Why isn’t it ok to be tired anymore?

Agnes has zero trouble snoozing.

But does anyone else feel like “tired” is an impermissible feeling these days?

Every single Instagram post, ad, article, etc reads something like… “find the younger you,” “reverse your aging,” “return to the energy you had in your 20s,” or actually “RETURN to the person you were in your 20s.”

And God forbid if someone else tells me another way to “get more protein,” I’m going to lose my mind. “High protein” is the “low fat” of the 80s and 90s and we saw how that turned out–now fats are our friends again. But seriously…did any of you have stock in a cottage cheese company 5 years ago and if the answer is yes, how is your new yacht treating you? Cottage cheese is having its moment and I did not see that coming.

I’m 53. I work out like they tell me to with “heavy weights,” I take the supplements, I walk for “zone 2 cardio,” blah blah blah blah.

I rarely drink alcohol anymore, I don’t smoke any one of the 50 stupid ways to smoke that are available nowadays and I eat pretty “clean.”

Despite my best efforts, I sleep for crap and I’ll keep trying to work on that because I know its “the key” to health but for Pete’s sake I.have.tried.everything.

I see you typing, Yes, I’ve tried that. But also…send it anyway, I likely want to hear from you, 🙂

And I’ve had experts tell me that my sleep doesn’t actually look that bad when they look at my sleep tracker graphs so maybe I’m being picky but I want that sleep from my teen years back. Where I put my head on a pillow and I woke up 12 hours later with zero memory of ever waking in between. In fact, the only reason I woke up was because I had that dream where you have to pee really badly and you spot a toilet but it’s at the top of a super long staircase and then your legs weirdly feel like they have 100 pound weights attached to them but they finally let you climb the 100 stairs to get to the toilet and then you sit down in your dream and you are about to pee but your body doesn’t want you to pee the bed so it forces you awake and you realize its 10am.

Wait…did that only happen to me? Anyway,..

WHY DIDN’T SOMEONE TELL ME TO ENJOY THAT THEN???

They probably did but it’s the same thing as when someone tells you that “The days are long but the years are short” when your kids are tiny and you just can’t imagine it because your days feel like the years will last forever and you will never have a clean house or a shirt without someone else’s bodily fluids on them EVER again.

People do tell us, we just can’t imagine that the present situation isn’t what it will always be.

But what’s funny is that I think we’d likely be happier if we just spent some time accepting where we are. And how we feel.

And sometimes, I’m tired.

Sometimes, my back is stiff and if I’ve done a hard workout or just decided to clean closets too vigorously, my knees can get a little achy.

And I spend a lot of time hating that sometimes I feel tired and sometimes I feel achy.

I don’t think generations before us felt guilty about being tired. I don’t think they felt a 2pm fatigue and started researching new supplements.

I think they sat down in a chair and took a quick nap. Or went to bed a little earlier. Or did nothing and thought to themselves, “I feel a little tired,” without following it with a thought on how to fix it.

Sidenote: You ever have one of those things that you don’t realize everyone does, and then someone is brave enough to say it out loud, and then everyone in the group freaks out because… “SAME” is the only word they can say in the midst of the amazement that they aren’t the only nutty one? One of the most unifying things I have found in women is the following phenomenon. If you are home and you take 5 minutes to sit down, or God forbid, lay down, and turn on some form of trash TV that likely involves women screaming at each other at an expensive resort while they carry $30,000 purses on their arms and have enough lip filler to resemble an anaphylactic event, and you have a snack balancing on your lap, there is only one occurrence that is gauranteed:

Your husband will come home for a completely untimed visit and then, FOR ABSOLUTELY NO REASON AT ALL you will proceed to jump up, hide the snack, turn off the TV and grab a vaccuum,counter spray or a computer to “look busy.”

AND WHY??????

Do we really think they care if we took a minute to rest?

No, its that we’ve convinced ourselves that they will think that ALL we do is rest.

I’ve shared this with my husband, who thinks it’s crazy, and for sure, at this point in my life, I’m less compelled to do the leap-up than in my younger years, but the compulsion is still there; I just fight it and remain in the lounge game more often than not. But he always says the same thing…

“I love to see you rest.”

Have you ever seen this meme…

So I’m thinking that God would also say… “I love to see you rest.” He designed us to sleep–I’m guessing that was intentional since His plan seems pretty thought out in all other aspects, so obviously there was something about sleep that He deemed essential for us. He could have just as easily made us beings who never stopped…but He didn’t; He designed us to rest. That’s pretty freeing if you think about it.

And also, back to those headlines, I mentioned at the beginning of this blog… “return to the person you were in your 20s.”

Ew.

I’m not saying that I don’t hold a lot of GREAT memories from my 20s…but I have no desire to be the person I was then. I love the person that the last 30 years have grown me into. I love the people I’ve collected over those years and the experiences that have shaped me. I’m not even sure I’d really like that 20-something person much anymore… One time in college, I lived in a house with 3 other people, and, without asking my roommates, I volunteered to keep a dog in our house, and that dog spilled a huge container of cherries on the kitchen floor, and I left the huge cherry puddle on that floor for 3 days without cleaning it. Also–that time is a little fuzzy in my brain…I might be combining two stories into one and maybe I spilled the cherries but either way there was an unwanted dog in the house as well as a sticky kitchen floor that I didn’t clean OR apologize for and my roomates should have hated me…which they probably did a little bit, maybe still do…come to think of it, I think they hang out a lot without me. 🤷‍♀️🤣

My point being, I think 20-year-old me would have been better off reading a headline that read… “Be the person you’ll be in your 50s, today.”

And also, she shouldn’t have wanted that either. Because she had to do the things, and make the mistakes and learn the lessons and sleep the sleeps. And 80-year-old me will likely look back at 50-year-old me and shake her head the same way I am doing right now, looking back.

I just hope 80-year-old me still likes trash TV, and that she sleeps 12 hours straight again… that sounds pretty dreamy.

Who knows, by then, we’ll probably be watching holograms (is that even the right word?) for TV and taking a flight to the moon for fun…I just hope they have good snacks…hopefully carbs have made a massive comeback. I need to look into bread and pasta stocks…

Love,

Suzy