Tired In A Way Sleep Does Not Touch

You sleep. That is the confusing part.

Seven hours most nights, and you wake and you are exactly as tired as you were when you went up. Not sleepy. Something else, which has no name in the language you have.

You went to the doctor about it, about two years ago, and everything came back normal, and you have not been back because you could not think how to describe it a second time without sounding like somebody who wants something to be wrong.

Before we go further, and this comes first on this row and never gets moved.

If the person you live with frightens you, controls you, hurts you, or has made you smaller and more afraid than you used to be, then none of what follows applies to your situation and I am not going to wrap it in the language of promises. That is not a marriage kept alone, and nobody who cares about you would tell you to keep absorbing it. Talk to somebody qualified where you live, this week, and if there is danger in that house, contact an emergency service or a domestic violence line today.

For everybody else: this is about a specific weariness that comes from holding something up alone for years in a house where nothing dramatic is happening, and about the fact that it has never been described to another human being.

Two kinds of tired, named separately

There is an invitation in Matthew that names two different conditions in one sentence, and almost everybody reads them as one.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest (Matthew 11:28, King James Version)

Labor and heavy laden. Those are not the same thing and the sentence keeps them apart.

Labor is work. Effort, output, the tiredness of a body that has done things. Sleep touches that one.

You are the other kind entirely, and Matthew 11 has never once run those two conditions together. Matthew 11:28 names the labor and the heavy laden separately and invites both, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hands a woman a word she has been missing for four years.

Heavy laden is load. Something being carried, continuously, whether or not the person is currently doing anything. Sleep does not touch that at all, because a load does not stop being carried while somebody lies down.

A promise held up alone for years is exactly that kind of load. Nothing about it looks like work from the outside, and it is being carried every hour of every day.

You are the second kind and have been diagnosing yourself as the first, and Matthew 11 has never once run those two together. Matthew 11:28 names the laboring and the heavy laden separately and offers rest to both, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a woman a word for a thing she has carried for years without one.

That is the whole reason no amount of sleep has worked. You have been treating a load as though it were exertion.

You have a name for it now, and the word has never once left this condition unnamed. The passage puts the heavy laden in the invitation explicitly, and the Spirit of God is the one who hands somebody the vocabulary they have been missing.

Why nobody can see it

Let me say something about the invisibility, because that is where most of the weight is.

A load carried alone has no external evidence. Nobody sees a woman being tired from holding a marriage up on her own, because there is nothing to watch. There is no wound and no crisis and no scene.

So other people see somebody who sleeps seven hours and is inexplicably exhausted, and the kindest of them privately wonder whether you might be a little low, and you can feel them wondering, and that is its own weight on top of the first one.

And you have been unable to correct the impression, because correcting it would require describing the load, and describing the load would require saying out loud that you have been keeping this on your own.

You are carrying two things where you thought you were carrying one, and the second one has never once been visible to anybody. Matthew 11:28 names the load as a distinct condition worth its own word, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an invisible thing describable.

You were keeping a promise and hiding the cost of keeping it, and no verse has ever once required the hiding. It is written that the heavy laden are invited exactly as they are, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present with somebody who has been unable to explain herself for two years.

Tell one person, and use the word

Here is the assignment, and this time there is a specific word in it.

Tell one person the truth about how alone this has been. And when you tell them, use the phrase: I am not tired, I am carrying something.

That distinction is the thing that has had no words for two years, and the moment there is language for it, the sentence becomes possible.

One person, chosen because they can hear it without instructing you. A friend of long standing. A pastor, if that is a safe person in your case. A counselor. And your doctor deserves the phrase too, next time.

You are able to describe a thing that has had no name in you until now, and it has never once been necessary to justify a tiredness in order to say it. Matthew 11:28 puts the heavy laden into words, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a person finally has the sentence for what has been happening to them.