Soul-level tired

The tired that sleep can't fix

There I was, running along the lake road near my parents’ house in Canada. The sun was shining, the ospreys were flying overhead, and I could smell the pine trees all around me. That run is one of my favourite things. It makes me feel so alive. After years of living abroad, those sights and smells are home.

Running has always been a bit meditative for me. My thoughts flow freely, and without ever trying to, I work things out while my feet are moving. That day started exactly like that. And then, somewhere along the lake, it hit me.

The loneliness. The uncertainty. And a tiredness I didn’t have a name for yet.

I started crying. Bawling my eyes out, actually.

I didn’t stop running. I just cried harder with every foot that hit the pavement.

If a car had driven past right then, I swear it would have screeched to a halt. They’d have thought I was hurt, or that something had come out of the woods after me. I was fine. I was just finally letting something out that had been in there a long time.

Some of it was ordinary exhaustion, the kind sleep can fix. But most of it wasn’t.

I’ve come to call it soul-level tired: the kind that comes from spending too long living out of step with what you actually want and need.

Chris had been retrenched from his job with South African Airways during Covid and was deep in a depression that wouldn’t lift. I was working my ass off, not just for money but to hold everything together and drag us both toward some kind of future.

Underneath all of it, I’d also started to feel like the work I was doing wasn’t right for me anymore. But I felt stuck. It was the income we needed, at a time when so many people were struggling in the aftermath of Covid.

I get an image of an octopus carrying a heavy dumbbell on every limb, trying desperately to move forward while being weighed down from every direction. That was me.

I’m a get shit done kind of girl. I find the solution and I move things forward, and I’ve always been proud of that. What I didn’t do, for longer than I’d like to admit, was pause to consider myself, or what any of it was actually costing me.

I would just jump on board a moving train and start directing it to where everyone else wanted it to go, without ever asking myself whether that was somewhere I actually wanted or needed to go.

I think I’d been switched off for a long time without noticing. On autopilot, just doing what needed to be done.

Being out in nature has always made me feel more connected to myself and to everything around me. That’s part of why I love that run so much.

I think that’s exactly what happened that day. I reconnected to myself and it opened up what had been building inside me. And it all just came rushing out like a waterfall in the mountains after a storm.

I was soul-level tired. And I honestly didn’t know how much longer I could go on feeling that way.

You can’t force someone out of depression. I’ve been in that misty grey world myself, so I know exactly what it’s like. What I could do was connect with my own wants and needs, and start figuring out what it would take to look after them.

I still had bills to pay and a job to show up for. That didn’t change. What changed was that I slowly started taking steps towards myself.

While I was still in Canada, I found a place for us to rent in Spain, where we were about to move. It was a place that felt right for me. Lots of space, light, and views. A happy, inspiring kind of energy.

And I started thinking properly about the kind of work I wanted to move into next. I began reaching out to people. Looking at what might be possible. None of it fixed anything overnight. But it gave me a hand back on the wheel of my own life, while I kept doing the job I already had.

I’ve felt that soul-level tired more than once since. In relationships where I lost track of myself while showing up for everyone else. In jobs I stayed in long after I already knew they weren’t right anymore. In stretches of my life where I was living for everyone else instead of myself.

Here’s what I know now. It doesn’t just lift on its own. You have to start moving toward what’s actually true for you. One choice at a time. The same way you’d run a road you’ve known your whole life. One foot, then the next, until you look up and you’re somewhere completely different from where you started.

If you’re feeling it right now, the tired that sleep doesn’t fix, I wonder what’s actually true for you underneath it.