i am tired essay

I Am Strong, But My Soul Is Exhausted

Exhausted isn’t just enough to describe the state I am going through right now. I am exhausted yes, this tiredness is beyond physiological tiredness. It’s psychological, it’s emotional. I am tired of being strong. I am tired of trying to put on that smile on my face every day of a strong woman and be the Super Woman for anyone and everyone.

Suddenly I sit here, tight in the chest, feeling lost and unsure where to look for direction. I spent too long denying my own feelings and now I feel like I am the one who is unravelling.

I have written many articles about the Alpha woman: The strong, independent, self-sufficient woman. It sounds nice, doesn’t it? 

I never particularly set out to be this kind of woman, but life made me face my worst nightmares, I had to learn to become strong because no one was there for me through my struggles and tribulations, yet here I am, now I found myself worn-out and lost, wondering if someday someone would be there for me in all the ways I have been there for them.

I have always played the infallible woman role who seems to be able to do anything and everything.

When others look at me they see me as such. They see me as competent and able, but my soul is exhausted —while they see me sure-footed and steady—inside I am breaking.

I feel like I have spent my entire life trying to prove to myself that I am strong and being strong would be enough. I have spent so much of my energy setting such high expectations to be strong and shelving my own emotions that now I’m tired.

And now, it’s me who has become pale and worn out.

When you’re always the strong one, you usually suppress your desires, thoughts, and sometimes even how you feel. When you’re always the strong one, you’re very cautious about giving your problems to anyone else. You see that as laying a burden on the people you’re supposed to be supporting.

And the people who are usually so busy looking after others don’t always go around asking for help. But as the strong one you go through your own challenges, and it there can be times where you reach a breaking point.

Truth is it’s those of us that are the strongest end up needing someone the most. I see now that we all need someone who’s just a little bit stronger than we are. Yes I said the NEED word, the word that I ran from for so long because it seemed it had a negative connotation.

But I have come to the realization that is okay not to be strong all the time, I used to tell myself to not let anyone in or let them know of my struggles, I had the belief that those that are strong, they don’t feel like they have the space to have a weak moment. What if someone sees you bleed? What if someone see the tears you keep to yourself? What if someone hears the deepest dreams and desires in your life that you don’t always find the place or the time to talk about?

Now I have found myself exhausted from running from my need to be vulnerable. 

I long to be taken care of, not financially, but I want a strong arm around my shoulders, someone who can hold me down, no matter the storm I endured that day. I am independent economically, but I don’t wish to remain psychologically strong anymore. Yes, I desire to be caressed by someone.

There’s no wrong in craving for someone to hold you, to take care of you. It’s not something to be ashamed of. It’s not weakness. It’s rather a strength, we all need a “someone” to remind us that it’s okay to not be strong all the time. It’s the power of love.

Mitzi J Hernandez

A writer writing love, life and her cancer journey.💚

Keep up with Mitzi J on Instagram and Twitter

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Why You Feel So Tired All the Time

A little over a month ago, I started feeling more fatigued than usual. Just about everything in my life—from getting out of bed to exercising to writing to coaching to reading—required a significant amount of activation energy. All of these activities usually felt smooth and seamless. Now they had turned into a grind. I wasn’t depressed, or even particularly sad. And I didn’t have the sense of stagnation or emptiness associated with languishing . I was simply tired.

I was—and am—not alone. I started sharing these feelings with friends, colleagues and neighbors, and many of them, too, reported a similar sense of exhaustion.

“I am sleeping and eating well and not commuting to work or worrying about getting dressed up in the morning and yet I still always feel so beat,” bemoaned Linda, a 40-year-old woman who lives down the street.

“I am so tired always,” said Mark, a close friend. “For the first time in my life, I am struggling not to hit the snooze button multiple times.”

Read More: Why Do I Feel Sleepy Until the Moment I Get in Bed?

These struggles are not new. They were a common theme over the past three years in my reporting on The Practice of Groundedness , and they were a large part of what drove me to write the book. But they are intensifying. Google searches for the phrase “Why am I tired all the time?” have been at their historical highs between July 2021 and September 2021.

There are, of course, many reasons for our collective fatigue: a year-and-a-half-long pandemic, social unrest and democratic backslide—to name just a few. But even beyond these obvious drivers, I think there is something else going on: We are replacing excitement with anxiety.

This phenomenon is subtle and insidious. My hope is that describing it will help.

