Lisa called this week and I heard the tired in her voice before she told me anything.
She’s the friend I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, the one who asked me during my divorce to pretend I was choosing to be alone. She walked me through the hardest years I’ve had, and she taught me what a good friend actually does. She listens and she says yes, that’s real. And then she reminds you it will not always feel like this. Both halves. The yes-that’s-real and the it-won’t-always-be. That combination is why I felt seen instead of managed.
So it was a strange and good thing to be on this side of the phone. To know someone well enough to hear it in a few words.
I told her to rest. I told her to believe what she was hearing from her own body, because it wasn’t making anything up.
But here’s the part I get stuck on. I write almost every week about the stories we tell ourselves. Catch the thought. Ask whether it’s true. I ran a whole workshop on it last weekend.
I am tired is not a story. It’s information.
The sentences worth interrogating are the ones we repeat about who we are. I have the worst luck. I always do this. Nobody listens to me. Those have earned the questioning. A body saying it needs to lie down is not a thought to catch. It’s a fact to believe.
Which I apparently understand perfectly well, for other people.
Twice this last week I was tired in a way I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be clear and productive and inspired, and instead I was heavy. Both days, before the sun went down, I made myself walk. Maybe the slowest walk I’ve taken, not for exercise but to try to pull myself out of it. I kept waiting for a second wind, even though the first hadn’t bothered to show up.
I also spent a good portion of those two days trying to identify the culprit. Isn’t it funny how badly we want to find the thing responsible? Sometimes it just is.
Not once did I consider a nap.
I don’t know whether one would have turned the days around. I didn’t try. I’m not certain I would have even if it had occurred to me.
What I do know is that Lisa spent years being the person who told me it wouldn’t always feel like this. Getting to say it back to her is the best thing that happened to me this week. I’d like to start believing it when the voice on the phone is mine.