The end of school years is often fraught with fatigue, but I seem to perceive this year a certain aggravation in the insistence with which it grips us collectively.
On the butt, Burned, Burnout…Books and hundreds of pages of fatigue in the aisle bestsellers in the last few months. We talk about fatigue on television, on our networks and in our podcasts. To our friends, our colleagues and our therapists. Our fatigue no longer has anything singular or fleeting. It is collective and persistent.
Our fatigue has become so great and so vast that we can no longer contain it within the contours of a single word. It is growing and multidimensional. We must now target it with more precision to be able to capture it. So, we divide and compartmentalize our exhaustion, as if to make ourselves believe that we will be able to better carry the load.
Mental, parental, neurological, activist, teacher, domestic fatigue. Nursing, seasonal, decision-making, institutional and sensory fatigue.
Mental fatigue like a vice that tightens on our skulls, militant fatigue like a knocked out breath or a fist in the back, decision-making fatigue like a dizziness that confuses us or sensory fatigue like broken skin.
It’s up to us to list those that inhabit us.
We were taught that naming anchors points in a conversation. That it allows you to communicate more clearly, more effectively. However, we also suffer from social and communication fatigue.
Even though we name everything more and more accurately, our points of reference get mixed up. Our fatigues add up relentlessly, multiply, intermingle and end up being linked. This insidious weaving of all our fatigue leads to their potentiation and, despite ourselves, ends up overcoming all of what we embody. We empty ourselves and we fade away.
Our fatigue spreads in our bodies, between them and through them, like invasive plants. The performance culture is their fertilizer. We sow them everywhere, throughout our territories, regardless of borders.
Our fatigue is identity
I am tired as a woman, as a mother, as a friend, as a daughter, as a lover, as a citizen. Exhausted, in each of my cells. When I talk about it to those around me, they respond with looks of solidarity and… tiredness. Too busy or exhausted to help. Our collective fatigue is matched only by our feeling of inadequacy.
In my office, I am also told of these feelings of despondency and overwork. The tense bodies that visit me tell me the full weight of the demands they carry. The pressure to perform even extends to our gender roles, no matter which one we identify with.
An identity fatigue like a knot in the hollow of the pelvis.
Our bodies tense for our protection. Muscular tensions like so many bulwarks against the world. Our bodies straining to preserve what’s left of us, in a last-ditch attempt to prevent crushing. Our muscles aching from the pounding of a demand for performance that hits us everywhere we go. In all that we are.
In the origins of the word fatigue, we find words like crack and cleft. So we wouldn’t just get tired. We would fall into it, totally. And our fatigue is multiple and exponential. They become an abyss from which it is increasingly difficult to extricate oneself. And by struggling to get out, we are only digging into the bottom.
Our fatigue is multigenerational
Our children are tired too. They are anxious, inattentive. They are diagnosed and medicated. In our alternative schools, where we thought we would protect them from pressure to perform academically, exhaustion catches up with them despite everything. Their fatigue is systemic. Contagious. It crawls from the exhausted bodies of their parents, their teachers and their educators. From the crumbling structures of the buildings that house them and the ill-adapted manners of a completely worn out system.
Even the strongest beams eventually crack when subjected to too great a load. They get tired too. In physics, we designate the tension exerted on a material by the word stress. A material can only withstand a certain amount of load before reaching its fracture point. Beyond this limit, there will be rupture or deformation.
We are creatures made of sentient materials. Fatigue fractures and deforms us. What will remain of our bodies if, collectively, we do not review our demands?
What will it take for us, collectively, to finally give ourselves a little rest? A chance to get back into shape?