I Don't Know What To Call This

Hey. I'm Linhcheu. Thanks for clicking on this.

Is it stress? Is it burnout? Is there even a real difference between those two words, or is that just something we say to make it sound temporary? Stress feels like something you push through. Burnout feels like what's waiting on the other side of pushing through for too long. I think I crossed from one into the other at some point this year and I couldn't tell you which day it happened. There was no line on the ground. I just looked up one afternoon and I was already standing somewhere else.

What I do know is this. I've been tired in a way that sleep doesn't touch. I sleep and I wake up and the tired is still sitting there at the edge of the bed, waiting, like it never left the room.

Also I keep thinking about shaving my head. For no reason. It just sounds nice. Clean. Like pressing a reset button on a thing you can't actually reset. That's probably the entire diagnosis right there and I'm choosing not to look at it too closely.

Let me back up.

If I try to find where this started, it was around June or July last year. And the strange part is that nothing happened. No breakup. No disaster. No single moment I can point at and say there, that's the one, that's where it turned. It came in quiet. It came in like a hum.

That's the closest word I've got for it. A hum. This low background frequency underneath my life, running all the time, asking the same three questions on a loop. Where is this going. Are you doing enough. Is this it.

And you can live with a hum. That's the thing nobody tells you. You can live with a hum for a really long time. You go to class. You go to work. You show up for people. You laugh at the right moments and you mean it, mostly. And the whole time there's this frequency sitting under everything, not loud enough to stop you, just loud enough that you never quite get silence.

Then this year came, and the hum stopped being background.

I've spent a lot of time trying to find the one thing that caused it, and I've given up, because there isn't one. It's more like work and school and life all walked through the door at the same time and then none of them left. And individually? Every single one is fine. Manageable. Normal, even. But stacked on top of each other, in the same week, in the same body, they turn into something with a different shape entirely.

The part that really gets me is never being fully anywhere.

I sit in class and think about work. I sit at work and think about deadlines. I lie in bed at 2am with my phone lighting up my face, thinking about all of it at once, and I call that resting. You know that feeling where you're technically doing nothing but you're not relaxed at all? Like a car parked with the engine still running? That's been most of my year. Parked. Engine on. Going nowhere and still somehow burning fuel.

And it's started showing up in ways other people can measure.

I'm late to work almost every day now. Not by a lot. Not dramatically. Just consistently, reliably late, in a way that's stopped being an accident and started being a pattern. The alarm goes off and I hear it. I'm awake. I'm just lying there doing this math in my head about how much time I have left before late becomes really late, and then somehow that math keeps coming out wrong, and then I'm walking through the door making the same face I made yesterday.

I've got a whole apology I don't even have to think about anymore. It just comes out. Traffic. Sorry. Won't happen again. And everyone nods and it's fine, it's genuinely fine, nobody's making a thing of it. But I know. I know it's every day now. I know somebody's noticed even if they're being nice about it.

And some days I don't go at all.

Work. Class. Whatever was on the calendar. I just don't go. Not because something came up. Not because I made a decision about it. I just lie there past the point where going was still an option, and then the choice gets made for me by time passing, and then I spend the rest of the day carrying it around.

The part I can't explain to anyone is that I want to go. That's the thing. I'm not sitting there enjoying it. There's no relief in it. It's not a day off, it's a day I lost with the guilt included. But there's this gap now between wanting to do something and actually being able to move, and I don't know when that gap opened or how it got that wide.

People see late and they see skipped and they see one story. Lazy. Not serious. Doesn't care. I get why. From the outside that's what it looks like. From the inside it's the opposite. It's caring so much about everything all at once that the whole system just quietly stops responding.

But here's what I wasn't ready for. How much of this would show up on my body.

I lost a lot of weight this year. Not on purpose. I wasn't trying to do anything, I wasn't chasing anything, there was no plan. It just happened quietly in the background, the way things happen when you're too busy to notice you skipped a meal. And then skipped the next one. And then stopped keeping count of which ones you skipped, because keeping count would mean admitting there was something to count.

Your body is patient like that. It waits. It gives you months of grace. And then one day it hands you the bill.

Mine came in the form of a mirror. I looked up and I didn't recognise the guy standing in it. Not tired different. Different different. My face had changed shape. Something around the eyes had gone somewhere else.

Someone joked that I looked like an addict.

I laughed. Because what else are you supposed to do standing there in that moment. I'm not, obviously. But I knew exactly why they said it, and that's the part that stayed. Because it meant whatever had been happening inside me for a year had finally worked its way to the outside, into the open, where people could see it. And they were watching it happen with absolutely no idea what they were looking at.

