The Tide and the Undertow

I wrote about fatigue before. I called it a wave. That was only part of it.

The wave is the part that crashes. It builds, it hits, it pulls me under. Caffeine and music and cold water are my surfboard. Sometimes they hold. Sometimes the wave flings me off anyway. All of that is real.

But a wave has a calm between it and the next one. A wave recedes. A wave lets you catch your breath on the surface before the next one comes.

My fatigue doesn’t do that.

There is a tide underneath the waves. It never leaves. It is always pulling, even on the days that look calm from the outside. I can be sitting still, doing nothing, and the tide is still there, dragging at me. It doesn’t announce itself. It just is.

The tide is the reason rest doesn’t fix me. People tell me to rest and I do, and the tide is still there when I open my eyes. It was there before I lay down. It will be there after. Rest doesn’t stop the tide. It only stops the moving.

And then there is the undertow.

The undertow is the part that surprises me. It is the current I can’t see from the surface. I think I’m doing fine. I get up to fix my sheets, a small thing, and the undertow grabs me and pulls me down before I know it’s there. One minute I’m okay. The next I have to lie down.

The tiredness is hard. The not knowing is harder.

If it were only the tide, I could plan around it. I’d know the water is always there and I’d budget for it. If it were only the undertow, I’d at least get calm stretches in between. But I get both. The constant pull and the sudden grab, layered on top of each other.

So I’m never not tired. And I’m never safe from being suddenly more tired.

The wave was a good picture. It’s what people see when the fatigue gets dramatic. The tide and the undertow are what I live with every day, even when the surface looks still.