Tired

I'm freaking tired. 

Exhausted, actually. To the point where I'm craving sleep the way I crave chocolate. Did you know that your body shivers, it trembles, when it is asking for sleep? It gets colder than anything, and your teeth chatter. 

Bristol has always been a revelation place for me. I show up broken and it fixes me. Two years in a row, I spent time there when I was unable to function, and while I was there I broke through into somewhere better. This has not yet been the case this year.

This year, I have things that I know I need to learn that I am refusing to. My lesson is supposed to be to let myself rest. When I've done that, things have gotten better. Some people have not been able to understand this, and a smaller number of people have tried to make me feel like shit when I draw my lines, however shaky they may be. It makes me boring, or selfish, or flat-out a bad friend. Those people have never worked 80 hours, 7 days a week, for 6 weeks in a row. What I need to remember is that it's not about the numbers. It's not about the fact that I have a full-time job and, at the moment, an equally full-time small business. I get stuck on the justifications and miss the point. 

The point is that I'm tired. That's really and truly the point. I wish I were equipped to give everyone what they need, without taking things away from myself, but it doesn't work that way. I want what I want, and what I want is a quiet room with a couch and a stack of movies. I need to find that before the quiet room becomes a padded room. When I was running around trying to tend to everyone else's needs, that padded room wasn't far off. 

I am working on knowing that I am important enough to put my needs first. Some days, I know that more than other days. At this point, it's still intellectual knowledge, not bone-and-breath knowing that I am important. I'll be happier when it gets to that point.