I’m Too Tired to Try

A Narrative Shift. Or...

This is a Narrative Shift. One limiting belief, one reframe, one writing practice to move you through it.

On the heels of my post Drowning in Doing? Become a Sacred Slacker, I want to take a slightly different turn. Not toward shame, guilt, or hustle (a bro word if there ever was one). But toward the truth, which is, as much as we’d like to deny it, sometimes we need to snap out of it, suck it up, and hunt down the energy we need to get the shit done. Because, sometimes, if the shit don’t get done, you’ll end up in a worse place than you were before all you needed to do was get the shit done.

But the problem is, if you’re peri-menopausal, sometimes you feel like your energy’s been spirited away by a trickster (Not funny, trickster! We keep you around to supply us with fun!) Or maybe, like so many of us, you’ve just spent too many years running yourself into the ground looking after the entire world, or, like Suzanna Quintana told me, you just have yourself hooked up to the world’s IV.

Most advice about this treats your energy like a jar of colorful M&Ms. You get issued a full jar every morning. You can choose to hoard the M&Ms, give some away to other people you like (but not the red ones), say no to some people who beg for your M&Ms, and if you run out of M&Ms by two that afternoon, well, you should have been more responsible with your M&Ms. This makes our lives a narrative about scarcity and self-control, and I don’t really believe in either.

So what does story tell us?

Nobody ever asks how much energy the heroine of your favourite story has. What a reader might notice, is two much smaller things. What does your favourite character keep doing that takes her backward. And what does she do in the five minutes before the hard part that takes her forward.

Bridget Jones is the patron saint of going backwards. She weighs herself, despairs, drinks, and goes back to Daniel Cleaver to get the kind of abuse she feels she deserves. Then our dear Bridget writes it all down in a diary (you know that tone of cheerful self-loathing), and then she does the whole circuit again.

Our backward steps might be less cinematic but they cost us just as much. Mine, for years, was that if I didn’t do it, nobody would, or it wouldn’t get done right, which sent me back to people pleasing every single week, and then I’d be tired, and then being tired proved I was the only one carrying it. The lie we tell ourselves feeds the loop, then the loop proves the lie, and we’re on a carousel of self-loathing. If your backward step is “I’m too tired to try,” that’s the one that keeps you from finding out whether you’re actually too tired to try.

But what about the forward steps?

Katniss, before every courageous step she takes, completes a tiny ritual. She touches the mockingjay pin. She takes Peeta’s hand. She thinks about Rue’s song. None of that makes a true impact. Not one of those gestures makes her faster or a better shot. What they do is remind her who she is and what she’s there for, which helps her take that forward step.

See the difference between Bridget and Katniss? Bridget goes backward because of what she believes about herself. She’s in a loop. Katniss does forward because of what she tells herself. She’s got a ritual.

Which means the question isn’t how do I get more energy. It’s which of my repeated loops are draining me, and which rituals fuel me, and roughly how many of each am I running? Inputs and outputs. Banking for energy.

You probably know some of the answers. There’s the regular stressful phone call that costs you the rest of the evening, or the twenty minutes with the scented candle and your favourite pen when everything becomes possible. I’m about to ask you to write the rest of them down in one place and look at them together.

And if none of that works? Grab some salt and vinegar potato chips, plug in your heated throw blanket, and rage-scream into a pillow for ten minutes. That’s a ritual too.

Your energy levels aren’t a mystery, and you’re not too broken or lazy to get moving. You’re not. You’re a damn heroine on a long, twisty, gorgeous quest, and this isn’t a burnout memoir, it’s a Heroine’s Adventure.

Narrative Shift

Limiting belief:
I’m too tired to try.

Empowering narrative:
I can find out where my energy actually goes, and get some of it back.

Reflection Prompts

What am I putting up with (or repeatedly doing) that I’ve never once questioned?

When was I last properly awake?

Who taught me that being tired means I haven’t earned my rest yet?

Reinvention Steps

Map it. Two columns, one week. Where are my loops. Where are my rituals.

Find the loop. Pick the thing on the “took it” side you do most often, and ask what you’d have to believe for that to make sense. Write that sentence down and pick an argument with it.

Build one ritual. Not a routine, a ritual. Tea before you write. One candle. A song. The point isn’t the tea. The point is teaching yourself something is about to start.

Worksheet Link:

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