Yes, you ARE this tired.
On the importance of validating our own experience–because no one else ever fucking did.
“Why do I feel so tired?”
“I didn’t do anything that would justify feeling so tired.”
“I shouldn’t be this tired.”
Do you ever notice yourself arguing with your own perceptions of how you’re feeling? It’s such a weird thing, and I’m certain we all do it: your body is very clearly communicating what it’s experiencing and you’re like, Hmmmm I don’t think that’s it.
If anyone were to ask me (they haven’t, so I have to ask myself), “Fanny, what do you think is the root cause of everything that’s wrong in Western society these days?” my answer would be that we cannot sit with our own grief (because trauma) and because we can’t sit with our own grief, other people’s pain has to remain invisible to us, because if we were able to see it, it would trigger our own grief, our own pain, our own vulnerability, and that’s what we have to avoid at all costs.
I can’t see you, because I have never been seen.
If you’re reading this newsletter, there’s a 98% chance that you experience the opposite: that ONLY other people’s pain is real to you, but you struggle to witness and validate your own. You and I are in the “I can’t possibly be tired” camp together. And if this is true, I’d bet good money that you grew up surrounded with the people who can’t be with their own pain, and who therefore would argue you out of your own. Those are the people whose voice you hear in your head when you try to convince yourself you’re not tired when you are visibly, incontrovertibly, bone-fucking-tired.
I’ve been on this bandwagon for a while, as evidenced by the above, which I posted on Insta at the end of 2018, which I believe was approximately a million years ago. (I feel strongly that my math is correct there.) All of those many years ago, I wrote:
Tired is holy wisdom. Tired is sacred. Tired is a message from Source that you need to tend to self-care.
It’s been a belief and a value of mine for a long, long time that the body doesn’t lie. That if we pay attention, our body is telling us the truth not only about what’s happening, but about what it needs, about the kind of care the body is longing to receive. Furthermore, I have long believed that our bodies, if and when they receive the care they need, are perfectly equipped to bring our creative dreams and desires to life. That our bodies are the perfectly matched vessels for our souls.1
Now–believing something is not at all the same thing as embodying something. It’s not the same thing as knowing something in our bones, and living & making choices from that knowing. The process of learning to embody & make choices from our values is a long and slow one. And, more often than not, we’ll go through multiple seasons of learning the same thing, over and over, each time at a new, slighter deeper level.
Having recently discovered that I am Autistic, I am moving through a new layer of witnessing & validating my own experience, my own exhaustion. Through the lens of Autism, I can see my lived experience, the reality of living in my body, with brand-new clarity and focus.
I can see how much everyday life drains me: things that neurotypical people might take for granted, things that in my earlier days as a masked Autistic I also would’ve taken for granted. How much leaving the house and interacting with the vast, crowded, bright, loud, STIMULATING world overwhelms and exhausts me. How much labor I expend in constantly monitoring my level of stimulation, and calibrating the sensory input I’m taking in, so as to avoid a meltdown. How many spoons it takes for me to do basic stuff like showering, doing the dishes or laundry. How laborious it is to decide what to eat, make food, and eat food, not just every day but multiple times a day; how rarely I am fully satiated as a result of this, and how difficult it is to exist and function in a body that isn’t properly fueled.2
There’s something about having a name for what I’m experiencing that makes the validating easier, yes–and, also, having this new level of clarity means that I am feeling layers of tired that I just have never felt before.
And so, as I am having to learn a new level of skill around witnessing & validating, I am also coming up hard against the ways in which my inner experience, the experience of my body, hasn’t been seen, named, valued, and/or validated by my early care environments. I can see with renewed clarity that the near-constant gaslighting of “Am I really this tired?” is the direct legacy of having parents who would not, could not make space for their own exhaustion, their own pain, their own grief, and so could not make space for their child’s.
Children need a basic amount of witnessing, validating, and mirroring from their caregivers to learn that it means to be in a body, to learn how to listen to the information we get from our bodies and how to care for them. But children are constantly told to ignore their bodies’ signals; are not often conferred body autonomy; and are taught from an early age that their subjective lived experience matters less than what their caregivers and teachers want them to be and do. And so, because they’re completely dependent on their caregivers for survival, children learn to ignore and disavow the language of their bodies so as to not lose the belonging their lives depend on.
(Here’s a great, short reel from my fave trauma dude, Gabor Maté, that deftly explains this process.)
As an undiagnosed Autistic child, I learned to mask my constant state of inner overwhelm so that I could fit in the mold of what a good kid is and acts like. And I did a brilliant job of it: I was precocious, smart, a “pleasure to have in class.” I was praised for being mature and gifted, and so I made sure I behaved that way, at tremendous cost to my health and sense of self.
Without anyone to witness and validate my inner experience, and when being punished and judged when my mask cracked and my inner distress seeped through, I learned to mistrust my body, its cues and its language. I learned to argue with my body when she told me that it was too much, that I was too tired or overwhelmed, that I needed to retreat. I learned to bypass and override my own limits and boundaries.
