A Cartography of Tiredness

I am tired. I cannot understand, cannot distinguish what kind of tiredness this is.

Yes, I believe there are many types of tiredness. I can only think this way because I have felt, lived, and discovered different ways of being tired. Perhaps tiredness isn’t merely a depletion but a different mode of existence—a temporary shift in how we inhabit our bodies and minds, perceive time, and relate to others.

There is tiredness that brings sleep. There is also the kind that prevents us from sleeping.

There is tiredness caused by all we have accomplished. There is also that which comes from what remains to be done.

There are times when the body aches from exhaustion, each movement an exercise in negotiation with gravity. Other times, we are so tired we cannot stay still—as though motion itself becomes a temporary shelter from collapse.

Some grow tired from doing nothing. Others get tired from having nothing to do.

There is tiredness that distances us from everything, from everyone. Yet there is also intimacy that, without fatigue, would never form; barriers dissolved when we lack energy to maintain our usual defenses, or the accommodation that gets installed by the lack of energy for rebellion.

We recognize each other’s exhaustion in subtle signs—the slight delay in response, the particular way shoulders curve, the specific quality of silence, the unexpected and unnecessary irritated reply. In this recognition lives a wordless solidarity, a shared territory of vulnerability or hostility.

I was tired of not writing anything, of thinking someone might be tired of not reading me. Creative drought carries its own distinct exhaustion.

While writing, I rested. Now, despite being tired—perhaps because of being tired in this particular way—I can find peace.

In mapping these territories of tiredness, perhaps we discover not just personal geography but a form of resistance against a culture that demands perpetual vigor. To name our exhaustion, to attend to its variations, is to reclaim our embodied experience from systems that would prefer we ignore it—until we collapse.

This meditation on the varieties of fatigue was originally written in Portuguese as “Cansaço” in May of 2014. The piece explores exhaustion not merely as a state to overcome but as a complex human experience worthy of contemplative attention—how it manifests differently in body and mind, how it both connects and separates us, and how certain forms of tiredness can only be addressed through paradoxical action rather than simple rest.