When All You Feel Is Tired
It’s hard to keep doing all the stuff
National Poetry Writing Month was a good excuse for me to take a break from writing anything that wasn’t poetry. With poetry, one can always cheat a little by writing a Haiku, something short. When I’m tired and uninspired, I find myself writing a lot of cat poetry. I look around, and there they are. My head gets full of cats, and my thoughts are too muddled to think of anything else. And so, the Muffin Man gets immortalized in Haiku, no deep thoughts required.
I’ve been waiting since February to see an endocrinologist. My appointment is in July — that’s the soonest they can get me in. If you know any students who are about to graduate high school and they don’t know what to do with their lives, tell them we need more endocrinologists. They’ll probably get licensed in time for my second appointment.
I’ve spent much time the past few weeks scrolling through Facebook. My Facebook news feed is full of other people’s cats. The world is stuffed full of cats.
I think the scrolling makes it worse. I’m tired, and now I’ve reduced my attention span to cat memes and thirty-second videos. Something about the endless scrolling makes it harder to get up off the couch — or bed — to go do something productive. Maybe the problem isn’t my thyroid — maybe it’s Facebook.
Although I had planned to go to bed as soon as the chicken did last night, I actually stayed up almost three quarters of an hour after I closed the coop at 7:45. I felt proud of myself, productive even — I read a little, the way responsible grownups do. I was proud of myself until I turned off the lamp. Daylight glowed softly through the sliding glass door, and I realized it wasn’t even properly nighttime yet.
I went to bed anyway.
We spend our whole adult lives clutching lists of things we need to do. Today my list makes me want to go back to bed. I have grants to write, emails to send, an outdoor tortoise habitat to build, and somewhere there’s cat puke that needs cleaned up — I heard it happen but haven’t found it yet. I have to buy a present for Mother’s Day and arrange a giant shindig for my parents’ 60th wedding anniversary. I need to brush my teeth. And I want to do all these things, but more than all that, I want to crawl back under my weighted blanket.
Today is Tuesday, and so tonight I’ll take my great nephew to his baseball practice. We’ll track down the ice cream truck afterward. Maybe I won’t be tired, but if I am, I’ll just keep moving. Forward motion helps.
It’s been a long time since my evenings were all booked, but it’s starting to happen again — and it makes me so, so tired. But if I don’t get myself out the door to baseball practice or church or to the flea market or coffee with a friend, then I’m going to sit and scroll, filling my head with other people’s cats.
Life shouldn’t be made of other people’s cats. Life should be made of baseball practice and ice cream, flea markets and friends. I refuse to go back to bed and miss life, no matter how tired I am.
I think we’re all tired. Something about this world we’ve built is exhausting. It demands too much. It’s not just my thyroid. It’s all the expectations. It’s the noise and the scrolling and the work, work, work. But life is hidden somewhere in between, and we have to stay awake to find it.
