Just Plain Tired

I am exhausted. Not weak, not broken, but just plain tired. Some days my limbs feel like they’re filled with lead and my thoughts are so sluggish I can’t even finish a sentence inside my own head.

Yet I keep getting up, every single day, and trying to find a way to make things a little better for myself. A way to be a little more comfortable while I wait for this life to end so the next life can begin.

I may never have a life I feel good about, and I’ve given up on the idea of actually being happy, but if I can keep my wits together for just a few more months this life will go back to being reasonably tolerable.

I can live with reasonably tolerable. I managed it for all those years I spent with Norman. I can definitely do it again. I just need to wait out the currently unbearable situation.

It’s hard to explain without giving details that aren’t mine to share, but my living situation is the worst I’ve experienced since I was a child in Arkansas living in a condemned house that was literally falling down around us and was so infested with roaches that I had to sleep with a light on to keep them from crawling on me during the night.

And it’s been like this since last fall.

I’ve tried to stay positive, to look to the future. I’ve been taking my meds as prescribed and doing my therapy workbooks and seeking solace in religion. But some things can’t be fixed by pills or prayer.

Well, not the kind of pills to which I currently have access. If laudanum was still openly available I’m sure I wouldn’t mind much of anything right now. Although technically laudanum was a liquid, not a pill.

Still, there’s not a lot that can’t be fixed by a mixture opium and booze. Samuel Taylor Coleridge¹ was certainly feeling no pain.

I am feeling a lot of pain. I live in a world of shit. Every minute of every day is a battle against bad memories. Just being here means constantly reliving years of buried trauma.

The echoes of past voices bounce around inside my skull, shredding my thoughts and making it hard to focus.

Everybody hates you.

No one can stand to be around you.

You ruined my life.

I hate it here. I absolutely fucking hate it here.

Staying here is sensible and the best choice I can make for my children and I realize that the very least I owe them is to go back to making sensible decisions at least for a while.

But I still hate it here. And fully committing myself to staying here indefinitely makes me feel so trapped and anxious that I want to peel the skin from my bones.

In my own head, I’ve completely given up. Unfortunately my version of giving up doesn’t actually appear that way from the outside. Other people take to their beds when shit gets bad. I just work harder.

I line things up. I put all the pieces where they need to be. It doesn’t mean I’m happy. It doesn’t mean I’m satisfied with how the picture looks when completed. It just means I’m good at puzzles.

Next week my part-time job at the casino becomes full-time, and I start a new part-time job during the day. I put a deposit on an apartment that will be available in June when the college kids move out. I’ve been looking at the admissions deadlines and criteria for a master’s program at the small local university.

Little Miss Perfect is doing what she is supposed to do again.

I crawled right back into my little box like a good girl. I am overcoming and I am overachieving because that is who I am and what I do, whether I want to or not.

Everyone is happy for me. Everyone is proud of me. I’ve heard “congratulations” so many times in the past few days that it left me screaming in my car from frustration and rage until my throat was so sore it hurt to speak.

Sometimes I feel like no one at any point in my life has ever cared whether I was actually happy so long as I was doing what they thought should make me happy.

The absolute worst part is when I tell people I’m miserable and they tell me I’m stronger than I think I am.

No, I’m not. It’s not possible to be stronger than I think I am.

Because I know for a fact that I am INDESTRUCTIBLE.

I know other people have problems. I’ve met hundreds of people who were completely broken by a fraction of the trauma that I’ve overcome. I’ve treated them all with patience and compassion. I’ve stood beside many of them and asked for mercy and leniency for the harms they’ve caused while trying to cope with their own hardships.

I tended to the wounds of others while doing my best to hide and ignore my own. It wasn’t a sustainable situation. Something had to give.

I have never said I was broken. I have always maintained that I am merely wounded. The word broken came from other people, not me. I don’t believe I can be broken. There is nothing I cannot overcome, given a little time.

I never said I was weak. That word also came from other people. I have always maintained that I am merely TIRED.

There is nothing wrong with being tired. Those guys who do the iron man competitions don’t lift those weights 24/7. They need rest between rounds of pulling tractors out of the mud with their bare hands.

I got tired, that’s all. Just plain tired. I still am tired. I’m absolutely exhausted.

That doesn’t mean I think I’m weak.

If I say the word “tired” and you hear the word “weak,” that’s your problem, not mine.

I got so tired it became hard to think and for a little while I stopped making sensible decisions. My whole fucking life I have been sensible and pragmatic, and it got to the point where I was pissed off by my own perfection.

