Everybody My Age Says They Are Tired

It comes up about four times a week and she says it too, and that is the problem.

Somebody says they are so tired. Somebody else says same. There is a whole conversational form for it and she knows it perfectly and she participates, and it is completely genuine on everybody's part, and none of it touches what is actually going on in her.

Because when they say it they mean a fortnight. They mean a bad run, a deadline, a stretch of not sleeping properly, and they mean it will lift, and it does, and she watches it lift in them and is glad.

She has been like this for about fourteen months.

Not sad. She wants that clear. She has been sad and this is not that, and she would say so to a doctor and has, and there is nothing they have found.

It is that she wakes up already having spent something. Every day. And by about four in the afternoon she is running on a kind of will that she can feel operating, like a hand holding a door shut, and she has been doing it for fourteen months and she is twenty-four.

And she cannot say any of that, because the sentence for it is already taken. I am so tired means a fortnight in her circle, and if she says it people will nod and it will be over, and if she says more than that she is being dramatic about something that everybody has.

So she says same, and laughs, and goes home.

And that is you in your own kitchen, or you would not still be reading.

The verse with no threshold in it

Let me put a sentence in front of you and then point at what is missing from it, because the missing thing is the whole gift.

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.Psalm 34:18

Now look for the qualification.

There is not one. There is no minimum. There is no clause about how long it has gone on, no requirement that the cause be identifiable, no comparison with anybody else's situation, and nothing anywhere that says a person has to have earned the condition before the nearness applies.

You are inside that sentence and there is no threshold in it you have failed to reach. It is written that the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit (Psalm 34:18). The Holy Spirit is the nearness in that verse, and He does not run a comparison between you and the people in your kitchen.

Now the permission thing, because that is the actual injury and it is worth naming precisely.

You have a real condition and no vocabulary that is not already spent, and so you have concluded that you have no standing to describe it.

That is not modesty. It is a trap, and it is specific to being young. At twenty-four there is a background assumption that the serious version of anything belongs to somebody older, and it operates constantly and nobody ever says it out loud.

You are not required to have earned this before you are allowed to say it. It is written that He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), and there is no age qualification in the word frame. The Holy Spirit is not waiting for you to be old enough for this to count.

And I want to be careful and useful about one thing.

Fourteen months of waking already spent, with a doctor involved and nothing found, is worth going back about. Not because this page can diagnose you, because it cannot and will not, but because fourteen months is a long time and a second conversation is a reasonable thing rather than a dramatic one.

That is not a spiritual instruction. It is the ordinary sensible thing, and it does not compete with anything in this article.

You are dwelt in through the whole of the fourteen months, and none of it has been a gap. It is written that the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you (Romans 8:11), and dwells has no start date attached to a person's capacity. The Holy Spirit has been in a twenty-four year old at four in the afternoon holding a door shut.

And I need to say this plainly. If it has gone further, if there have been thoughts about not being here at all, tell somebody today and tell your doctor. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one person who knows your name. Being young is not a reason to wait, and nobody will think you are being dramatic.