FATIGUE

It isn’t just tiredness.

No amount of sleep fixes it. No amount of caffeine, sound baths, or breathing exercises.

It’s simultaneously the need to do nothing, and yet, contrarily, do everything.

It lives in every cell of my body. It reaches all the way down to the soul. It hurts. It brings up grief—old grief, layered grief.

Someone wise once said that anger, like jealousy and other strong emotions, is an invitation to look deeper. Anger is about boundaries being crossed, often boundaries you don’t want to or know how to name. Jealousy is about things you want to have but do not.

So what is fatigue asking for?

Right now, my answer is surrender.

Fatigue doesn’t come to the table to compromise.

When I’m in it, the questions get blunt:

What do I owe so much allegiance to?

What is so important that I can’t take a moment to breathe—whatever “a moment” might realistically look like for me?

Will the world actually fall apart if I take that time?

And if it will, if everything collapses the moment I step back, then is this really the world I want to keep sustaining?

There’s a specific weight that comes from staying in things you’ve already outgrown: environments, relationships, survival frameworks. It’s the weight of negotiation, of trying to desperately move the pieces around on a chess board.

I recently read a blog post by Alice Sparkly Kat where they wrote about all the socially acceptable ways we talk about fatigue. Names that let us partially acknowledge how unwell we are while still forcing ourselves to function: Sick. Tired. Sick and tired. Fed up.

Below is the beautiful excerpt from Alice’s blog post (see notes for a link to their post):

“People don’t change when they are angry or frustrated or even hopeful. Someone who is expressing precise rage, exponential frustration is not expressing a willingness to walk away from their situation but an incredible energy of wanting to pour more in. An angry person has hope that their anger will help them get what they need out of the situation that they are currently facing. To change, you must be willing to walk away. You must be willing to acknowledge the losses that you have already endured and sometimes suffer through more. Hope means that you don’t want to walk away, at least not yet. There’s only one emotion, if it can even be called an emotion, that can do that—fatigue.”

Fatigue asks for no more, to surrender to what hurts. Fatigue asks: What are we willing to walk away from and leave behind for the sake of our own sanity?

Would that cost you the comfort of meeting certain social expectations—societal, peer-level, familial—any arena where you have to interface with another person’s gaze? Probably. But can you humble yourself before your own cognitive, physical, and/or emotional limits?

I doubt that leaving Earth would solve your problems. In fact, I’m fairly confident you could be on Saturn, and that fatigue would follow you, because it runs so much deeper than showing up with a socially performative mask that performs wellness and competence on cue.

And yes, I believe certain material changes can solve problems such as immediate bills, meeting obligations, or just the daily panic of needing to keep up.

But I would ask you to humbly sit with your proposed solution and plan out the next 24 hours once these proposed material changes come into effect.

I think the most important thing they would buy you is space. Space to finally ask the questions this blog is asking. But they won’t solve the root of the fatigue. This phenomenon is sometimes called “money doesn’t buy you happiness.”

Maybe that is the primary soul-level research question here: If you were to move to Saturn, which of these fatigue markers would you carry over the light-years? If earthly obligations fell away, would you know how to rest your body, mind, and spirit? Start there.

Because honestly, what on God’s good green earth would happen if you stopped pouring energy into this bottomless pit of giving without receiving enough nourishment back?

And is the thing you’re trying so hard not to fail at really worth the cost, especially if the cost is your ability to get out of bed, practice basic hygiene, and make a nourishing meal for yourself?

Notes:

Alice Sparkly Kat (2025), A Love Letter To The Twelfth House, https://www.alicesparklykat.com/articles/685/A_Love_Letter_to_the_Twelfth_House/