Tired All the Time

Maybe it's everything. Maybe it's me.

Dear Reader,

(I have been binge-watching Bridgerton and so feel compelled to add a greeting to this particular missive. Please feel free to read it in your best Julie Andrews voice.)

Lately I am tired all the time. It’s not a weariness born of insomnia or late night Netflix. It’s not a full-body kind of fatigue—although my body does lag more than it used to. It’s not illness or lack of nourishment.

I’ve got the ennui. The melancholy. The weltschmerz. Pick your synonym.

I’ve got all of the above about everything, it seems. Friends ask me out to lunch, out for a drink. I say yes because I feel like I must but I wonder what I could possibly say when we sit down at next week’s cafe. I feel like the most unappetizing bore, and the thought of dredging my closet for something akin to appropriate for such occasions makes me wish for oblivion. Or ozempic.

There are trips coming up soon. An overnight here, a couple of weeks there. No one’s forcing me to go anywhere. Technically, I am looking forward to these trips. If I were to describe myself to a stranger I’d tell them I love to travel. I’m sure I’ve just misplaced that wanderlust. It’s got to be around here somewhere.

I’m supposed to be writing 1,000 words a day for the next 12 days. Yesterday I wrote 347 and then couldn’t drag my fingers back to their places on the keyboard. I couldn’t find any more words. I laid on the floor with the dogs instead, watched the clouds drift by the windows so very slowly they hardly seemed to move at all.

I stared and stared at the relentless blue and thought about the coming summer heat and the anticipation of all that shimmer made me pull a pillow over my face and wail.

“Are you depressed?” my sister asks me.

“What do I have to be depressed about?” I scoff.

Her question is not unfounded. This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened.

In my 20s, a guy—an overeager evangelical pastor mere months older than me—laid his hand on my arm in a way meant to be comforting and said, “Oh LaDonna, I know you’re sad but I am sure you’re not depressed because you’re still going out with your friends, you’re still present and participating, you’re still washing your hair!”

“Sure, yep, I’m sure you’re right,” said my mouth but even then I knew he was full of shit. There are a thousand thousand ways to be depressed. Some of them involve washing your hair.

In the thick of the first lockdowns of 2020, I likened myself to a wombat. “I just want to stuff my pouch with lots of snacks and crawl into a hole and not come out till all this is over,” I told my friend Kathy. Wombats don’t need jobs. Don’t need to worry about the mental well-being of their children. Don’t have to be loyal friends or good partners or choose outfits or write books. Wombats just dig burrows and monch treats and fart aggressively and without apology. A human can only act like a wombat for so long before reality demands you gather your dignity and get up off the floor.

I don’t know how many women in my family have battled depression, because my great-grandmother Tillie would have thought such a thing too shameful to put words to. My nana Mary Ellen wouldn’t have thought it shameful so much as nonsense. She was too busy chain smoking and going to roller-skate dance parties to talk about her sadness.

My mother didn’t talk about hers, either. She just swallowed it. Smiled. Drove carpool and weeded gardens and bandaged bloody knees. She held down all the forts—mine, my sister’s, my father’s, and then spent afternoons in bed while in the kitchen dirty dishes lay in drifts across the table.

Her bedroom was off-limits, draped in darkness, entrance forbidden to children who so easily shatter that tenuous silence. I don't know if she thought the absence of light would hide her from us or herself, covering her disappointment with a soft blanket of oblivion for two to four hours, relieving her from reality in the brightest part of the afternoons.

For years I thought all mothers slept like this, that all kitchens lay buried beneath the detritus of unwashed plates and forks. I thought all adults disappeared in the afternoons to take refuge in rooms swathed in the soothing twilight of fiberglass drapes.

For years I worried that my mother bequeathed me not only her name (we are both LaDonna) but also her sadness. A hereditary propensity toward melancholy.

When I was old enough to buy my own (non-fiberglass) drapes, I began to scour my dishes to perfection every night before turning out the lights.

I would be different, I determined. I would not be my mother.

Determination doesn’t deter depression, though, and I have dealt with my fair share of lowering lows.

I am not ashamed. I don’t think it’s something to hide in the shadows, to whisper about behind closed doors. Depression is an entirely reasonable reaction to so many things that so many of us experience in our lifetimes. It’s not all roses and rejoicing out here.

That said, I don’t believe I’m depressed at the moment. I say this as someone who knows myself pretty damn well. I’m not depressed. I’m just tired. In my head and in my heart.

Maybe this is middle age or menopause or maybe it is an absolutely understandable, inevitable, even logical response to the state of our world these days. For 248 days now Palestinians have livestreamed unspeakable horrors — not the least of which is 75,000 tons of explosives dropped on the displaced and dispossessed — all while the world watches and shrugs. Crises are escalating in Haiti and in Sudan, where 3.5 million children can’t find any kind of safety. Meanwhile children in the Democractic Republic of Congo mine cobalt to power my mobile phone. The war in Ukraine drags on and on, and its neighbors Poland and Estonia fear the future if Russia finally bludgeons its way to some kind of victory. Meanwhile, the hottest months ever recorded on the planet were the last 12 we just lived through. Extreme weather continues unabated, and the people least responsible for climate change continue to suffer the biggest consequences while pop stars and billionaires flit to and fro in their private jets like NBD. Last Monday it was 52°C (125°F) in southern Pakistan. On that same Monday, severe storms killed people in Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Texas. And of course I cannot mention the country of my birth without thinking of the convicted felon who will likely get another go at being President, and the way universities keep calling down violence on the heads of peacefully protesting students, and the way students from kindergarten to university keep getting shot just because they showed for class. Yet any kind of meaningful gun control remains out of reach. And all of that is just the tip of the (swiftly thawing) iceberg.

