I’m 76 now, and it’s 2 AM. My old bones ache even when I’ve done nothing all day but read. My husband used to say I was a creature of habit. He’d be right. I divorced him at 52, you know. Rebuilt. Started over. That was… something. Friends vanished. Poof. Like I’d never existed. But I did it. I built a life. I *always* did. That’s probably why this feeling now… it feels like betrayal. From myself. Here’s the thing about being a social worker for forty-odd years: you learn to compartmentalize. You learn to listen. You learn to *see* the fatigue in other people. The existential kind. The kind that sleep doesn’t touch. And for a long time, I thought I was immune. Or, perhaps, just better at masking it. It’s part of the job, isn’t it? To project competence. To be the calm in their storm. But then, about twenty-five years ago, it started creeping in. Insidious. A slow seep. Not acute exhaustion, like when you pull an all-nighter for a crisis intervention. No. This was… a background hum. A low-grade hum that just never stopped. I’d sleep eight, sometimes nine hours. Deep sleep, I think. No tossing. No turning. My dreams were usually pleasant, if I remembered them at all. But I’d wake up, and the first thought would be, “Oh. This again.” The heaviness. The leaden feeling in my limbs. My brain felt like it was coated in treacle. I remember one Tuesday morning – I was 47 then – I had a particularly difficult client, a young woman, maybe 22, grappling with… well, a whole constellation of stressors. Poverty, domestic instability, you name it. She was crying, really *heaving* sobs, and she looked at me with these big, wet eyes and said, “I just feel so tired, Ms. Peterson. Like I can’t even breathe sometimes.” And I nodded. I gave her the appropriate, empathetic response. “I understand,” I said. “That sounds incredibly difficult.” But in my head, a little voice, a particularly mean one, whispered, *You have no idea, sweetie. Not the way I do.* Is that awful? To feel competitive with someone’s despair? Probably. The fatigue started to affect the quality of my work. Not catastrophically, not at first. Just small things. I’d forget a minor detail about a client’s history. Misplace a file. My notes became less comprehensive. My mind would wander during sessions. I’d be sitting there, nodding, making eye contact, but internally, I’d be thinking about… the dusty light coming through the blinds, or the faint smell of coffee from the office next door, or whether I had enough energy to cook dinner or if it would be another frozen meal. It was a subtle disengagement, a slow erosion of my focused presence. My former husband called it "cognitive attrition" after our divorce — always so clinical. But I think he just missed the old me. It was never *so* bad that anyone noticed. I was too good at my job. Too professional. I’d perfected the art of the active listening face. But inside, I was screaming. Not in a dramatic, movie-scene way. More like a slow, silent scream that only I could hear. Like a pressure building behind my eyes, always there. Always. And that was before the divorce, before rebuilding everything from scratch at 50, when the real deep-down kind of bone weariness really started. I tried everything. Vitamins. More exercise, less exercise. Meditation. Talking to colleagues – discreetly, of course, because you can’t show weakness. Never weakness. Is that a social worker thing, or just an old woman thing? A divorcee thing? I’m not sure. No one had answers. “It’s stress,” they’d say. “It’s your age.” My age? At 47? I laughed. A brittle sound, I imagine. And now, here I am, 76. The fatigue is still here. It’s… a part of me now. Like a phantom limb, but instead of missing, it’s just perpetually heavy. I look back at that 47-year-old me, that social worker trying to help others while battling her own invisible enemy, and I want to tell her… what? That it doesn’t get better? That it becomes a constant companion? That you just learn to live with it? I suppose that’s the hard-won perspective you get when you’ve lived this long. You just… live. Even when you’re dead tired. So yeah. That’s my confession. I spent decades trying to alleviate suffering, and I couldn’t even fix my own. It’s not depression, I don’t think. I’ve seen depression. I’ve treated it. This is… something else. Something slower. More fundamental. Maybe it’s just entropy. The universe winding down, starting with me. A social worker, perpetually tired, looking out at a world that never stops needing her, even when she can barely lift her teacup. It’s a joke, I suppose. A cosmic one.