to an unsustainable set of demands. Your nervous system is right. It knows exactly what it is dealing with.
You are going to make it through.
I cannot tell you how or when because I did not get a how or when and I would not rob you of the particular knowledge that only comes from navigating the thing itself. But I can tell you it ends. The contract years end. The exhaustion ends. The morning arrives when the thing you have been bracing for is no longer the first thing you feel when you wake up, and on that morning you will know it, you will feel the difference in your shoulders, and you will understand what I mean by this.
You were always good enough. The bar was always wrong.
Take care of the body while you are in it. Rest when you can. Call your friend more than you do. Let the people who love you give you things. Say thank you and stop there.
There is a morning on the other side of all of this and the morning is yours and it is good and I am in it and I am telling you from inside it: keep going. Not because the keeping going is the point. Because there is something worth keeping going toward, and you have not seen it yet, and it is real, and it is waiting.
