Dear Me

I get it.

It’s a tiredness that goes beyond sleep.
Beyond busy days or long to-do lists.
It’s something deeper—harder to explain.

You tell yourself it’s just stress, or hormones, or work, or parenting, or age. And maybe it is. But maybe it’s also something else—something quieter you’ve been carrying for far too long.

The emotional weight.

The pressure to hold everything together.
The years of keeping yourself “fine” for everyone else.
The way you’ve pushed through, even when your heart was heavy.

Sometimes, we don’t notice how much we’ve been holding until it shows up in our body—
in the tension in our chest,
the tightness in our jaw,
the constant fatigue that lingers, no matter how much we rest.

And maybe you’ve started to wonder—like I did—
Is this just life now?
Or is my heart asking for something more?

I didn’t used to think about emotional wellbeing very much. I thought if I stayed busy enough, kept moving forward, and ticked all the boxes, I’d feel better.

But eventually, the tiredness caught up with me.
And beneath it, I found something I wasn’t expecting:
grief.
Disappointment.
Resentment.
Loneliness.
The quiet ache of outgrowing the life I thought I wanted.

This wasn’t the dramatic kind of exhaustion. It was a slow, steady depletion—emotional burnout, I’ve since learned.

And it’s more common than we realise—especially for women in this season of life, when we’ve spent so many years looking after others and putting ourselves last.

If this letter feels familiar to you, please know this:
You’re not broken. You’re not weak.
You’re just human.

And maybe it’s time to listen to what your tiredness is trying to tell you.

Not to push through.
Not to “fix” it immediately.

But to pause.
To soften.
To ask yourself gently:

What am I really carrying right now?
And what would it feel like to finally set some of it down?

You deserve rest—the real kind.
The emotional kind.
The deep, nourishing kind that comes when you stop pretending you’re fine.

You don’t have to carry it all alone.

With heart,

Me