I stopped wearing exhaustion as a personality

For years, “so tired” was my opening line. Friend asks how I am: exhausted. Coworker on Monday: wrecked. My own mother on the phone would say I sounded tired, and I would confirm it like a signature.

It was true, which is what made it dangerous. True things repeated long enough stop being descriptions and become addresses — the place you live.

Exhaustion was not just a feeling; it was infrastructure. It excused the cancelled plans, softened the missed deadlines, and lowered everyone's expectations to a height I could step over.

• It answered questions before anyone asked them.
• It turned “I can't” into “I would, but.”
• It made the struggle visible without me ever explaining it.

As long as tired was my personality, I never had to interrogate it. The label did the coping for me.

I did not make a big vow. I just stopped saying it, the way you stop a nervous tic: awkwardly, with relapses. The silence where “so tired” used to go turned out to be very loud, because now every “how are you” required an actual answer.

Without the slogan, one question became unavoidable: okay, but why? Why was I tired after easy weeks, tired on vacation, tired as a default state?

The first weeks were genuinely awkward. People would ask how I was and I would stand there buffering, realizing I had no second answer prepared.

The answers were not mysterious once I looked. I was overcommitting because saying no felt rude, masking all day and calling the collapse “relaxing,” and resting only after I broke — which is not rest, it is repair.

Dropping the identity did not fix the exhaustion. It stopped the exhaustion from being the end of the story. I am still tired sometimes. It is no longer the most interesting thing about me.

Rest is on the calendar now like an appointment instead of a collapse. Some weeks I even keep it, and those weeks feel noticeably different.