Why am I so tired during the work day?
She woke up tired and stayed that way all day. Not the kind of tired coffee fixes. The kind where the alarm goes off and there is already nothing left.
The rooster had woken her at dawn because she forgot to put him away. She had come home too late the night before, crawling through a hedge with a dying swan tucked under her body, and just didn’t have it in her to walk back outside. So the bird screamed at sunrise and she paid for it.
She got up anyway.
There is a version of exhaustion we all recognise. The kind that builds from too many nights like that, too many calls that come in at 20:25 when we thought the day was done, too many times we choose the thing that needs doing over the thing that would let us rest. The weight behind the eyes. The way standing up takes a full decision.
What we talk about less is the part where it doesn’t stop us.
She went out again that night. Another swan, another crisis it could not solve on its own. She stayed until it was safe. The next morning, the bird she had pulled from the hedge was eating again. She got there in time.
Nobody filmed her cutting through the fence. Nobody photographed the part where she shielded the swan’s body with her own back, crawling through branches on her elbows while it tried to bite her hair. The hardest part happened when no one was watching. That is where the day’s energy actually went.
We carry two versions of tired. One is the backlog — the emails, the errands, the things still sitting there. That kind has a finish line, even if we never quite reach it.
The other kind does not end because the need does not end. The call that comes in late. The choice between convenience and someone else’s survival, made over and over until the day is gone and you are still upright only because stopping was never quite an option.
That exhaustion does not come from working hard. It comes from working hard at something that will never be finished, that no one will see, that does not count as productivity in any measurable way.
She knew the swan would not have lasted the night. That mattered more than being home on time. The next day she still had to get up with the rooster and do it all again.
The burnout we talk about publicly usually has an audience. The boss who doesn’t appreciate you. The grind you can at least name and resent. This is the other kind. The one where you are tired because you kept going when it would have been easier not to. Where the only person who knows how much it cost is you.
What are you too tired to keep doing that you are going to keep doing anyway? And what would it mean to let that count as work?