The other day, I was talking with my dad, and I mentioned how tired I was, tired in a way I couldn’t quite explain. At one point I said, “I am tired of being tired.” He found it a bit funny, and hearing myself say it out loud, it did sound a little dramatic. We laughed, the conversation moved on, and that was that. But the truth is, there is a tiredness that cannot really be explained, one that seems to rise from somewhere deeper than the body, where being tired stops feeling like something you’re experiencing and starts feeling like part of who you are.

Even sleep doesn’t touch it. You can sleep eight hours, ten hours, spend an entire day doing nothing, and still wake up needing to rest from the resting you just did. That’s when you realise the body isn’t actually the thing asking for rest.

Sometimes it’s your mind that’s tired, tired of thinking, planning, worrying, calculating, trying to stay five steps ahead of everything that could go wrong. There’s always something to think about: work, money, family, the future, the things you should have done, the life you’re trying to build. Your body might be lying still, but somewhere in your head you’re running a marathon.

That’s what makes this kind of tiredness so hard to explain. From the outside, nothing looks wrong. You still go to work, answer messages, laugh at the right moments, meet people, take pictures, post online; it looks like a very normal life. If someone asks how you are, you say fine, because explaining anything beyond that feels like work in itself.

And maybe after some time, you stop noticing it too. You get so used to functioning while exhausted that exhaustion becomes your normal. You start wondering whether you’re simply lazy, undisciplined, or just built wrong for the pace of things. Maybe you need to sleep earlier, take more vitamins, exercise, get off your phone, take a holiday, get your life together. The list of “maybes” becomes endless.

So you keep trying to fix it. New routines, more water, another productivity app, waking up earlier, convincing yourself that this time you’ll finally become the kind of person who has enough energy for everything.

But sometimes the problem is not your routine.

Sometimes you are simply tired from carrying too much for too long.

And I don’t mean one huge, devastating thing. Sometimes it’s an accumulation of smaller things that individually don’t seem serious enough to explain how exhausted you feel. The disappointment you convinced yourself didn’t matter. The job you mentally left months ago but still show up to. The uncertainty of what comes next. The pressure of wanting more for yourself. The responsibility of always being the person who can handle things. The version of your life you thought you’d have by now, and the quiet acceptance that things aren’t going to happen exactly as you imagined.

None of it seems dramatic enough by itself, but exhaustion isn’t always caused by one dramatic thing. Sometimes it’s the weight of everything accumulating quietly until someone asks how you are and the only truthful answer is, “I am tired.”

Then they say, “You should rest,” or ask the harder question: tired from what?

And you don’t know.

Everything? Nothing? Life?

Because you’re not tired from what happened today. You’re tired from yesterday, last month, last year, and everything you’ve carried into every new day without putting any of it down. Tired from things that already happened, and somehow also tired from things that haven’t happened yet. Tired from worrying about what might go wrong, and tired from trying to make sure it doesn’t. You are tired of the tiredness.

There’s also a particular exhaustion that comes from always feeling like you should be doing more. There’s always another goal, another deadline, another person doing something impressive online. Even rest has to be justified; you sit down for an hour and feel guilty, because there are emails you could answer, work you could finish, some part of your life you could be improving.

Sometimes I wonder when simply existing stopped being enough. When did every hobby have to become productive? I wrote about this in The Lost Art of Doing Things You’re Bad At. Somewhere along the way, we decided enjoyment alone is no longer reason enough to do something. When did an evening doing nothing become something to feel guilty about? We’re constantly told to optimise, improve, become better versions of ourselves, but there has to be a point where trying to become better becomes exhausting in itself.

Maybe that’s why “I am tired of being tired” made so much sense to me. Because after a while, even exhaustion becomes exhausting. You get tired of waking up tired. Tired of convincing yourself to do things you actually want to do. Tired of trying to figure out what’s wrong when, technically, nothing is wrong enough to explain how you feel. Some days you wake up already tired, before the day has even started.

And perhaps not every tiredness is asking for more sleep.

Maybe sometimes tiredness is information. Maybe it’s your mind, your body, or some deeper part of you trying to tell you that the way you’re living is costing you more than you realise. Maybe instead of asking “How do I stop being tired?” the better question is, “What in my life keeps exhausting me?”

I don’t have a neat conclusion for this, because quite frankly, I am still tired. And maybe everything doesn’t need to end with a lesson. Sometimes you’re simply tired in a way that eight hours of sleep cannot touch, and you don’t need to turn that into something productive or profound.

Sometimes you just need to admit that you are tired.

Because there are tirednesses that sleep can cure, and then there are tirednesses that require you to look at your life.

STAY SHINING