The Tiredness Nobody Can See

The operation was fourteen months ago and it went well. Everybody says so, including her, because it is true.

The scar is neat. The thing it was for is gone. She was signed off in the spring and there was a small feeling of an ending, and somebody at work said welcome back and meant it warmly.

She has not slept properly since.

Not insomnia exactly, which is the problem when she tries to describe it. She goes to sleep. She stays asleep, mostly. She wakes at about half past four almost every day with her heart going slightly faster than it should, and then she lies there until six, and then she gets up.

And what comes out of that is not ordinary tiredness. It is a flatness that sits underneath everything. Words she wants are half a second further away than they used to be. Two flights of stairs are a thing she notices. By four in the afternoon she is doing arithmetic about whether she can manage the evening.

Nobody can see it. That is the whole difficulty. There is nothing on her, no stick, no dressing, no visible sign, and she looks well, and people tell her she looks well.

She has stopped mentioning it. She mentioned it twice, months ago, and both times got a kind reply about how these things take time, and she could see the conversation had ended before she finished the sentence.

So she has taken it out of circulation, and now she carries it privately, at half past four, with the heart going.

That is you, and nobody signed you off from this.

Three things I will not do

I am not going to tell you what is causing it. Sleep that changes after surgery has a long list of possible reasons, some of them entirely physical and some of them not, and none of them can be worked out by a page that has never met you.

I am not going to tell you to leave your doctor alone. Go back. Fourteen months of waking at half past four with a raised heart rate is a thing to say to somebody who can investigate it, and these things take time is not a diagnosis. Take the specific detail with you: the time, the heart, the flatness at four in the afternoon.

And I am not going to tell you that faith would have you sleeping by now. Rest is not a reward for spiritual performance, and treating it as one has kept a great many exhausted Christians awake.

You are not failing at recovery. Scripture says he giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength, Isaiah 40:29, and it is addressed to the ones already out of strength rather than to the ones managing well, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a room at half past four when nobody else is.

The verse is about who does the giving

There is a line in Psalm 127 that people quote as a comfort and that is actually a rebuke of something, and the something is worth seeing.

It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep.Psalm 127:2

The first half is a picture of a person trying to hold their life together by sheer hours. Up early, up late, eating a meal that has anxiety in it.

And the verdict on that is vain, which does not mean wicked. It means it does not work. It is not a rebuke of effort; it is an observation that the outcome was never resting on the effort in the first place.

Then the second half: so he giveth his beloved sleep.

Giveth. It is a gift word. Sleep is described here as something handed over rather than something achieved, which is the one thing every exhausted person needs to hear, because the harder you try to sleep the further away it moves and you have known that for fourteen months. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Psalm 127:2, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

And his beloved. Not his most disciplined. That is what you are called in the sentence where the sleep is given.

You are not required to earn your rest. Scripture says so he giveth his beloved sleep, Psalm 127:2, and giveth is His verb rather than yours, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land in somebody who has been trying to sleep correctly since the spring.

Invisible is the hardest kind

Let me name the specific cruelty of what you have, because it is not the tiredness. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Psalm 127:2, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

An illness that shows recruits help. People carry things for you. Nobody asks you to justify it.

An exhaustion that does not show has to be argued for, every time, to people who are not being unkind and who simply cannot see it. And after two or three of those conversations most people do exactly what you did, which is to stop having them.

So now you are carrying two things: the tiredness, and the constant low work of concealing it. And concealing it takes energy, which you do not have, which is why the concealing makes it worse.

You are not exaggerating and you are not imagining it. Scripture says the Lord looketh on the heart, 1 Samuel 16:7, and the whole of that verse is about the difference between what shows and what is true, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for evidence before He believes you.

Half past four

The specific hour matters and it is worth telling your doctor about.

Half past four with a fast heart, for fourteen months, is a pattern rather than a mood. Bodies do this after significant events, and an operation is a significant event even when it goes perfectly and even when the person has been entirely reasonable about it.

Something in you has been on alert since that day. It went well. The alert did not get the message.

That is not weakness and it is not a spiritual failure. It is a system doing what it did to keep you safe, and continuing to do it after the danger passed.

And this is worth saying plainly, because you have not thought about it once. You had an operation. That was a real thing that happened to your body, and everybody around you has treated it as an administrative event that concluded in the spring.

You are not overreacting to something that was nothing. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and He is nearer to a body still braced than to one that never needed to brace, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in the room at that hour and does not need it explained.