Even the calmest, most equanimous people benefit from at least occasional periods of excitement. There is a reason that “flat-lining” is associated with death. We thrive with some degree of oscillation in our lives. The pandemic has, by and large, taken these punctuated bouts of excitement away.

Attending concerts, sporting events, movies , even going to restaurants (let alone taking a proper vacation) are not as straightforward as they used to be. For many people with children too young to be vaccinated —myself included—these activities are still off-limits. And even for those who feel more comfortable partaking in these sorts of activities, they are not stress-free. Every night out is accompanied by some degree of decision stress on the front end (should we go or not; is it worth the risk?) and nervousness on the back (is this slight headache from the wine or did I contract a case of the highly contagious Delta variant ?) As a result, many people are going out less often. There is a collective lack of excitement in our lives.

Read More: You Asked: Is It Bad for You to Read the News Constantly?

A chronic lack of excitement is challenging enough on its own. But it is even worse when we replace our longing for excitement with anxiety, which can feel quite similar in the moment but has an extremely different long-term effect.

Consider this-all-too common example: You are feeling kind of sluggish and bored, so you go online and check trending topics on social media or visit any of the major news websites. You are not going to these destinations to learn anything specific, per se. You are going because you want a jolt to your otherwise flat-lining system. The jolt comes in the form of a horror story about politics , COVID-19 , Afghanistan or any number of other unsettling topics. Though that jolt can, at least momentarily, feel like the excitement you are so desperately craving, it is actually anxiety. And repeated bouts of anxiety lead to deep exhaustion.

Put it all together and not only are we lacking many sources of positive and energizing excitement, but we are replacing them with negative and exhausting sources of anxiety. Viewed in this light, the question isn’t why are we tired all the time? The question is how could we not be tired all the time?

Read More: The Secret to Success? Mastering the Art of Patience

The solution, I believe, requires three steps. First, we need to stop replacing our desire for excitement with anxiety. When you feel the urge to doom scroll, ask yourself what is fueling that urge? If the answer is some vague notion of well, it’s something to do, then you’ve got to resist the urge.

Second, we need to do everything possible to insert some positive excitement into our lives in a way that feels safe. There is an inertia to fatigue. And while physical fatigue often benefits most from rest, psychological fatigue—the variety I am describing in this piece—often benefits most from action . In other words, you don’t need to feel good to get going, you need to get going to give yourself a shot at feeling good.

Third, we need to be patient . While there is still much that we can do that is safe, it is also true that there is much we can’t. Things are hardly normal, and to pretend otherwise is absurd. Though it may seem like it will, our current state of affairs will not last forever. This may be a long winter, but it is just that—a season—and seasons always change. There is an old expression that goes don’t just stand there, do something . But in situations like this, perhaps the better advice is don’t just do something, stand there.

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I Am Tired: Navigating Exhaustion in Life

When fatigue becomes your identity..

Posted March 13, 2024 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

A profound realization struck me while in a recent conversation with a client. When she says, "I am tired," she's not describing her current state. Instead, she's identifying with exhaustion itself. Tiredness, it seems, has a peculiar ability to morph into a defining aspect of our being.

This transformation often begins subtly, without our conscious awareness. Slowly but surely, we withdraw from activities we once enjoyed, avoid social interactions, and become increasingly irritable. It's as if our very identity is overshadowed by fatigue, rendering us unrecognizable even to ourselves.

But what can we do in the face of such pervasive exhaustion? Resting, it seems, is not the solution. By the time fatigue has taken hold, we've already surpassed our body's limits. Even lying down offers little respite; our minds remain restless, and our bodies feel disconnected and unresponsive.

Where does that leave us? Perhaps the answer lies in a radical shift—a willingness to say no to the familiar and yes to the unfamiliar. If exhaustion stems from the depletion of our physical and emotional reserves, then it's time to rewrite the script of our lives.

In his insightful essay, "The Sense of Suffering," Scheler challenges society's aversion to pain and suffering. Rather than viewing them as obstacles to be avoided at all costs, he suggests they can serve as conduits to deeper meaning. Suffering, he argues, is not a mark of failure but a gateway to resilience and personal growth.

In this light, recognizing our own fatigue becomes a catalyst for change. It's not an indictment of who we are but a clarifying call to explore new avenues of existence. Like heavy snow blanketing dormant seeds, exhaustion signals the potential for renewal and transformation.

