The Kind of Tired That Sleep Doesn’t Fix

I’m tired.
Not tired like “I didn’t sleep well.” I mean that deep, bone-dragging kind of exhaustion where your soul feels like it’s been running a marathon barefoot through broken glass for the last 40 years.

Because honestly, I don’t know who I am without the anxiety.
I don’t know who I am without the constant thinking, worrying, prepping, bracing.
I don’t know who I am when I’m not scanning for what might go wrong, or trying to stay one step ahead so nothing sneaks up and breaks me.

People tell me I’m self-aware, like that’s supposed to make me feel better. And sure, I am. I can name what I’m feeling, I can recognize the patterns, I know the trauma responses and the nervous system flares and the coping mechanisms by name. But that doesn’t make them stop. Knowing something doesn’t make it lighter.

I’ve been carrying this internal weight for so long. The mental pressure. The emotional clutter. The invisible checklist of everything I have to keep track of just to keep functioning. I don’t resent anyone else. This isn’t about wishing someone else would carry it instead of me. It’s about realizing that even if they wanted to, they couldn’t. Because this isn’t something I can hand off.

It lives inside me. It’s wired in, like a survival instinct that never got the message that I’m safe now.

And I’m tired. Really, deeply tired.

There are moments I want to give up and just sit down in the middle of the chaos and say, “I can’t do this anymore.” Not because I don’t want to. Not because I’m weak. Just because I’ve been doing it for too long without any real rest. And I don’t mean sleep. I mean rest. Like peace. Like not bracing all the time. Like putting something down and not having to immediately pick something else up.

But I don’t stop. I don’t unravel. I keep going. I keep showing up. I keep doing the next thing because I don’t know how not to.

And underneath it all, there’s grief.
Grief for the version of me that never got to grow up calm.
Grief for the woman I might have been if I didn’t always feel like the weight of the world was just behind me, waiting to catch me off guard.
Grief for the moments that could have been easy, but weren’t.

I don’t want to just survive anymore.
I don’t want every day to be about getting through the next fire, the next panic, the next obligation.

I want to know who I am without the stress.
I want to meet the version of me that isn’t shaped by coping mechanisms and emergency-mode thinking.
I don’t even know what that would look like, but I want to find out.

f you’re feeling it too, if you’ve ever thought “I don’t know who I’d be without all this heaviness,” you’re not alone. I’m right there with you, carrying something I can’t even explain, but hoping that one day, I won’t have to anymore.

Not because someone else finally carries it.
But because I finally find a way to let it go.