I remember the first time I actually allowed myself to feel tired. I was a relatively new mom, my son was probably 18 months old at the time. He was waking up frequently throughout the night and I was struggling. My husband got up earlier for work than I did, so I often took the night shifts.
One particular night, upon waking suddenly to the sounds of my son crying, I stomped with a hurried frustration into his room. At this moment, I remember screaming in frustration, only in my head, of course.
In that moment, I truly didn’t know what to do. From this place of uncertainty, a thought randomly sparked in my mind.
“Can you be here?”
What? I thought. Of course, I’m here.
Then a moment passed, and I realized I wasn’t really there. I was wishing I wasn’t there. I was wishing he was sleeping already and I was lying in my own bed so I could sleep through the night, to have the energy I needed for the day, and so I could brag about my son being a good sleeper, and all the other bullshit thinking that was coursing through my mind.
Then I got curious about this new question, and I wondered what it would be like to be in the room with my son.
I listened to him breathing. I noticed the city lights shining through the lined gray curtains. I felt his body underneath my hand.
Something shifted in that moment. I was still tired, but I was no longer frustrated about being tired, and I was actually enjoying an early morning moment with my very young son.
Some weeks later, he was still struggling to sleep, and while he was getting naps at daycare, I wasn’t. I was able to walk my son to daycare at the time, so I walked him on my shoulders that morning.
I’ve done some fairly physical feats in my life, but I’m not sure I can ever report feeling this physically defeated in my life. The fatigue in my body felt insurmountable and all consuming.
Normally, I’d fight every ounce of this feeling. I’d have gone home and guzzled the coffee and recounted all the mistakes I’ve made that are responsible for a fatigue this great. All in order to prevent this kind of terrible thing from happening EVER AGAIN!
Fortunately, however, another new thought found it’s way into my mind.
“What if you just let yourself be tired?”
Huh? Just let myself be tired? But isn’t it bad to be tired? At least that’s everything I’d ever previously been told.
Yet, instead of following the familiar path of resisting the fatigue, I chose a different one. I got curious about what it would be like to allow myself to be tired and to embrace the fatigue.
I found that my cadence slowed down. I mean, really, really, really slowed down. I felt the fatigue in my muscles, my feet as they met the sidewalk, the bones as they carried my weight the 3/4 of a mile home. But I also felt a completely new energy in my body, a vibration and an awareness that I hadn’t noticed before. I felt alive in my body and alive in my fatigue.
Then the most interesting thing followed. Later that morning, I stopped being tired.
Not a little less tired, the fatigue had completely dissipated.
I will never truly know the explanation for this occurence, but I seem to notice that by allowing myself to feel the fatigue, my body got what it needed, and the fatigue was no longer an issue.
I don’t know your story, I don’t know your life, but I do know that our bodies are always talking to us, they are always telling us what we need. We just tend to think we know more than our bodies do, and we get in our own way.