As we embrace this new perspective, we invite the possibility of a life lived with intention and purpose. Rather than succumbing to the tyranny of fatigue, we reclaim agency over our experiences and forge a path toward greater fulfillment. Let tiredness be not our identity but a harbinger of the vibrant, resilient selves waiting to emerge. Like snow melting in the warmth of spring, we too shall thaw and bloom anew.

Susi Ferrarello, Ph.D., is an associate professor at California State University, East Bay, and a philosophical counselor.

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How To Write When You’re Really Tired

by Joe Bunting | 22 comments

Just last night, I arrived back home from the Middle East, where I was working for the last two weeks. I traveled over 7,400 miles over thirty-two hours, and honestly, I'm exhausted.

Photo by Umberto Salvagnin (Creative Commons)

However, I also have a lot of writing to do. I'm working on a new ghostwriting project with someone who has been doing conflict resolution work in the Middle East for over twenty-five years. Deadlines are fast approaching, and I don't have much time to rest.

How do you write when you're tired? How do you focus when you really just want to take a break?

“I Don't Feel Like Writing”

What do you do when you just don't feel like writing? You know you  should  be writing, but when you think about actually doing it, you start thinking about all the other things you'd rather do (e.g. play another round of Candy Crush, scroll mindlessly through Facebook, eat Elmer's glue).

One way to handle this is to say to yourself, “Just do the work, darn it! Push through. It doesn't matter if you don't  want  to write. Do it anyway!”

While this approach does work sometimes, it can also develop an inner resentment against your work that can actually lead you to be even more unproductive later on.

Another way to deal with this is to slow down, take a deep breath, and connect with your shadow.

The Shadow's Secret to Restful Work

I've talked about your shadow several times on this blog (here's an introduction to the concept of the shadow and here's a longer discussion about how to write a book  with your shadow's help). I find that the idea of the shadow is one of the best ways to think more creatively.

As I was struggling to summon the will to write, I began talking to my inner shadow. I asked it questions, like,  “What do  you  want to write about? How are you feeling about this? What would make you happy?” 

Almost instantly, I started to think about new ideas to write about, topics that excited me, that made me actually want to write despite my lack of willpower.

And within just a few minutes, I was not only writing, I was enjoying myself.

Finding the Willpower to Write When You're Tired

When you're too tired to write, you usually take one of two options:

• Procrastinate  and avoid writing
• Bully  yourself into it

Both of these options are less than helpful.

Instead, try tuning in to your inner shadow. Ask the following questions:

• How are you  feeling about this?
• What do  you  want to write about?
• What will make this more interesting to  you ?

These questions will often unlock a new, creative path for your writing to take, and more importantly, you'll almost always have more energy to write than if you try to bully yourself into writing what you're s upposed  to be writing about.

Do you think this would work for you? How do you get yourself to write when you're tired?

Talk to your inner shadow and ask a few of the questions listed above, especially, “What do  you  want to write about.” What does your shadow say? After you listen to your shadow, start your timer and write for fifteen minutes.

When you're time is up, copy and paste your practice into the comments section of this post to get feedback. And if you share your practice in the comments section, please be sure to give feedback on a few pieces by other writers.

Have fun writing!

Joe Bunting

Joe Bunting is an author and the leader of The Write Practice community. He is also the author of the new book Crowdsourcing Paris , a real life adventure story set in France. It was a #1 New Release on Amazon. Follow him on Instagram (@jhbunting).

Want best-seller coaching? Book Joe here.

22 Comments

I grabbed my purse the kids had left earlier for elementary school after I had rushed around trying to find backpacks, matching shoes, and permission slips signed and ready. I walked tiredly out if the door of our tiny apartment and down the steps to the concrete jungle.

My beat up pick up truck lurched to life as I turned the key after giving a cough it spurted to life and gained speed. I looked out the window at the line of traffic that spilled from the highway I sipped my coffee careful not to burn my tongue and sighed. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror.

Dark bags hung under my eyes from staying up late trying to diecide what bills to pay after the kids had gone to bed. Since the divorce I had heard nothing from Will and money was tighter since all the court payments. So from bedtime till dawn I sat and crunched numbers which always left bad news. I tried not to show for the sake of the kids but the late hours were starting to show.

I turned on the radio and “Your momma don’t dance” blared though the radio. My mind drifted to when I was a kid. My long brown hair tied up in a ponytail flew around carelessly as my father swing me around.

