I wanted to write about exhaustion the way I used to write about love. Like love, exhaustion both requires language and baffles it, and like love, it is not as if exhaustion will kill you, no matter how many times you might declare that you are dying of it.
Exhaustion is not like death, either, which has a plot and a readership. Exhaustion is boring, requires no genius, is democratic in practice, lacks fans. In this, it’s like experimental literature.
I was once not exhausted, and then I was. I got sick, and then the late effects of treatment made me exhausted. I was taken to the moment of depletion and then taken past that, and after my recovery kept there in the probably forever of never-all-better, sinking further and further into exhaustion’s ground. What happens if you can no longer self-repair ? To be depleted is not to die : it is to barely do something else.
Exhaustion is a culmination of history presented in one body, then another, then another. If exhaustion as a subject has become newly popular it is because a once-proletarian feeling has now become a feeling of the proletarianized all.
*
The exhausted are always trying, even when they don’t want to, even when they are too exhausted to name trying as trying or to think about it like that. The trying of the exhausted is fuel for the machine that keeps running them over in the first place. Life doesn’t have to be happy to be long.
Trying is the method of traveling with a body through efforts to find the limit of those efforts’ ends. You just can’t, but have to. Now you will. First a breath, next an achievement, then another combination of attempts, a failure or a nap or a bad decision, all in an attempt at attempting, eating a high-protein afternoon snack and playing out with one’s existence existing’s limit-end.
The exhausted are plastic and adaptable. They bend better and more to what is necessary for their having been worn down. They live as fluidly as the water into which a corpse tied with rocks has been plunged or into which a ship sank or from which a dolphin surfaced.
The exhausted have a desire : to no longer be exhausted. The exhausted can have this one desire, to no longer be exhausted, as the prerequisite for the possibility of again having many desires, to no longer be exhausted so that they can want something other, to want what they really want, which is to no longer be exhausted, so that their bodies can offer the possibility again of love or art or pleasure, of thinking without regretting, of achievement, too, or something beyond failed and sorrowful trying at the barely.
Our wanting is not our wanting, exactly, when it is exposed like this through being too tired to want anything. What the exhausted once believed was a desire from inside them showed itself to be a desire from what was outside, what had been there before them and what was ordered by whatever wasn’t them.
But it’s not that abstract, energy and lack of it ; and not that abstract, being too worn out to want anything but to not be worn out anymore ; and not that abstract, the hyperfocused forever of not having enough of any life to do with it what one could. The exhausted are exhausted because they sell the hours of their lives to survive their lives, then they use the hours they haven’t sold to get their lives ready for selling, and the hours after that to do the same for the other lives they love.
*
A person can be anything, she is told, if she puts her mind to it in the economic zone of unfettered personal possibility. It’s the free trade of souls across the open borders of indefatigability. It’s a series of horizon-wide choices unlimited by limitations except for how all possibilities will be circumscribed by the capacity to exhaust oneself to discover a possibility’s end.
Fate was shipwrecked, so in its place, they sent us agency. Free to love, free to work, free to get, free to enter multiple and contractual and subcontractual realms in which each element of a person’s existence is negotiated to the effect of determining her position only by how it wears her out.
In this version of freedom, the invisibility of all fences is the point of every invisible fence. The apparent lack of limits among the limits mystifies both limits and limitlessness. There are horizons that sink, roads and highways that seem to go on for as long as one has the capacity to travel them, and then, at the place at which it wears you out, you find a real fence.
Freedom ends exactly there, hung up on your own system’s failure, a former dynamo that is now an evaporated animal, all free energy having been expended freely in a quest toward freedom’s end.
*
The exhausted rise each day, or at least most of them do. That they rise most days is testament to the distance between how a person feels and what they do.
A person can and often does rise in a will-optional attempt at getting out of bed, and when they can’t rise, it’s almost never from lack of wanting to. No matter how much they just can’t, the exhausted, if they are living, continue to. They continue to, like everyone who does until they don’t anymore, but they continue to more miserably than those who are not exhausted yet. To live and so to eat, drink water, to find a method—work or love—by which to afford to eat, to pay their bills and pay their taxes, to use the bathroom, to put on clothes, to care for their loved ones, requires that they rise, at least sometimes. The exhausted might almost do what they are supposed to do, but as a consequence of their depletion, they almost never do what they want. The exhausted don’t die. Or if they do die, it is only once, like everyone else, and from anything. An exhausted body almost always provides the wrong information. The wrong information is also the right information : things can’t go on like this, and so they do, and what gets proved is the blurred edge between being alive and being dead.
