This Body is Bullshit

I am so fucking tired. Not regular tired. Not “I stayed up too late” tired. My body feels slow and sluggish and heavy. Everything hurts. Everything aches. There are mornings when getting my ass out of bed feels like the first major accomplishment of the day, and the day hasn’t even fucking started yet. I’ve talked before about sitting on the floor of the shower until the water runs cold. I still do that. Not because I’m crying or having some dramatic breakdown. I just sit there because getting up feels like too much effort. I think about staying in bed. A lot.

Lately the fatigue has gotten bad enough that I’ve caught myself almost falling asleep driving. That’s scary. I know that’s beyond just being tired. I don’t know how to get rid of it. I don’t know if it’s my medications, lack of sleep, hormones, stress, my body being put through absolute hell for the last several years, or some fantastic combination of all of the above.

But here’s the weird part. Once I get my ass up and going, I’m up and going. I shower. Get dressed. Go to work. Go to my dad’s. Take care of the dogs. Worry about my friends. Try to do some sort of workout. Make plans. Laugh. Have fun. Handle whatever needs handling. Once I’m moving, I don’t really have time to be sad or mad or dwell on the fact that my body hurts and I’m fucking exhausted. It just becomes background noise. It’s every day.

And maybe that’s what has me thinking about something else lately. How come I always seem to be fine? Sometimes I think I have too much emotional intelligence. My empathy is off the fucking charts. I can usually understand everyone’s side. I can see why people behave the way they do even when they’re behaving like complete assholes. I worry about people. I think about things they’ve told me days later. I want to help. I want to support them. I want to fix things for the people I love.

I love everybody. I just really want to love everybody from my house sometimes. Because I’m also an introvert. A serious one. I can desperately want to be there for someone while simultaneously not wanting to put on pants and leave my house. Apparently wanting to be there for someone and wanting to physically go there are two very different things.

But lately I’ve started wondering where all this empathy and emotional intelligence actually came from. Is some of it a trauma response? Is it a survival mechanism? Did I learn a long time ago how to read a room because I needed to? Did understanding everybody else’s moods and reactions make things easier? Did I get really good at anticipating what people needed and adjusting myself accordingly? Or am I just empathetic? Probably some combination of all of it. Who the fuck knows. But then there’s another part of me that is significantly less enlightened. I am the first person to say that everyone’s problems are their own. If something feels huge in your life, then it’s huge to you. Your head and your heart don’t operate on some universal suffering scale. Someone else having cancer or losing a parent doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to be devastated because your marriage is falling apart or your kid is struggling or you lost your job or whatever is breaking your heart. I genuinely believe that. And then sometimes someone tells me what they’re completely losing their shit over and inside my head I’m thinking: Are you fucking kidding me? You have no idea.

I know. That’s shitty. Apparently I can be empathetic and judgmental at exactly the same time. Another fun little personality feature. There are just days when I’m so tired and my body hurts and I’m worried about my dad and Kathy and my friends and work and family and everything else, and somebody is devastated about something that, from where I’m standing at that particular moment, seems incredibly fucking fixable. My emotionally intelligent self knows pain is pain. My exhausted self thinks, Oh honey. Trade me. Both of those people live inside me.

And maybe that’s why I’ve started wondering if I’ve done myself an injustice by always being okay. Because I watch other people cry. Rage. Completely fall apart. And sometimes I wonder why I didn’t. I’ve been through things that should have knocked me flat. Some of them did for a minute. But then I got back up and did whatever came next. So where is all of it? Did I actually process it? Did I shove it somewhere? Am I just wired differently? Did I learn a long time ago that falling apart wasn’t particularly useful, so I stopped doing it? Is it the Venlafaxine? Is that turning down the volume on everything? Am I emotionally healthy, incredibly resilient, or slightly numb? Am I really good at processing things, or am I just really fucking good at functioning through them? I honestly don’t know.

Maybe that’s why I notice it so much when somebody else completely falls apart. Part of me envies it. Not the pain, obviously. The ability to just fucking lose it. To cry and scream and say I can’t do this and let somebody else figure shit out for a minute. I don’t really do that. I figure shit out. And I don’t say that like it’s some admirable quality. I’m starting to wonder if maybe I’ve made being “fine” such a part of who I am that I don’t always know when I’m not.

Because I’m functioning. I’m laughing. I’m working. I’m going places. I’m making plans. I’m taking care of people. I can have a great day. I can be genuinely happy. I can still find absolutely ridiculous things funny. So I’m fine. But I’m also sitting on the shower floor because standing feels like too much. I’m fine, but my body fucking hurts. I’m fine, but sometimes I desperately want everyone to leave me alone. I’m fine, but I’m so tired that I don’t know what rested even feels like anymore.

Maybe both things can be true. Maybe I’m not secretly falling apart. Maybe there isn’t some giant emotional collapse waiting for me if I finally stop moving. Maybe this really is just how I process life. Or maybe my body is doing some of the screaming for me. I don’t know yet. I just know I’m tired. So fucking tired. And tomorrow I’ll probably get up and do it all again.