Nothing ever really prepares you for the kind of tired that doesn’t go away with sleep. It settles in slowly, quietly, like dust on surfaces you stopped cleaning a while ago. Some mornings, I stand before the glass door and catch myself watching the light bend through that pink filter, as if the world outside were softer than it actually is. But I know better. I’ve lived too much to fall for that kind of illusion. That door isn’t a portal. It’s a mirror. And what it reflects back at me isn’t a body, it’s a weight.
Underneath the routine, there’s a scream I’ve trained myself not to let out. Too many people rely on my silence, and I’ve played that role so long it’s hard to remember when I last spoke honestly about how heavy it all feels. It’s not drama, it’s not victimhood — it’s just reality. You wake up, you show up, you keep everything moving, even when you feel like collapsing. Especially then. Because in places like this, where nothing is guaranteed and everything feels borrowed, you learn to keep going out of fear more than hope.
Routines become cages before you notice. I cook while thinking about bills. I answer messages with a smile no one can see. I make jokes about exhaustion, as if making it sound funny will make it feel less real. But the body remembers. The tension in the jaw, the weight behind the eyes, the shoulders that don’t drop even in sleep. There are no weekends in this kind of life. Only pauses between demands. And sometimes, while drying my hands in silence, I wonder if I’m still in there somewhere — the person I was before becoming someone who holds everything together for everyone else.
Veins don’t show on the surface until there’s pressure underneath. That’s what this stress is: invisible until it breaks something. I’ve learned to carry it without letting it spill, and I’m not the only one. Especially at this age, especially in this country, especially when being vulnerable gets confused with being unstable. There’s this unspoken agreement among people like me — mostly women, mostly working, mostly tired — that we don’t get to fall apart. So we don’t. We laugh it off. We survive beautifully, silently, and alone.
Maybe writing this is just another way of breathing through the noise. Not to fix it, not to ask for pity, but to say it out loud, at least once. Someone needs to say it. That we’re not weak, that we’re not broken, that we’re just carrying too much for too long. If you’re reading this and you feel the same, then maybe you understand what it means to stand behind a tinted door and feel like the world is out of reach — not because you can’t get to it, but because you’ve forgotten how to step toward it without guilt. If there’s any beauty in this, it’s that we’re still here. Not perfectly, not painlessly. But here.
All photographs and content used in this post are my own. Therefore, they have been used under my permission and are my property.
