When the Body Shuts Down

Perhaps you know the sort of exhaustion that sleep does not touch.

Perhaps you have taken the week off and found that the rest restored nothing, or that stopping felt worse than continuing, and something within you began to hum with a pressure you could not name.

Certainly this is confusing. We are told to rest, to slow down, to be gentle with ourselves, as though the stopping were freely available and we were simply refusing it.

Yet for many of us there is good reason the stopping is so difficult. Somewhere within, younger parts of us remember what happens when we cannot keep going. Perhaps there is frustration.

Perhaps there is expectation, or anger, or intrusion. Perhaps, more painfully still, there is nobody there at all.

And so we continue. We push on and push through, whilst the exhaustion accumulates beneath the pushing, and the panic and the dread and the shame of being found wanting press in from underneath.

This does not soften through more discipline, or more determination, or one more attempt at doing it properly on our own.

What makes the difference is company.
Someone alongside us, softly, slowly, steadily, whilst we find out what it is to be this tired in the presence of another person.