Today I am not tired.

I am professionally exhausted.

This is not the kind of tired a nap fixes. This is the kind of tired where your body is upright, your brain has clocked out, and your soul is leaning against a wall smoking a cigarette it doesn’t even enjoy.

I woke up already needing a break.

My alarm went off, and I immediately disagreed. Nothing about me was ready to participate. My soul wanted to call in sick.

At some point in adulthood, sleep stops being rest and starts being a suggestion. You technically did it, but it didn’t take. Kind of like when you plug your phone in before bed, only to wake up and see it’s at 12% battery life.  Or that one time you drank water and expected it to fix everything.

Today is powered by caffeine, muscle memory, and Costco-madeleines.

I poured coffee, forgot where I put it, poured another coffee, and found the first coffee abandoned on the dining room table like a cold, neglected puppy from those ASPCA commercials (cue in Sarah McLachlan’s ‘In the Arms of the Angels’ song). That cup had been there long enough to form opinions, and it was disappointed in my life choices.  Obviously, it had been talking to the centerpiece because I felt very judged by both of them.

And yet, despite all signs pointing to lying down immediately, I still had responsibilities. A blog post. Words. Sentences. Humor. The audacity.

This is the cruel joke of exhaustion: your brain becomes a minimalist. It wants to communicate exclusively in sighs and eye rolls. Unfortunately, writing requires… letters. A lot of them. In the correct order.

By mid-morning, my internal monologue sounded like a stand-up set written by a woman who hasn’t slept since the Bush administration.

“Why am I like this?”
“Who allowed adulthood?”
“Is it too late to fake my own kidnapping?”

Every task today felt unnecessarily aggressive. Email? Hostile. Notifications? Threatening. Someone asking a follow-up question? Absolutely not. We are not circling back. We are going to lie down, stare at the ceiling, and negotiate with the universe to cancel today.

And yet, I barely managed to push through. Because that’s what I do. I slap on a sense of humor like concealer and hope no one notices the dark circles under my optimism.

There’s a specific flavor of exhaustion where everything becomes funny because it has to. If you don’t laugh, you will cry, and crying requires energy you simply do not have.

So instead, I started narrating my life like Morgan Freeman in a dry National Geographic documentary.

“Here we see the woman attempting productivity. She believes the email will be quick. It will not be.”

At some point, you convince yourself you’re being productive because you moved things around. Nothing is finished, but it’s organized exhaustion. Which feels like progress.

Let’s be clear: this is not burnout. Burnout is dramatic. Burnout has feelings. Burnout has opinions.

This is low-battery mode.

This is when your body switches to power-saving settings and shuts down all non-essential functions, like joy, memory, and the ability to remember why you walked into a room.

If exhaustion had a personality, it would be dry. It wouldn’t complain. It would just stare at you and say, “We’re doing the bare minimum today. Be grateful to be breathing.”

And honestly? That’s fine.

Not every day needs ambition. Some days just need survival and maybe a joke about it. Some days, the win is showing up, typing words, and not falling asleep face-first into your keyboard like a Victorian child with the vapors.

So here it is. The blog post. Written tired. Edited tired. Delivered tired.

If any of this felt familiar and made you laugh, congratulations, we are now a support group.

I’ll see you tomorrow. Unless I need a nap that accidentally lasts twenty hours.

Which feels likely.