You Are Feeling Sleepy

You’re tired. You also anxious and angry and a little scared — and always, always sad — but usually these days when you suddenly take a step back and survey who you’ve turned into while you weren’t paying attention, you realize that mostly you are a person who is tired. And not just tired in the world-weary way we have all become because of the continuous content assault absorbed each day as we wend our way through life’s web; no, this is an actual physical fatigue. You’d kill for a rest, just an extra hour of shallow slumber here or there but even when you find yourself in the perfect position — eyes closing on the couch and nothing in particular to do for the next sixty minutes — you can no longer sustain any sort of sleep before the worry wakes you, so you sit there, head slumped on your shoulder, recalling how easy it used to be not so long ago for you to turn everything off. But now? There’s nothing natural you know of that will let you lay yourself down, and even the chemical cures are proving less and less effective. There are plenty of reasons for this, some of them psychological, some of them due to how hard you run yourself and how little room you allow for the sheer silence and the utter absence of stimulation; a lot of it has to do with the way that everything is terrible and only getting worse and the accompanying physical toll that it takes on you to pretend otherwise to yourself and the people around you, to proclaim in spite of all the evidence that things are really great, that you don’t understand how anyone can’t see just how terrific it all is and why isn’t everyone cheering about what a wonderful world we live in now etc. etc. etc. to the extent that you know you have to just keep on shouting about how amazing it is because if you stop for even a second the next sound out of your mouth will be a low, keening wail wracked with a pain so profound that it will never find itself finished. So yes, you’re tired. It’s a constant struggle. But come Sunday morning the clocks go forward an hour; at least your end-of-day exhaustion will shimmer a little longer in the late-afternoon light. That’s something, right?

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