I'm Tired
I wrote this two weeks ago. The day we put down our cat Mufasa. I honestly was thinking about just shelving it and saying “meh, you were raw and emotional, let it rest”. But I have been thinking that maybe being raw and emotional is why I shouldn’t let it rest. Because we’re all emotional beings. We all have thoughts and feelings that we tend to shove down ESPECIALLY at work and it’s even MORE difficult for women than men, because in the workplace when a man is emotional they’re “fiery” or “expressive” and when a woman does it she’s “emotional” or “moody” and it’s fucking insane. Which isn’t the point of this at all for me to go on a “women aren’t treated fairly in the workplace” conversation, though they aren’t and it should be a bigger point of emphasis.
The point is, I still hurt. I’m still grieving. And I try to ignore it and push it down because that’s so much easier. And I can compartmentalize, and just think about the task I’m on and get wrapped up in it and ignore the pain. But that doesn’t make it go away. This morning, our house cleaner asked where all our cats were, because she hadn’t seen them around lately. And I tried to act like it wasn’t a huge deal. But it fucking is. Our house feels empty. It feels quiet. It feels like it’s MISSING SOMETHING. My wife was listening to a video of kittens howling last night and I reflexively said, “I love and hate that sound so much, but more importantly I can’t wait to hear it from one of our cats again.”
Because the point is, even when you feel that awful pain and emptiness, you can realize the only way you could feel so terrible is to have had immense joy and love preceding it. And you can feel that again. You don’t lose that capability because you felt loss.
Having kids provides for constant opportunities to learn lessons.
At first, those lessons are just about basic survival. I gotta make sure I sleep and eat just like I need to make sure the baby sleeps and eats. Then it turns to more nurturing needs, I need to make sure this baby feels loved and safe and is able to go explore. Then it turns to societal fears as they start going to day care, and elementary school, and you learn lessons about the level of control you really have over what happens to this other human. And it just keeps going endlessly into infinity, learning new lessons about how people operate and how to work within the confines of what you can actually control.
And for some reason, I thought the exhaustion would wane as we stopped being as worried about how much sleep our baby is getting and started worrying about different facets of their life, but what I’ve found is, I’m getting more tired instead of less tired.
Which feels like an allegory to what is happening around us every day. We’re learning more, we’re evolving, as individuals, as parts of companies, as cogs in machines, our day to day lives are constantly evolving and teaching us new lessons. But I’m getting burnt out on learning new lessons every week.
And the problem is, those burn outs aren’t a result of work alone changing too fast. Work always changes fast. If you’re not expecting a reorg, a RIF, or a change in priorities, or executive leadership… well, you’re either hopelessly naive or one of the very few lucky ones in a place of stability.
That change though combined with societal changes, global economy changes, global morality changes, whatever the hell is going on with the weather changes, etc. (you could argue most of this isn’t “change” per se and is more that we’re just being exposed to things that were already bad, and I probably couldn’t argue against that but I also don’t know nearly enough to pretend to be the expert on this one). It’s a lot all at once. And if you’re feeling tired and burnt out, know you’re not the only one.
Today in particular I feel that burnout.
I had a call I had to be on at 630, so of course my brain woke me up at 430, just to be safe.
Then I didn’t have time for a workout, which was good, because I was exhausted anyway (let’s be real, I had time, but that time was at 530 am and I just wasn’t having it lol).
Then the meeting at 630 went incredibly smoothly.
Then I had to take the kiddo to school.
Then listen to more meetings, with a lot of “stuff that’s important but not something you can control right now” which is like, just a lot lol. But it’s all intellectual a lots not tangible or actionable a lots?
Then I have a more energizing meeting later that’ll be hopefully a good time.
Then I have a sick cat, who is my best bud, but needs to get some relief from the fact that he’s 16ish years old, with a giant tumor in his belly making it impossible to sit comfortably. And of course, the only time that the vet can do it is at 5 pm, so we get to sit with it all day.
Add in that I want to be able to give my kids and wife a space to feel everything they’re going to feel about his dying.
