There’s a specific kind of tiredness that doesn’t go away with sleep. It’s not the tiredness of a long day, it’s the tiredness of a long life spent understanding everyone except yourself. I know that I’m tired. I’ve been living in it.

I have made excuses for people who never once made excuses for me. I have shown up considered, gentle, patient and been met with silence, distance, or a version of myself edited out of the story entirely. Left out. Not considered. Forgotten in the small decisions that tell you where you actually stand with someone.

And it isn’t just people. I have felt betrayed by my parents, the ones who were supposed to be my first evidence that the world was safe. I have felt betrayed by friends, the ones I built inside jokes and late-night conversations with. I have even felt betrayed by God because if there is a plan, I don’t understand why it required this much breaking to get here.

I am tired of trial and tribulation being treated like a personality trait of mine. I am tired of being the one who understands, who forgives, who reads between the lines of someone else’s bad day and decides to be soft about it anyway. I give and give, thinking that generosity is a language everyone speaks. But some people only know how to take.

So now I sit with this question: who am I without my sensitive heart? If I stopped being the one who considers everyone, who softens every room, who absorbs what others won’t hold, would there be anything left of me? Or is my softness the only thing anyone has ever wanted from me?

I don’t have a clean answer. But I know this: wanting to be left alone isn’t the same as wanting to disappear. Sometimes it just means stop taking from me what you won’t protect. Stop asking for my patience if you can’t offer me any of yours. If you won’t consider my feelings, then yes give me the room I’m asking for. That’s not bitterness. That’s the boundary. I’m only now learning the difference.

I don’t think I need to stop feeling deeply. I think I need to stop being the only one who does the feeling in every relationship I’m in. Empathy was never supposed to be a one-way road I built by myself and maintained alone.

I don’t know yet what it looks like to keep my heart soft and my hands closed a little to still care, but to stop performing care for people who’ve shown me, over and over, that they won’t reciprocate it. I don’t know what it looks like to trust God again after feeling so unseen. But I know I’m done pretending the exhaustion isn’t real. I’m done calling it strength when really it’s just me, quietly running on empty, hoping someone notices before I have nothing left to give.

Maybe that’s the whole essay, honestly. Not a resolution. Just an admission: I am tired. And tired people deserve to rest — even from their own kindness.

Not tired like I need more sleep. Tired like my body already knows what’s coming — the small performance of being fine, the bracing before I even open my eyes. I do everything afraid. Romantic relationships, friendships, trying new things, even walking outside sometimes — all of it filtered through the same question: what is this going to cost me later. So mostly I don’t. I avoid. Quietly. I just don’t show up for my own life.

Lately the fear has started living in my body instead of just my head. A kind of pain that doesn’t go anywhere. Not an injury, nothing a doctor could point to, just a low, constant ache I’ve stopped expecting to end, because I think it’s my mind, tired of holding itself together, spilling into wherever it can.

Hopelessness isn’t dramatic. It’s quiet. A low hum underneath everything, a suspicion that whatever good thing is happening right now is temporary, and that the temporariness is the whole point.

I grew up in a house where depression was something that happened to other people. White people, specifically — that was the actual language. So even when I knew, even when I could feel something in me was wrong, I didn’t have words for it that wouldn’t also sound like betrayal. Like I was calling a good life a lie. So I said nothing. I’m still good at that.

Sadness has taken my own memory. When I try to think back on my life, the bad stuff comes first, comes easiest. The good stuff is there, I know it is, but it’s behind glass — I can’t quite believe it was mine. I get nervous when things are going well, the way you’d feel watching something breakable get passed around a room. Already waiting for the drop.

And when it drops, there’s a specific silence that shows up. Not sad — knowing. Loud, somehow, despite being silence. Yes. Of course. I knew this was coming. There’s almost relief in it, which is its own kind of awful.

Somewhere in all of this I’ve understood something about myself I don’t say out loud often: I am easy to leave. My parents managed it. Strangers do it casually, all the time. I’ve built a life around the assumption that everyone eventually will, which is maybe why I don’t let many people close enough to test the theory.

I don’t have a neat way to end this. I don’t think I’m supposed to. This is just what today looks like, and most days before it. The avoidance, the ache that doesn’t leave, the good moments I can’t quite hold onto, the silence I already know the shape of.

I’m just trying to say it out loud, finally, to someone other than myself.

So I built the scene, because it felt like the only thing I had control over. My grandmother, who had spent years trying to pour warmth into the space everyone else had left empty, would be angry first. Then sad. Then stuck on “why”— turning it over and over, the way people do when they loved you and still couldn’t see it coming. My sisters would cry, the kind that doesn’t stop when you tell it to, the kind that just turns its course. My uncle would go quiet and pretend he was fine, because that’s what he always did with anything that scared him, he’d wear the strength like armor so no one could see underneath it. My aunt would ask herself what she missed, turn it over a few times, feel the guilt sit heavy for a while, and then, slowly let herself move on because that’s what people do, even when they don’t want to admit it. My classmates would be stunned, because I smiled everyday and my grades never slipped. No one actually sees anyone. You can stand in a room full of people and still be completely invisible.

And underneath all of it was quietest, most dangerous thought: AT LEAST I WILL STOP OVERTHINKING.

I’m 22 years old now. Different life, some real distance between me and who I used to be. And still – lately that old weight has started creeping back in. The dimming. The pull toward nothing. It doesn’t announce itself the same way it did at 17, but I recognise it now. I know its shape, the way it likes to show up quietly and settle in before I even notice.

But I’m not 17 years old anymore, and I’m not writing that scene again.

I’m choosing something else. I’m going to get my passion for living back. Not because it’s easy, not because the weight isn’t real, not because I have it all figured out but because I’ve already survived the version of me that didn’t think there was another way through. I know there is. I’ve seen it. I’m still here, which is proof enough.

I will get it back. I will.