There are people who fall apart in front of everyone, and there are people who fall apart in private and show up the next morning as if nothing happened. If you are the second kind, this is for you. You finally exhale when the lights go out. That is when the day stops requiring anything from you, and the face you have been holding up all day gets put down for a few hours. Then morning comes, and you pull yourself together and go out there again, still carrying whatever it was.
What the quiet carrying costs
Carrying pain quietly looks like strength from the outside, and honestly, it takes a lot of it. But it is not free. The energy that masking takes is energy you were not given back. You spend it at work, on friends, on everyone who needs you to be the stable one. You keep giving to a world that gives you so little back, and after enough months of that, even small things start to feel heavy.
There is a fear underneath it too, and I have heard it described the same way by many people. You are terrified of the future, and you are terrified of what happens if you stop performing okay. So the performance continues, and the worse you feel, the better the performance has to be. That loop is one of the loneliest experiences there is, because the better you are at smiling through it, the less anyone thinks to ask.
All you ever wanted was to be noticed
When I wrote this short, the line that mattered most was the last one. All you have ever wanted is for someone to finally notice your tired heart. Not to fix you, and not to hand you advice. Just to see that you are tired, that you have been carrying something, and to say so out loud.
If nobody has done that lately, I am saying it here. The fact that you are exhausted does not mean you are weak, and the fact that you hide it well does not mean it is not real. Pain does not become less painful because it is well managed. The people who carry things quietly are usually the ones who most need one honest conversation, and the ones most practiced at avoiding it.
Watch When Your Heart Breaks but You Still Smile
I made this short for late at night, for a walk, or for the ten minutes after you get home and before you have to be anything for anyone again. If it said something you have not been able to say, send it to the person in your life who carries things quietly. They may not bring it up themselves. That has always been the trouble with tired hearts.
For a longer companion to this kind of quiet exhaustion, The REAL Matrix Reloaded audiobook goes into how we got here and how to start putting the weight down.