The toxicity & harm of being gaslit about our own lived experience of our own bodies is something that happens to most children, not just neurodivergent ones. This is a major cause of burnout later in life, because we’ve learned to consistently blow past out limits in order to secure our belonging and survival. For me as a late-diagnosed Autistic person, it’s also led to the pervasive, insidious belief that I won’t be able to do any of the things my heart longs to do, like write a book or play the drums or go for hikes, because a lifetime of blowing past my limits and crashing & burning, and being alone with that particular pain, has taught my nervous system to fear taking on almost any activity that is outside the small, safe realm of ordinary tasks.
In my trauma repair work, I talk about the need to become a safe caregiver to ourselves. Our nervous system learns by experience, and the only way to repair the harm and rupture in our relationship with our bodies as a result of not having our inner experience, including our pain and our tiredness, witnessed, validated, and honored by our caregivers is to offer ourselves that curiosity and kindness that we were longing to receive as children and never got. When, as our own safe caregivers, we regularly meet our body’s cues and signals with curiosity instead of condemnation, with kindness instead of pressure, with validation instead of ridicule, our body slowly learns to feel safe with us.
When our body feels seen, it feels safe. When our body feels safe, it’s more willing to make new choices, to try new things, to explore and play and experiment.
So I am learning at a new, deeper level to witness and validate my own experience, my own tiredness. I am slowly unraveling a lifetime pattern of invalidating my own experience, of pushing past my limits and causing myself harm because that’s the only way I knew to secure belonging in a neurotypical world. I am learning to say to myself:
No, really, I am this tired even if I don’t think I did anything that warrants being this tired.
No, really, I am this tired, even if it doesn’t make rational sense.
No, really, I am this tired even if no one ever believed me that I was.⠀⠀
No, I really, I am this tired even though there are more things I want to do.⠀
Your body never lies to you. The lie has always been that you can’t trust your body when it tells you that it’s tired. The lie has always been that you’re somehow faking it. The lie has always been that being in pain, being tired, being overwhelmed is anything but the most natural, the most human thing, and deserving of anything but care and kindness.
There was never anything wrong with my body. What was wrong was trying to fit into a neurotypical mold and a neurotypical world as an Autistic bodymind. I’ll never know the kind of life I could’ve had if my parents had been able to see my struggle, had been curious about my inner life, if the world around me had been set up in such a way to accommodate my needs. The grief of that question is likely something I’ll be tending to for the rest of my days. But it’s not too late for me to create a life of curiosity, compassion, and kindness for my body. It’s not too late for my body to know what it’s like to have a safe caregiver. It’s not too late for our bodies to finally rest in the safety of being seen.
🌈 I’m in a big Red Hot Chili Peppers mood these days and listening to these two songs a lot a lot.
🌈 This video makes my music nerd Autistic brain light up like a pinball machine.
🌈 Stolen Youth is probably the best & worst cult documentary I’ve watched (and I watch them all): it’s incredibly well done and it’s very, very hard to watch. Highly recommend, but proceed with caution, especially if you’re an abuse survivor.
🌈 Currently re-ready Melissa Febos’ Body Work, which is just so damn good, as is all of her writing. This is a recommendation for literally any and all of her works.
🌈 Loving this sweet plant magic deck.
🌈 What’s blowing my newly-diagnosed Autistic mind this week: this reel, this reel, this post (very rude), this post, and this post.
I realize that this belief stems from a certain amount of able-bodied privilege; I do not claim to speak here for the multiple realities of folks with disabilities and/or chronic or autoimmune illness, or who face more state-based violence that limits to their body autonomy than I do.
My sharing these struggles is not an invitation for advice or solutions, most especially not anything related to diet, unless you yourself are Autistic or AuDHD and want to share what you’ve found that works.
Thanks Fanny for sharing your truth & being a mirror for reflection. At least for me.
Yes, I argue with myself about my perception of many things. In retirement, I’m learning to honor my body wanting to sleep.
This morning, I realized again for the zillionth time, I want to cover up anger. I learned how to stuff my opinions. I wanted to tell the cashier in all my glorified frustration with all the “healthy” “hormones & vitamins” added to our foods is killing us. So I did. I know this person has no power, yet I feel compelled. It came out as a frustration yet with kindness. Kinda surprised myself.
May we all continue swirling in the universal energy of love & live our best lives. 💞💞💞
This struck such a chord with me!
Especially “the pervasive, insidious belief that I won’t be able to do any of the things my heart longs to do...because a lifetime of blowing past my limits and crashing & burning, and being alone with that particular pain, has taught my nervous system to fear taking on almost any activity that is outside the small, safe realm of ordinary tasks.”
I experienced anxiety at a young age (9-10) and was lucky enough to have access to publicly-funded therapy. I was especially lucky that it included art therapy. That said, I can look back now and see how I was so eager to be “normal”, not a “problem”, that I conditioned myself to fit into those personas, belong past my own self/Self. Now, at 42, it’s a lifetime of false patterning to find my way back to a truer sense of safety.