Somewhere Between Staying and Going

Monday arrives the way it always does. Without asking if you're ready.

The list is already there, before the coffee cools. Children. Clients. Studio. Business. Home. And you, somewhere inside all of it, looking for the breath that will let you begin.

This kind of tiredness doesn't always have a name. It doesn't come after a bad night. It comes after years of holding. Of giving. Of loving a home in a city you didn't grow up in, far from the family that might have helped. Far from the hand you would have reached for.

There is something in the giving that fills me. I won't pretend otherwise. When I sit with someone who is struggling, when I lead a group, when I make something with my hands for someone else, there is a sense of belonging that I don't easily find elsewhere. It anchors me. It reminds me of who I am.

But there is a line. And I don't always know where it is.

At what point does giving become disappearing? At what point does being needed become the only way I know how to exist? These are not comfortable questions. I ask them anyway, quietly, usually on a Monday.

So you try. You stop by a flower. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. You listen for a bird. Sometimes. You go to the studio. Sometimes, even there, there isn't enough air.

And then you try something else. Classical music. A museum. Sitting in front of a painting by someone who lived hundreds of years ago and feeling, for a moment, a little less alone.

Sometimes, in those moments, a different thought comes. A fantasy, really. Of going somewhere. Of being somewhere else, just for a while. No list. No one needs anything. Just me, and whatever I find when no one is watching.

I feel guilty even writing that.

Because there are children. And clients. And a life I chose and love. And leaving, even in imagination, feels like a kind of betrayal.

But I've learned that the fantasy isn't about leaving. It's about longing, for a self that isn't always on call. For a version of me that gets to be tired without it mattering to anyone. That gets to be lost without someone needing her to be found.

And sometimes even that isn't enough. So you surrender a little. You let the tiredness be there without fighting it. You let something like acceptance come in. And that, strangely, helps more than anything.

How do you keep going? I'm not sure I have an answer. You protect something small and quiet inside yourself. You guard it. Not perfectly. But enough.

It's always there. The tiredness. The guilt. The longing. But so is the flower. The museum. The painting that holds you for a moment without asking anything in return.

You learn to live between them.

And somehow, that is enough to begin again.