12/27/2025
I’m not just tired. Let’s be clear about that. This isn’t the tired from a long week or a poor night’s sleep. That kind of tired has a remedy. This is different. This is trauma tired.
The kind of tired that lives in your bones. It’s not a sensation; it’s a condition. It has weight and texture. It’s a dull, constant ache in your marrow, as if your very skeleton is weary from holding you up all these years.
The kind that makes your soul feel heavy. Your spirit, the part of you that’s supposed to feel light and curious and alive, feels dense. Saturated. Like it’s been waterlogged by years of tears you didn’t have the safety to cry.
Sleep doesn’t touch it. You can sleep for ten hours and wake up feeling like you’ve run a marathon in your dreams. The fatigue isn’t in your muscles; it’s in your nervous system. It’s in the pathways that have been firing alarm signals for years, decades maybe. Sleep is a pause, not a reset.
Rest doesn’t fix it. A vacation, a lazy Sunday, a quiet moment—they’re bandaids on a wound that goes much deeper. The rest the world offers is for the body. This exhaustion lives in the mind that never stops replaying, in the heart that never fully unclenches, in the history that lives in your cells.
This body has carried years of survival mode. It has been a vessel for fight-or-flight, for constant scanning, for preparing for impact. It has held anxiety like a second heartbeat. It has housed depression like a permanent houseguest. It has maintained a state of constant alertness, even in supposed safety. Always bracing. For the next blow, the next disappointment, the next trigger. Always pushing. Through fog, through pain, through days that felt like wading through wet cement. Always trying to make it through. Not to thrive. Not to enjoy. Just to make it to the end of the day without crumbling.
Most days, even simple things feel like a fight. Making a phone call. Answering a text. Deciding what to eat. It’s not the task itself. It’s the monumental effort of marshaling the energy, silencing the noise, and performing normality. It feels like a fight because it is one—a quiet, internal war against an inertia that wants to pull you under.
Not because I’m lazy. That’s the cruel lie your mind tells you. It’s the opposite.
Because I’m exhausted from surviving things I was never meant to carry this long. I am tired from holding weights I should have been allowed to set down years ago. I am fatigued from a marathon I never signed up for, one where the finish line kept moving. The exhaustion is the honest receipt for a burden that was never mine to bear alone, or to bear forever.
And still, somehow, I keep going. It’s not pretty. It’s not graceful. Some days it’s just one breath after another. But it is happening. This profound weariness has not, in the end, stopped the forward motion. It has only made every step a testament to a resilience I sometimes wish I didn’t have to own.
This is trauma tired. And if you know it, you know. There are no easy answers here. Only recognition. And perhaps, in that recognition, a sliver of permission—to be this tired, to honor the weight of what you’ve carried, and to see the sheer, stubborn will it takes to keep going, not as a failure to heal faster, but as the ultimate proof of your endurance.
soul