I’ve always kept my expectations small. By only allowing myself to want the bare minimum, I ensured I would never be disappointed.

Norman knew that, and took advantage of it to the fullest extent. His excuse for letting his mother control everything in our lives was always “it matters more to her than it does to you.”

If I dared disagree, he simply stopped speaking to me until I broke down and let them have their way.

It turns out silence can be as abusive as screaming.

I gave him everything he ever wanted. I made all his dreams come true. There was the whole thing where we rarely had sex because I couldn’t stand it when he touched me, but I also never questioned where he was or what he was doing so he was easily able to have mistresses while swearing his complete loyalty and fidelity to me.

Then the day came when I woke up and was too fucking tired to keep going. His response was to tell me he believed in me, and that I just needed to try harder.

To try harder to be the person he wanted me to be. Not the person I wanted me to be.

It’s an important distinction. I spent a long time being the person he wanted me to be. I let important parts of myself wither away because they didn’t fit his very narrow vision of what is appropriate.

While I was blundering about in the confused fog of exhaustion, slowly collapsing under the weight of Norman’s expectations of me, I crashed into something monumental. My small, quiet existence suddenly exploded with unexplored possibilities. I found something I wanted in a way I had never before experienced.

For a brief period of time I stupidly allowed myself to dream BIG. A part of my soul that I had buried and neglected awoke and took flight and that part of me believed in magic and destiny and true love and happily ever after.

It filled me with a fiery zeal that gave me the energy to break free of the confines I had imposed upon myself. It gave the courage to tell Norman to fuck off.

It didn’t work out, of course. The foundation wasn’t strong enough and it all fell apart and no one would hire me to do anything other than the work I was trying to escape and Norman was delighting in his own brutality and every day was like taking a new beating when I was already grievously wounded.

I was hurt. And so fucking tired.

I still am hurt and tired.

I’m hurt and tired and frustrated and angry and bitter and all these feelings are fair and valid.

But every day I get out of bed and I add another piece to the new foundation I am building.

Every day I wake up and my first thought is “fuck it, I quit, I’m not doing it anymore.”

And then I do it anyway. Because that’s just who I am.

I haven’t entirely convinced myself to stop wanting the big, magical, impossible dream I found looming up out of my sea of despair. I’ve built a little room in the back of my mind and I’ve carefully placed what pieces remain on sturdy shelves to be reexamined at a later time.

I honestly do think things will improve when I move into town in June. The isolation and the desolation and the flashbacks and the nightmares are a major part of what is fueling my perpetual panic right now.

I never lived in town when I was here before. And it’s not a bad little city. It’s even a bit bigger than the town where we had a house in Louisiana.

And there’s a college. It’s not a college I’ve ever particularly wanted to attend, but it’s there and it has a master’s program in English and it’s basically a certainty that I’ll be admitted.

I need to be in a classroom. School has always been a place of safety and comfort for me. There’s a reason I’ve been so insistent on going back to school for the past few years.

I need it. It’s a difficult thing to explain in a society where most people don’t enjoy going to school and are delighted to finish their studies. But for me as an individual, every school I have attended has been a sanctuary. And I desperately need that right now. It no longer matters where I attend. I just need a classroom, and some books to read, and some other students with whom to discuss those books.

Perhaps most importantly, every program of study has an end point. If I can tell myself I’m just here to get a master’s, then I have an I have a built-in release date.

But all of that is in the hypothetical future and the all-too-real present currently feels absolutely impossible to deal with. Right now it feels equally possible that I’ll be trapped in this wasteland for all of eternity. Some days I wonder if I actually did die last year and am currently in hell.

So, yeah. Not really in the mood for congratulations or empty platitudes right now. If you want to be helpful and make me feel better, try saying “wow, that sucks. But it’s only for a little while.” THAT is what I really need to hear right now.

I’m making sensible choices for the sake of my children. It’s only for a little while. I’ve escaped this place before, I can do it again.

I’m just so fucking tired.

1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a poet and one of the founders of what is known as the Romantic Movement in literature. He was addicted to laudanum and is famously known (among lit nerds) for failing to complete a poem (Kubla Khan) that he started in an opium haze because he got interrupted by a visitor and forgot the rest of the words.
   Incidentally, the parts of the poem he did remember to write down are pretty fucking weird. In my opinion, anyway.
   Also it’s absolutely fucking ridiculous how much I know about poetry considering how much I bitched and moaned and straight up refused to read it while in undergrad. ↩︎