Burnout

I wasn’t lazy.
I was tired of surviving.
Not tired of the day-to-day,
but tired of the weight that comes
from never truly living,
only holding on.

Every morning,
I woke with a sense of urgency,
the world outside demanding me
to rise, to perform, to push,
like some invisible force
was setting the tempo of my life,
and I was a puppet to it all.
I was tired of running,
tired of pretending
that I was living when I was only
breathing,
surviving.

Survival isn’t a choice.
It’s a quiet war that begins
before dawn,
long before your eyes open,
when your body is still trapped
in yesterday’s battles.
It’s the ache in your chest
that doesn’t belong to anything real,
but is the residue
of years lived in second gear,
always moving,
but never arriving.

I wasn’t lazy.
I was tired of pushing forward
with no reason.
Of walking through the motions,
chasing ghosts of who I thought I should be.
There’s a hollowness in surviving—
in just getting by.
It’s as if the world wants you
to be always busy,
always functioning,
but never living.

And so, I didn’t care about the deadlines,
the social expectations,
the million things that would have
made me worthy of some kind of praise.
Because in the end,
I wasn’t even sure who I was
or what it meant
to be alive.

I wasn’t tired from the work;
I was tired of being a part of something
that didn’t leave room
for me to feel
anything other than
exhaustion.

There’s no place for rest in survival.
Rest is the luxury of living.
To pause without guilt,
to just exist without the weight of
expectations bearing down on you,
is a kind of freedom
that doesn’t come easy.

I was tired,
not from being lazy,
but from being forced to carry
the weight of the world,
the endless pursuit of things
that didn’t matter.

It’s hard to keep your head above water
when you’re constantly treading
just to stay afloat,
and the tide keeps rising,
faster than you can swim.

And still,
even in this exhaustion,
I learned something:
Surviving isn’t enough.
It never was.

What do you do
when you’re too tired to dream,
too tired to hope?
Do you just keep breathing,
waiting for the will to live to return?
Or do you learn to sit with the silence,
to find rest not in movement
but in stillness?
There’s a quiet rebellion in rest.

A refusal to keep going,
for the sake of going.
A choice to surrender
the fight for just one moment,
to say, “I am more than this.”
More than the relentless push,
more than the ceaseless chase,
more than a body that just survives.
I wasn’t lazy.

I was tired of surviving.
And in that tiredness,
I found a soft rebellion,
a whisper of the person I had forgotten
in all the surviving.
A spark of life
that needed time to rest
before it could burn again.
I wasn’t lazy.

I was tired of surviving.
And I’m finally learning
how to live instead.