You get the early night. You take the slow weekend, the lie-in, the walk that was supposed to clear your head. By Wednesday afternoon the heaviness is back, the same as before, as if the rest never happened. The tiredness has outlasted everything that should have fixed it, and you put it down to age, or work, or the season, and you carry on.
When sleep does not touch tiredness, the tiredness was never really about sleep. Something else has taken the shape of exhaustion, because exhaustion is the one version of it you are allowed to admit to.
The Feeling That Gets Reclassified
A good deal of what men call being tired is closer to being quietly furious. Not rage, nothing that would show on your face. More a low background heat about how the days are being spent, about commitments you agreed to without ever choosing them, about the gap between the life you are living and the one you half believe you should be building by now.
Anger is uncomfortable to hold, so it gets converted into something with a softer name. Tiredness is permitted. You can tell anyone you are shattered and be met with sympathy and a cup of coffee. Say you are angry and people want to know why, and the why is a longer, harder conversation than you want to start. So the feeling gets filed under exhaustion, where it can sit indefinitely without ever being looked at.
The trouble is that filing it somewhere convenient does not make it smaller. It keeps generating heat. It just does so out of sight, where you read it as a flat battery rather than as a fire that has nowhere to go.
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