Meanwhile within the bubble of my own small life, I recently rescued a stray cat from a flooded hole in the ground and took it to the vet, where it died within minutes and I paid 41€ for its cremation.

A few days later as I took Filha to school we nearly hit an elderly Dalmation wobbling across a busy road. He looked lost and confused and was still there 10 minutes later when I returned home, so I pulled over and helped him climb into my car. I took him to the vet where they used three different microchip readers that all came up empty: no owner on record. After calling and driving to multiple animal rescue organizations, I finally found one that would take Mr. Wobbles—and left that information at the vet in case the owner showed up looking for him.

Both the vet and I were/are pessimistic on that front, though—our theory is that the owner didn’t want to deal with an ailing elderly dog and dumped him in a field early one morning when no one was watching. It happens. A lot, actually.

“I’m ready for the universe to stop sending me animals who need help,” I told Marido that night.

A week or so later, one of the wee goats who shares a pasture with my foster donkey, Senhor Bonanza Cinnamon Toast, was attacked by a mysterious predator sometime in the night. The ensuing struggle left her with a badly broken back leg and a swollen and infected bite on her front shoulder.

For five days when I took Toast his dinner, I also gave Vanilla (the injured goat) two shots of antibiotics while her mother, Bean (the uninjured goat) looked on and yelled at me. I’ve never given injections before, but the veterinarian handed the syringes to me and was like, “You can give her injections, right?” And now I know how to stab a goat in the neck with a needle.

All of that happening in a short amount of time on top of all the other personal life stuff that in my church days I would have primly described as an “unspoken prayer request”—it was kind of a lot.

That’s Mr. Wobbles the elderly Dalmation with our dogs Vila (in the front) and Zambú (to the right). There was a whole love triangle thing going on where Zambú was quite taken with Mr. Wobbles, but Mr. Wobbles fancied Vila and she was not interested in the least. Classic rom com situation, amiright? And on the right there is Vanilla the Goat and her very fetching cast, which she’ll be wearing for the next 4 weeks.

Sometimes the psychic load gets quite heavy. Which brings me back to that German word I dropped on you earlier: Weltschmerz. Like the Portuguese word saudade, weltschmerz has no exact English translation.* It is a word used to describe a specific kind of weariness. World weariness, like “the weariness that comes with knowing that the world is going to let you down no matter what and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.” (source)

Maybe that sounds pessimistic. I think it’s just realistic.

Listen, I believe the world is wildly marvelous. Life is a journey that never stops stunning me stupid with moments of devastating wonder and unspeakable joy.

But also. Life is harrowing and heartbreaking and ludicrous and tedious. Adulting is discovering that life has endless ways to exhaust a person, body and soul. The act of living can be a teeth-baring show of defiance sometimes—the energy you must muster just to get up out of bed and put on pants and set foot outside your door to face whatever new catastrophe might lie in wait.

This world is a wonderful, terrible place.

It’s all worth it, of course. I’d choose my life again and again and again.

But it’s exhausting.
I know you feel it too.

It’s ok for us to be exhausted. It’s ok to admit we’re exhausted. It’s ok to be tired of *gestures around* all this.

And yes, I know I’m lucky. I know my own personal version of “all this” might look enviable to someone else. But few of us know what burdens bear down upon our neighbors.

So today, I am telling you that I’m tired. Not for pity or for advice but just to be human. Just to say, “This is how it is sometimes.”

Today I am tired. Tomorrow I might be tired, too. But then, out of nowhere, there will be something lovely. It will lift me back up so I can feel the wind. And on that day, the blue of the sky will seem welcome rather than relentless. I’ll remember, for awhile, how to soar.

*I adore untranslatable words like saudade and weltzschmerz. And have you heard of “kummerspeck”? It translates to “grief bacon” and refers to the weight gained from emotional eating.

---

A word to all my regular readers, especially those of you who write a comment or send me an email or hit the heart button. Those small moments of connection mean so much to me. No, I’m not writing for the likes, but still I appreciate the evidence that I am not writing into the void. Thank you for letting me know you hear me.

A thing I saw in Chicago back in 2019

---

If you want to support my work…

You can choose from a couple of tiers of paid subscriptions. In addition to my undying gratitude for your support, you’ll get more of my writing, which is what (I assume) you’re here for! Once a month for paid subscribers only, I will post an excerpt from my memoir-in-progress. The first one is here, for free, if you want a preview.

OR
If you’re not into paid subscriptions, but you’d still like to show support every once in a while, you can leave me a tip.

OR
If you want to carry on reading these posts for free because you can’t or shan’t pay, that’s perfectly fine. I do not hide Long Scrawl essays behind a paywall.

NO MATTER WHAT
Thank you for reading. Thank you for telling me when my writing means something to you. That matters most of all.

---

Copyright © 2024 LaDonna Witmer