Living takes the shape of the effort to exist. In the long night of this effort to exist’s case file, each hour recedes into a lack of energy to achieve a measure of that hour’s length. Everything is tried—that’s how it gets exhausted—and a person trying to take notes on this writes, « I’m exhausted, » because they are too tired to put down their pen.
*
That you will run out of yourself trying to make yourself is the yogic prelude to the entrepreneurial rules of existing. It’s the epoch of yes; the age of unlimited can, a mass existence in the soma-pathetic fallacy of the body and earth together registering the alarming texture of our mutual expiration.
Here’s an asana of auto-exploitation :
First, a breath. Then sweating. Now sweating with breathing. Then achievement. Then email and sweating. Now breathing and achieving and emailing. Now working while breathing. Now failure and sleeping and breathing. Now refusing to sleep while breathing or attempting to refuse to breathe while still sweating and failing and achieving.
Exhaustion as a method of existing combines all actions until it finds the edges of the shape of existing’s end. Like everything aleatory, as a method it has one outcome : possibility. This possibility is mostly the possibility that all things will end in exhaustion.
The exhausted find their energy wasted again. Sleep, which is often the remedy for tiredness, disappoints the exhausted. Sleep is full of the work of dreams, full of the way that sleep begets more sleep, full of the way that more sleep can beget more exhaustion, and that more exhaustion begets more exhaustion for which the remedy is almost never just sleep.
The exhausted are the saints of the wasted life, if a saint is a person who is better than others at suffering. What the exhausted suffer better is the way bodies and time are so often at odds with each other in our time of overwhelming and confused chronicity, when each hour is amplified past circadianism, quadrupled in the quarter-hour’s agenda, Pomodoro-ed, hacked, FOMO-ed, and productivized. The exhausted are the human evidence of each minute misunderstood to be an empire for finance, of each human body misunderstood to be an instrument that should play a thousand compliant songs at once.
*
We can’t measure spirit. This because it isn’t real, or at least because it is not material, but it feels real when we become acutely aware of our own aridity. But no matter how potentially unalive or indistinct an exhausted person feels inside of herself, her body will look like a body, discreet, alive and animate, and capable of trying more, of trying harder, of improving or remedying or aspiring or producing.
We are never our spirits’ containers. No person’s body is marked with a measuring line. No one knows how boundless we once were or could be, and by looking, no one knows what it used to feel like to exist, and how different it feels to exist now, or how we were once full and are now depleted. The water is gone because the empty glass tells us so. In order to appear used up, a body has to look like a particular life’s packaging, providing rough measure of its interior’s resources, then its lack of them.
The exhausted person is « used up, » but can’t ever be seen as that, only as what is potentially (like everyone else and probably everything else in the instrumentalized world) used. The « used up » mostly belongs to substances or objects that can be or commonly are contained, and it is mostly in relationship to their container that what can be used up becomes legible as use-up-able. Probably a thing that can be « used up » can’t be considered actually used until it is gone entirely, and maybe this is because a thing that can be « used up » is often a thing with a use that is recognizably metabolic, like food or soap or gasoline. The interior of the compost barrel stays dark.
The exhausted look exhausted because they aren’t trying, even if what they are exhausted from is all that trying. « You look exhausted, » we might say to the exhausted only when we remember them as once vital, noticing the alteration only through comparison, meaning you once looked okay but now you look gaunt, you have circles under your eyes, your face is puffy or your features deformed, you drag and do not spring, you seem to hold your head above your shoulders with the greatest effort, what you say is not too lucid, you fly off the handle in rage, you cry too easily, your words come out jumbled, you cry and say « I’m tired » and say « I’m exhausted » and you cry because you are so tired.
An exhausted person, trying to look less so, will try, as trying is what she is good at. She will put concealer under her eyes, add blush to her cheeks, do all the tricks the magazines and websites tell her will make her look less exhausted : curl her eyelashes up so that her eyelids might droop less, drink coffee, take Adderall, exercise, realize it is Tuesday, then that it is Friday, then that it is the end of the month, then that it is the beginning, then that time has rushed forward without her, carrying with it her to-do list but leaving her behind.