AAre you feeling tired?* I’m going to take an educated guess that the answer is yes. I think I might know someone who doesn’t get tired. One of the most devastating moments of motherhood for me is recovering from the trauma of a year of sleep deprivation only to discover that I’m still tired, and I will probably be for the next 25 years, during which time I’ll be tired because I’m old.
So, I wonder: What does it mean to be tired? Why are we tired – and what kind of tired are we?
I think we are all working very hard, all the time. We are working hard to survive, looking after our homes, our families and our friends; We face financial concerns; We live with medical conditions. Some of this hard work contributes to a better life – but there is another type of work that many of us are doing that does the opposite.
Sometimes, feeling tired is good. After a pilates class, a swim in the ocean, a good cry and a few other things that are best read between the lines, it’s satisfying to feel my muscles ache. I sometimes prefer a tired hangover if I have nothing to do but drink coffee and watch a film during the day (the ultimate exhausting pastime for those who don’t like sleep).
But I sometimes feel a different kind of weariness creeping through me. I notice this most acutely – as with most things – when I am with my psychoanalyst. It’s a bone-weary, ready-to-give-up kind of slump. It’s the draining of energy that comes from working very, very hard, unconsciously, to avoid certain emotions that I won’t let into my conscious mind. It is the exhaustion that comes from tension – gritting your teeth to bite back anger, or clenching every muscle in your mouth to hold back tears. In my experience, these are the most exhausting emotions to suppress, but all of it drains work, and often we don’t even know we’re doing it.
This type of fatigue does not improve with sleep or rest; In fact, it seems to get worse. Unlike the kind of fatigue that follows exercise or any other vigorous activity, this fatigue comes from our own inner bodies. This is the type of exhaustion that a plant experiences when it doesn’t have enough water or light. A wilting. How I feel when I leave my analytic session and have succeeded in working so hard not to cry – when all I really needed was to let go and feel myself.
So if sleep doesn’t help, what will? Well, it is possible to recover from this kind of fatigue, but it is also painful. It involves developing the ability to feel better – that is, to feel better, allowing our emotional and psychological selves to truly come alive.
Humans have spent millennia looking for ways to feel more alive. Magic mushrooms, sex, music, going too fast, going too high, going too low, going too far. When you put it that way, my choice of psychoanalysis seems rather cool.
But that’s not my experience. I’ve had moments lying on my analyst’s couch when I felt more alive than watching a killer whale burst out of the ocean. The memory that came to mind clearly expresses this.
My psychoanalyst helps me to understand what I have in myself that I am killing, and he is helping me to recognize and give voice to these different parts of me, little by little, feeling little by little, so that all my mind can really come alive. And it’s working.
I felt empty inside. It was horrible. I was surrounded by this disturbing sensation of feeling like an adult-looking carapace with nothing underneath: I found myself like an old turtle with a thick, heavy dark shell, with nothing inside but a smoky yolk. This is what led me to write my book about what it means to grow up, what it means to be a person. I don’t feel like that empty turtle anymore – or hardly at all. I think it’s because I wasn’t really empty, but I was working hard to empty all the feelings I didn’t want to know. All the anger, pain, shame, guilt, jealousy, hatred, terror. All anger and tears.
I’ve discovered that feeling angry is far less exhausting than working so hard to not be aware of my anger. Crying is a better kind of exhausting than every muscle in my face and jaw and throat holding back my tears. So even though it’s hard work, I keep trying to understand myself and my feelings. The alternative is too tedious to contemplate.
* If you are not tired, please do not write to tell me this. It was a rhetorical question and I’m already jealous enough. I know you are well rested, naughty people out there; Please enjoy and eat your spirulina without getting tired.
