There are two kinds of tiredness.
The good kind of tiredness is what you feel after working hard. The work can be physical or mental. For example, I might feel physically tired after spending hours moving heavy boxes and putting the contents onto shelves at the grocery store where I work. Doing this work requires effort and uses up energy, but the work is meaningful to me because I am accomplishing something concrete that needs to be done. I might feel mentally tired after watching a big horse race, a figure skating competition, or even a movie or show that I find interesting. For me, processing and remembering what I am watching requires a lot of mental effort. But if it’s a sport or a show that I care about, then the effort is worth it. The good kind of tiredness is the tiredness of a job well done. It’s the tiredness that you feel after working hard on projects that you welcome, projects that you feel engaged with, projects that you chose.
Then there’s the bad kind of tiredness. It’s an angry, nasty, irritable kind of tiredness. It’s the tiredness that comes not from working hard, but from chaos, overstimulation, and frustration. It’s the tiredness that comes from things not going as planned, routines being disrupted, unexpected problems arising, people doing things they’re not supposed to do. It comes from being blocked, due to circumstances outside of your control, from doing things according to your usual steps and routines. Your plan A gets messed up, so you have to scramble to come up with a plan B, and sometimes, if that gets messed up too, a plan C.
For example, I’m trying to explain something, but I keep getting interrupted, the listener inserting their own thoughts before I’ve had a chance to fully voice mine. Or the language-learning app that I am using to learn Italian keeps marking my answers wrong for reasons I don’t understand, causing my lesson to be abruptly terminated because I’ve run out of “hearts” for the day. Or maybe my dad asks me to help fold laundry, but before I have a chance to do so, my mom has already done it. Or perhaps I’m looking forward to eating the small pieces of chips that are left at the bottom of the bag, but before I can do so, someone has thrown the bag into the trash. Or I need to get something out of my locker, but someone else is using the locker directly above mine, and I have to wait for them to move, causing me to be late for my next assignment. Or I need to use the bathroom, but someone is in the bathroom, so I decide to go to the sink to fill up my water bottle while I wait, but someone is using the sink so I can’t do that either (and then, if I’m really unlucky, someone beats me to the bathroom while I’m waiting at the sink!). Or I am stocking the meat department, take a box of steaks off of my cart, and am forced to wait idle as customers stand in front of the steak section examining the various options and talking among themselves for what seems like hours on end.
None of these things is a big deal in itself, and it might even seem silly for me to complain about them. But these are the types of things that, for someone on the autism spectrum like me, can quickly add up into a mountain of stress and mental exhaustion. In other words: the bad type of tiredness.
With this type of tiredness, there’s no satisfaction, no pride, no sense of a job well done. Only frustration. It’s a feeling of tightness in my chest, tense muscles, a lump in my throat, and heaviness throughout my entire body, which no amount of huge, exasperated sighs can shake. It’s the type of tiredness that causes me to go to bed without brushing and flossing my teeth, because I simply do not have the energy to do so (sorry if that is TMI). Or worse, to stay up until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning because I don’t even have the energy to get up from the couch and go to bed. Pardon my French, but the bad kind of tiredness is, in short, when one feels like crap.
Unfortunately, I’ve been having a lot of the bad kind of tiredness lately. It started around mid-December and continues into 2025. As a result, I haven’t had the energy to blog as much as I’d like. (I’m sure I sound like a broken record when it comes to this subject.) However, the holiday season wasn’t entirely negative. I hope to soon have the energy to make a post with more details and photos of my holiday season.