Oh goody, another post about being tired.

TH and I joined some friends over the weekend for a social outing–the first of its specific kind in three years. The boys’ school fundraiser, a themed event requiring what the Aussies call “fancy dress” (ie costumes), typically occurs during the wintry month of August but has been sidelined since 2019 due to Covid.

This year they made up for it.

I did, at least, my ears pricking up at the mention of a French champagne-filled-open bar and an 80s DJ, and I flitted around that place in my Max Mayfield costume like some sort of extrovert as people questioned whether I was Britney Spears or Raggedy Ann (foreshadowing the next day, when I would be Raggedy AF). I visited tables and plopped onto friends’ laps and asked inappropriate questions as though I were some sort of psycho who gets energy from social situations, who actually enjoys talking to other people. I guess this is what three years of sporadic lockdown and perpetual panic does to an introvert?

When I tell you it wore me out…I am still exhausted from every part of it. The effort leading into it, the fine motor skills demanded by the decor setup, the suboptimal liver function afterward…it was a journey. A journey that I enjoyed (mostly) and that I’m glad is now over. “I’m just so tired,” I moaned over Voxer and to anyone in person who would listen, exchanging hangover stories and night-of in-jokes and recovery comparisons.

This form of exhaustion that I–in my recovered introversion-founded analysis–associate most readily with my age is, I think, deeper than that while certainly including it. My body is quicker to tell me these days what I already know: what is good for me, and what is not. I can no longer sleep through an early-morning headache, and hair-of-the-dog college efforts are frowned upon at 9am on the kids’ soccer field. But there’s also a nagging question further down, beneath the quips about advancing years and too many drinks:

Are we ready for this?

Because I don’t know if I am. I don’t know if the events (and non-events) of the past two years have been adequately processed–actually, I know they haven’t been. In Bittersweet, Susan Cain writes about “disenfranchised griefs” and, while I know it’s not fun party talk, I know there’s something to the idea (truth) that the pain we haven’t sat with, the difficulties we haven’t faced, don’t just go away, they simply find another place to live and pop up there. As they say, our bodies tell the story, and mine is exhausted. Overwhelmingly, achingly, existentially exhausted.

I go on a run anyway, just to prove I can. I book another show at the Opera House because I can’t miss that one. The sun comes out, radiantly, and a friend and I discuss local springtime happy hours, and I wonder if I actually know what’s good for me and what’s not. Yes, and no. And as I search for a photo to add to this post, I find one TK took of a group of cockatoos yesterday on our walk with the dog, which was exhausting and from which we came home and fell on the couch together, his memory of that walk more beautiful than mine and not less accurate and, now, something I can just see, in a moment of stillness within the exhaustion, like he did.