My constant giggling grew louder as he mouthed along to the lyrics as Kenny Loggins voice filled our kitchen. Mom sat at the table clapping along smiling and my father’s hazel eye’s twinkled as I danced around the floor my skirt twirled and my feet tried to stay upright.

The day’s of youth and innocents when the sound of that small FM radio could light up my whole world and the hands of my father guided my though life. I turned up the radio and sang along till the very end.

Love it. The fickle and challenging demands of life transformed by music and the remembering of freedom and the child your character once was.

In this short piece so much backstory and a massive transition/ arc for the main character. Well done. Regards Dawn

But I don’t want to write, I’m tired. I don’t care if you really want sleep, I want to write. Lazy shadow. I’m telling you… just do it in the morning…. you know how you are when you are tired. Shut up! I wanna write this thing! I don’t care how heavy my eyes feel! Whatever. See here I go. Blocking you out so I can write now. I’m writing now. Pencil in my hand and I’m writing. Sucker. Look at that! I wrote two sentences already. Things are happenin’ now! Soon my characters will be bouncing off the walls. The Tired ain’t cuttin’ into my productivity. Ok. So this will have to come first, and that will have to come later. Ooh! Yeah! Love it. Holdin’ back those blinks. Blink Blink Blink. My characters running through the trees! Skipping past…. rock….. trees. running passing rocks. I saw that Ehm! The WATER is running over the rocks, past the gorge. The trees are blooming like… hills… trees… girls… ice cream… girls dancing with ice cream… Whoa! Eyes don’t fail me now! Girls dancing with ice cream? I got this. Quiet! I can DO THIS! hills trees girls Girls dancing with ice cream The trees are blooming like…. …. …. …. Dang it! The trees are blooming like… …. Ugh! I told you so! Fine! I’ll call it for the night. But what am I supposed to do with this mumbo jumbo. What can you do with it? You know you won’t even understand it in the morning Alright. I’ll skim it for usefulness, otherwise I’ll toss it and hope I still got the time and desire to write in the morning. If you would just listen to me a little more often Yeah-yeah. Let’s get some sleep.

This looks familiar! I feel like this is me, lol. Duking it out with myself to get some work done.

Unfortunately, I usually end up writing and falling asleep mid sentence. Yet, if I start writing before I am tired, I can stay up to the wee hours of the morning writing away if I’m into it.

Madness 🙂 My favourite state of mind. And the gem… Girls dancing with ice-cream. Seriously what more could you ask for. Sounds like a good story idea to me. Thanks for sharing. Dawn

This made me smile. I can relate. 🙂 Thank you.

The funny thing is I am super tired right now. I actually have been pretty much too tired to write, so this is like perfect timing for me. I asked my mind what it wanted to write and basically went with this troubled guy. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

He stood up from the chair. The lights were off and so it was dark, difficult to navigate the room. The kitchen light was on. He saw her. His wife chopping something in the kitchen and smiling. She is always happy and busy. So different from me. But she doesn’t know that. She knows nothing about me, what I really am like. I doubt she’d have married me if she knew. I stand there, staring at her from in the darkness. I think about coming in but I don’t want to disturb her. I drift into the bedroom, and fall into dreams. Dreams keep you alive. He had read an article about how men died in horrendous ways from lack of sleep in a war experiment once. Sleep to him was a luxary, and he wanted to stay up just because he could. How many ways do we choose what’s comfortable instead of face something? But he fell asleep before he could work out the thought.

He woke in the morning to his wife laying next to him, lying peacefully by his side. He wanted to reach out and grab her, press his mouth into her soft lips, stroke her warm hip as just the warm up. He moved his hand towards her, wondering himself if he would. But then he hand grazed her back and he tenderly folded his arm over her. A smile curled on her face as she nuzzled into his arm. She let out a large yawn. And turned over and gave him a peck on the lips. “How are you sweetie?” she asked. You look so beautiful he thought. The light coming through thin white curtains made her look warm like she had soaked in warm pools of sunshine all night and came back just to share it with him.

“I’m good. I love you.” he whispered. He returned her kiss with another one. She moved in the kiss, and waited for more. But he got up abruptly and started pulling pants on his legs. “Okay I’m heading to work. I’ll see you tonight, k love.”

“Alright, see you then.” she said, her voice let down.