I've heard versions of that joke a few times since. I know nobody means anything cruel by it. People joke about what they can see. That's normal.

I still take it home with me every single time.

And isn't that the funny thing. You can hold yourself together for months. You can be fully convinced you're managing, that you've got a handle on it, that it's under control. And then one random sentence about your face takes the entire structure apart in about two seconds, and you're standing in a room full of people laughing along at your own expense and feeling something drop through the floor of your chest.

But if I'm being real with you, the tiredness isn't even the heaviest part of this.

The heaviest part is the overthinking about what people think of me.

There's a second conversation running underneath every real conversation I have. Constantly. What did they think of that. Did that come out wrong. Are they annoyed with me. Have I done something. Am I a bad person to them, and if I am, why? What did I actually do?

And the answer, every single time, is that I don't know. Nobody has told me I'm a bad person. Nobody has accused me of anything. There's no incident. There's no evidence. There's not even a rumour.

I just built an entire courtroom inside my head, cast myself as the defendant, and now I show up to it every night. Faithfully. On time. Without anybody ever telling me what the charge is. The trial never ends because there was never a trial. There's just me, and a room I made, and a verdict I keep handing myself at 3am on no evidence at all.

That's the exhausting part. Not being judged. Being judged by a jury I invented.

And I think it comes from caring, if I'm being fair to myself. Caring what people think is really just the shadow version of caring about people. Same root, different fruit. But somewhere along the way it stopped being the thing that made me considerate and started being the thing that eats me at night, and I don't know how to keep one without the other.

The word I keep landing back on is losing.

I lost weight. I lost the way I used to look. And somewhere in the middle of that I think I lost track of myself too. The version of me from before last June. Lighter. Funnier. Way less scared of taking up space in a room. Said things without running them through a filter first.

I don't know where he went. He didn't leave dramatically. Nobody leaves dramatically. He just got buried slowly under obligations and expectations and my own fear of letting anybody down, one layer at a time, until one day I looked around and couldn't find him under the pile.

Maybe that's what burnout actually is. Not exhaustion. Not being busy. Just the slow disappearance of the person underneath everything they're responsible for.

I'm not going to wrap this up nicely, because I haven't fixed anything. There's no glow up ending here. No “and then I started waking up at 5am and drinking water and everything changed.” If you scrolled this far waiting for the part where it turns around, I'm sorry. I'm still in it.

What I do have is that I noticed. And I've started to think noticing counts for more than people give it credit for.

Because for most of this year I had no words for any of this. I just felt heavy and assumed that was the standard cost of being a person with things to do. Everyone's busy. Everyone's tired. Get over yourself. But naming it, even badly, even just landing on “okay, something is off with me,” changed something small. It stopped feeling like weather I had to stand in and started feeling like a thing I might eventually get a say in.

The other thing I'm slowly figuring out is that this was never meant to be carried alone.

I've been treating being tired like a private matter. Something to handle quietly, in the background, so nobody has to move anything around for me. There's a kind of pride in that and I'm not sure it's the good kind. But the few times I've said any of this out loud, nobody looked at me differently. Nobody thought less of me. Nobody said the thing I'd spent months bracing for.

Mostly people just went, yeah. Same.

Which is probably the actual reason I wrote this.

Not because I figured anything out. More because there's a decent chance somebody reading this right now is standing in the exact same spot, holding the exact same thing, completely convinced they're the only one there. They're not. I promise they're not. I'm right here holding mine.

So if that's you, three things before I go.

1. 1

   You're allowed to be tired.

   You're allowed to be tired without something dramatic happening to you first. Nothing has to have gone wrong. Ordinary things, stacked high enough and left long enough, are more than enough on their own.

2. 2

   The jury isn't real.

   The jury in your head isn't real. Nobody has that much time. Everyone is far too busy attending their own trial to sit in on yours.

3. 3

   Your body is talking.

   And whatever your body is doing right now, the weight, the sleep, the face looking back at you in the mirror, it isn't trying to embarrass you. It's trying to tell you something. It's been trying for a while. Mine's been talking since last June and I'm only now starting to listen.

I don't know how this year ends. I'd love to write a follow up someday that opens with “okay, so here's what actually helped.” Maybe I will. Maybe that's next year's article and this one is just the part before it.

For now, this is where I'm at. Still tired. Still overthinking. Still not sure which word fits.

But writing it down turned out lighter than holding it.

Thanks for reading this far. It helped more than you'd think.