I want to spend more time on that withdrawal, because it was one of the decisions that shaped everything that came after, and I’ve thought about it more than I’ve thought about almost anything else from those years.
It was a Tuesday in November. I was sitting in the back of Professor Delaney’s statistics class, which met in a room with fluorescent lighting that flickered in the same rhythm as my anxiety, working through a problem set I didn’t understand. This was unusual. I am, in general, someone who understands math. I have always been organized and structured and good with numbers, which is part of why health administration eventually made sense for me as a field.
But statistics that semester was not clicking, and the reason it wasn’t clicking was that I was running on about five hours of sleep a night, I had picked up extra shifts at the billing office since October, and my brain had quietly decided that the statistics textbook was the one thing it was willing to refuse.
I remember sitting in that class thinking: I can identify exactly what I don’t understand. I know which chapter. I know which concept. If I had one Saturday afternoon that wasn’t already spoken for, I could sit down with the textbook and fix this.
I did not have one Saturday afternoon that wasn’t already spoken for.
That is a specific kind of exhaustion that I think people who have not been in it genuinely do not understand. It’s not the tired you get from a hard week. It’s the tired you get when every available hour is already load-bearing and you cannot add one more obligation without knocking something else over. The problem with that kind of tired is that it looks, from the outside, like capability. People who are managing everything look like people who can manage one more thing.