I Don't Want to Get Better at Being Tired

A beautiful planner can get me into trouble. Give me thick cream paper, a ribbon marker, and a pen that feels expensive in my hand, and for about twenty minutes I’m willing to entertain the idea that I could fit my entire life into a week if I wrote small enough.

The trouble starts when I get to Thursday and realize I would happily cancel half of what I’m about to write down. I know this before the ink hits the paper. I can feel it in the little sigh I make before I write somebody’s name.

What interests me is how quickly I can turn that sigh into a scheduling problem. I could move the call. I could get dinner started earlier. I could answer those messages while I wait for the water to boil. Look at me, finding six more minutes of labor in a pot of spaghetti.

Sometimes I move enough things around that I get an hour back and feel positively giddy about it. Then I look at that clean little rectangle and think, Oh good, I can finally get to those emails. Apparently I have a woman living inside me whose job it is to find available hours, and another woman whose job it is to seize them before the first one has a chance to go outside.

I know why women get good at this. Sometimes the whole damn household would come apart if we didn’t know who needed to be where, what was running out, and which person saying “I’m fine” meant it. You can sit down to dinner with everyone you love and still spend half the meal listening for the dryer. Then somebody tells you they don’t know how you do it, and for a second it feels like being seen. It might be the closest anyone comes to asking how you’re doing all day.

And there’s pleasure in being good at things. I like knowing what to do when something goes sideways. I like the little satisfaction of pulling off a dinner with whatever’s in the refrigerator. The trouble comes when people start planning around your capacity to pull things off. You do it once as a kindness, twice out of habit, and by the third time someone is explaining to a newcomer that this is the part Lisa handles. You hear it from across the room.

I don’t want to get better at being tired. I want to be able to hear myself when I say, “I wish I didn’t have to do this,” before I start looking for a way to make it easier to do. Sometimes there really is a thing that has to happen, and I am the person who has to do it. I’ve also spent perfectly good Tuesday afternoons on things nobody would have thought to ask me for if I hadn’t volunteered six months earlier and then quietly made myself indispensable.

There’s a small scandal in letting somebody discover you could have done something and simply chose to spend your afternoon another way. You might have to sit through a little silence on the phone after you say you can’t keep doing the thing. You might hear yourself getting ready to offer up a dentist appointment or a sick dog as evidence. If you can bear it, let the silence sit for a second. The other person may have a perfectly adequate idea of their own.

The funny thing is that once I have the afternoon, I can be a little awkward with it. I’ll reach for my phone in the middle of a book and have no idea what I meant to look up. There’s a kind of fidgeting that comes from having spent so long answering the next demand that it takes a while to notice the jacaranda blooming across the street. And then you notice it. You wonder how long it’s been blooming. You put the phone back in your bag.



I still want the beautiful planner. I want to open it on a Monday and see a Thursday afternoon with nothing written on it. Maybe I’ll take a book to a café and read three pages before I get distracted by the people at the next table. Maybe I’ll order a second coffee. I’d like to make that decision when the first one is gone, with my hand still warm from the cup.