Add into that, I don’t want to feel it or think about it at all, I want to pretend that it’s not happening. Because it’s not real until it’s real. And then it’s VERY real.
But then we still have to have dinner. We still have to do our evening routines. We still have to go to sleep and wake up tomorrow morning, without giving him his pill, only making one cat bowl of food for the morning. Not hearing his loud and obnoxious meow. Not having him walk all over me because he’s begging for food. Not have him try to use the litter box only to miss. Not have him constantly underfoot. Not have him react when we pull out the laser pointer. Not be able to tell the story of him making Daniel laugh for the first time and then show what he did that made him laugh in real life.
And it feels like a microcosm of our everyday lives.
We’re all grieving while trying to continue on.
We’re still grieving for the time we spent in COVID. We’re grieving for children we see dying in wars constantly. We’re grieving for people being starved just because of their nationality or religion. We’re grieving for the time when we felt like the moral and just actor in the world (I say felt very specifically because… sorry we’ve never been the moral actor in the world Americans!). We’re grieving for our own personal losses. We’re grieving for past versions of our selves that aren’t us anymore. We’re grieving for past versions of friends and family members. We’re grieving constantly.
And most religions and cultures had a tool to help us deal with this. Whether it’s a wake, or sitting shiva, or whatever, there was a time to sit in your grief and feel just that. Not to let the rest of the world in but instead just let yourself process your loss.
But when was the last time you simply sat and were able to process your loss.
I know for me, it’s been a minute.
My office is the room where we first started doing distance learning. It used to be my wife’s art studio. I was in here for a couple weeks before my incessant talking and phone calls started driving everyone (myself included lol) insane.
Today marks my third cat I’m losing SINCE MOVING INTO THIS HOUSE.
I will have sat with each of them as their heart beats one last time.
But I still have to go to work. I still have a family to take care of. I still have to pay bills. I still have to take the garbage cans out tonight.
We all just have too many responsibilities.
And likely this is just how adulthood has been forever.
I mean, if I’m a farmer in the 1800’s I’m laughing at this asshole complaining about living in fucking modern luxury, getting to go to a store and buy all my food, not having to raise animals just to kill them for food, or having a shitty harvest and not knowing if we’re gonna be able to survive the winter.
But also, this isn’t the misery olympics. We’re not competing with each other to see who is struggling most.
I think the idea is more - we’re not ok. None of us. We haven’t recovered. That person who seems to have it all together right now, living their best life? Suffering from some trauma or another.
Your boss who is riding you for some dumbass thing you’re gonna get done but not before being annoyed a few more times first – they’re also suffering.
That colleague who dropped the ball? Suffering.
It’s not an excuse. It doesn’t mean that whatever dumbass thing someone else is doing is OK because they’re struggling.
But if you start looking at is as all these people are going THROUGH IT first, then you stop worrying about people that don’t have it all together and start instead looking at the people overcoming everything that they’re going through and thinking “way to fucking go you rock”.
The reality is… we all DO fucking rock. You rock for reading this. And you rock if you’re not reading this. We all have such awesome things to bring to the table. AND we also sometimes suck, not because we’re trying to be shitty, but sometimes, the bulk of bullshit that is falling on your head is too much to overcome.
Performance = Potential - Interference right?
Now go back and think about ALL that interference that I threw out there that we’re all dealing with. You can’t have even shitty performance out of that without a hell of a lot of potential. And a lot of you are way above shitty.
But that doesn’t make it FEEL any less shitty.
Because it is shitty.
I’m not gonna miss my cat less to improve my performance. Fuck that. I’m going to wallow for a minute. I’m going to play a video game or sit outside and read and interrupt my distractions with bouts of sobbing or going to find my dog, or other cat, or kids, or wife – just to have someone to love in the moment when I don’t have my cat to love.
And I don’t need to be productive as a part of that. I don’t need to grind. I don’t need to clean. I don’t need to do anything. I just need to get that fucking love to my family so they can help me grieve. And I can help them in return.
We’re owed time to grieve. We’re owed the beautiful pain of having loved so much that the loss of that love breaks our hearts and rips us in two.
Because we all fucking rock, and deserve to feel.