I was going to write to you about something quite different. I had a plan, a list, ideas that were organized around a theme and that fit into a rhythm, which was already running ahead of a thousand trains, but here I slipped and am fallen. Somewhere in the middle of February, the viruses entered one by one my house full of children and undid, with a vigor and a regularity that one would have thought choreographed, all possible plans, transforming any of my attempts at accomplishment into opportunities to muscle my area of renunciation.
Between the gastroenteritis, the emergency, the COVID and the electrolyte drinks, I lost my spring, the one that serves to restore the necessary momentum through the “things to do”, and I have been looking for it since under the tons of laundry to fold, e-mails that need to be answered and the hours passing by on my horizontality. Since then, I’ve been stranded inside, even when I’m standing, talking, laughing, working. This is how I have the impression of going through my month of March, which, according to my diary, should be so full of great advances in the fields of the infinitely renewable conquest of doing.
We believe that we escape it, the madness of modernity, that we stand next to those who produce cortisol all day long, that we are not so tired, no, that it is only a period, then, we slip, we fall and only then do we realize the number of wagons that were following us.
I could have not written my column, because I have this chance that a lot of people don’t have, that of saying “I’m tired” and being told “rest up”; that chance that makes many adults want to cry who didn’t know they were so bad, until someone was a little too soft on them. I could have not written my column, I could lie down again on the divan of nothing, my hand lost in the hair of Stella, the faithful German shepherd who will force me out of the house.
I could have put myself in “quest for nothing” according to the very beautiful formula that I use in the title of a chapter of the book In the time of hurried thought by Jean-Philippe Pleau that I just bought. I could have given up again, taken seriously what my body was asking of me, like a big girl who has already spent a few mortgages on psychoanalysis, but, like a good child of my century, unable to tolerate lying down for a minute longer. against my culture, I began to dig on the keyboard to try to hear beyond the white noise that fills my head, words that would make sense, that would give me back the impression of belonging to my world and of launch this bridge of significance towards you.
I therefore give you my fatigue in March as a simple admission of my fallible humanity, of this ego which still got carried away in wanting to find its place in the choir of overactivity, the one that all professional circles intone, despite the statistics, the recommendations, the cries of the body and the prescriptions that rain down.
My fatigue is nothing out of the ordinary. It is frighteningly common, depicted in the clinic, on the street, on all our walls and in our trials which we have already spoken about, yes. My fatigue is probably socially constructed, symptomatic of a culture that ignores that it has limits and that draws up on our screens the endless list of everything it is now possible for us to do before we die.
My fatigue is sneaky, still takes me by surprise, disappoints me in myself, tells me how much I still let myself down on the way, when I thought I was immune by the great lesson of serious illness, by everything I believed know about me, my world, its pitfalls. She clings to me in the morning, makes herself beautiful in my bags under my eyes, slips into my fear of failing today, perhaps, or tomorrow, of becoming just that: someone who ‘failed.
She is also angry, rebelling against the resumption, forbidding me to “start the machine again”, to relaunch myself in the world, again forgetting to buy the return ticket.
My fatigue is not fatigue, perhaps because the more I describe it to you, the more it takes on colors that cross the white waves and begin to say very simple things that I had forgotten again. It is perhaps only this reminder to this other time of life, which lodges under the schedules, the hypomanic defenses made normalized, the routines which give the illusion of controlling a little of all this mystery which escapes us.
The more I write to you, the more my fatigue presents itself as my gift for the month of March, my slow thaw, my surprising return on the way home. She makes me a child again, reminding me of those times when I expected nothing of the day but her mere presence, savoring the moment as it came, delivered to my feet, renewed, without my consent, my endorsement, my opinion, my movement, just like that.
The more it is written, the softer my fatigue, rolling down my cheeks like a grace, in fact. It allows me to be slow and inefficient, happy procrastinator of my life, empress of my inaction, transforming my failure into triumph snatched from an injunction which I once again discard.
Moreover, I take up Jean-Philippe’s book which prompts me, as if he knew what I needed: “Personally, I believe that failure is, at the very least, a victory for the audacity, that of someone who has dared something. And if only for that, failure is a huge success! »