Exhaustion Seven Days a Week, Except One

​By Sydney

​As I’m writing this, I can feel the bags under my eyes growing.​ The urge to rest my head on my computer grows stronger with each word I type. I feel like all my energy is going to just staying awake. 

An endless cycle of waking up and fighting to complete my daily tasks before sleep claims me. 
With the tiredness comes the numbness. Feeling emotion takes energy- energy I don’t have. I want to smile, I want to cry, but all I can do is move through the day on empty, with no smiles or tears. It must be strange for you to hear that I want to cry, but I do. For me, crying means I’m feeling something strong enough to invoke a physical reaction; I haven’t felt that strongly about anything in a long time. 

On the other side of the coin, I constantly feel like I’m on the edge of crying. Not from emotion, but from exhaustion. At this point, I’d take those tears over the nothing I currently experience.
At this point, it should be noted that I stopped writing to go to the store for an energy drink- my fourth of the day- because I’d taken two naps and still felt tired. 
It’s only noon.

I’ve developed a dependency on caffeine in the last four months, something I said would never happen. Long have I loathed the taste of coffee and my parents drilled into my head that energy drinks would kill me. My senior project changed all that. Looking back, that’s probably when my exhaustion started. I slept so little trying to finish my last project of high school, it’s like my body is still trying to catch up on all the sleep I missed.

I don’t know how much more I’ll be able to write about this. For me, it’s normal to feel tired, so normal that I don’t know how to describe exhaustion. It boggles my mind that people will wake up after eight hours of sleep and feel rested with no need to nap during the day. The envy I feel towards people who aren’t running on an empty battery is ineffable. I long to be them. I wish I could feel that way.

In order to stay awake, I’ve taken to bombarding my senses. There’s always a TV show, youtube video, or playlist playing in the background while I talk to my friends and read a course description for college. 

College, college is coming in less than a month. I hope I don’t sleep through it. I hope my energy returns and I can spend the next four years of my life having fun with friends and learning about topics I’m passionate about. I hope it’s normal.

Deep in my heart I know I’m not the only one that feels like this. That there are others who are chronically exhausted. Maybe you feel the same? If you do, I’m sorry. No one deserves to feel tired every hour of the day, every day of the week.

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This is Sydney from the next day. I’m not sure what happened, but I feel… better. For the first time in a long time, I woke up without the heavy curtain of exhaustion over my eyes. 
I’ve taken advantage of this newfound energy and gotten caught up on a lot of work I had put aside in favor of napping. I cleaned the kitchen, researched college courses, and completed some reviews. 

I want this to last as long as possible, but I’m scared it’ll go away as fast as it came. 
I’m scared the tiredness will return.
I’m scared my motivation will vanish.
I’m scared.
I’m scared, but I will take this one day at a time.