This is TERRIFIC, Joe! I will have to connect to my inner shadow the next time fatigue hits, but I still have to write. I coax myself with “10 minutes.” I tell myself I only have to write for 10 minutes and I can stop after that, no problem. Plus, it’s okay if it sucks. More times than not, I keep going after 10 minutes.

Yes. The good old 10 minute trick. It works for me too. 😉

Oops, sorry, Dawn. I called you Joe. Thanks again for the great tip, and for responding.

What d o you want to write about? How are you feeling about this?

Dinner. Really? Why? Because it was nice.

In fact it was sheer pleasure. He was here. He was here chatting and eager to engage. He was back home enjoying our company. And he had so much to say. He’s grown up so much, realised so much. Yes, yes I know he’s anxious about not having work. And regretful that he’s burned so many bridges. But he’s young. It is the age for impatience, nervousness, overwhelm mistake making and mayhem.

He shared some of his life with us. The fishing story was my favourite. Remember it? Traipsing out to Mageeries Point, scrambling over smooth granite boulders and and through the gnarly coastal scrub. Showing his friends the ‘secret spot’ and delighting in their surprise and appreciation.

I can imagine the winter sun reluctant to disappear, hanging on to the edge of its low arc and peeling wisps of violet into it’s melting mouth. What a beautiful picture. The voracity of youth shadowed in creamy gold and the invitation of winters twilight. Venus rising to the east. Her full silver skirt studding the way for the misty galaxy to follow her across the sky.

Imagine the silky luminescent pink of the first salmon they caught. The biggest one he’s ever seen. That’s what he said. And her tail flicking salty water in to specks of glitter and splaying her belly on the end of the line like a mermaid jiving.

Did you see the pride on his face when he described the small fire they built from twigs collected from the shrub and small grey smooth drift wood nestled above the high tide line. How they made embers hot enough to steam the fresh salmon they’d wrapped in a skerrick of old tin foil. Like hunters. Proud young men fending for themselves. Surviving on the edge of the world with fire at their feet, the galaxy of their home waking above them and the freshest food on the planet in their hungry bellies.

Did you see the twinkle in his eye. The deep connection buried there. Beyond his iPhone. Beyond his confusion. Beyond the nagging concerns of just starting out into the world of grown men. It was the twinkle of aeons. The knowing of fathers and forefathers. It was the call and the gift of the wild. Dinner on the edge of the beginning.

Sheer pleasure.

I liked this because it expressed what makes going out in the wild really enjoyable. How everything can be emotionally enhanced. I liked the line, “It was the twinkle of the aeons. The knowing of fathers and forefathers.”

When I don’t want to write, and I ask myself that very question, “What do you want to write,” it’s usually a song or a poem. Sometimes it’ll be a plot line for a new novel, even though I’m working on one already! I’ve got notebooks FULL of things I wrote when I “didn’t want to write.” Breaking away from the pattern of the same plot, characters, setting, that you write about every day helps you regain focus (plus come up with a lot of new writings in the process!) And it gives you back the desire to WRITE!

In all you do, do unto the glory of God

I am really just starting to get into story writing, I randomly came up with this story that i could continue on. This is all i could get out in 15.

It felt like there was crude oil in her jean pockets, dried crazy glue in mixed up in her long dirty blond hair and mud underneath her paint cracked nails. It was unbearable, She wanted to run as far as she could but all she could do was sit still and dwell on the approaching verdict. There was nowhere to go, no escape, this could be with her forever. She found herself sitting in a chair elbows to knees staring at the lines, and veins on her palms as if they were tools in this mistake and reminded her it was all too real. The “what ifs” and “buts” clouded her thoughts and she was lost.

Unstuck in time she throughly sifted through her past mistakes and to the future predictions. She dreaded the whole thing. It was like rolling dice but the outcome effected your life and the dice bounced around for days rolling around back and forth. panic and dread sat on her should like a hot iron. She waited in scorn and sat and thought as the dice dance around. What will become of me and how will I continue? she thought.

I just signed up for thewritepractice a few days ago, and just read the comments here. I think I might be hanging out with some good writers! Thank you for sharing the samples of writing, they are all good and interesting, and I hope to read more. I do have a reaction to the post about writing when you’re tired and finding the shadow.

What a coincidence to read about “The Shadow” this morning. For the last two days, I’ve started to feel that I finally understand why I am never pleased with anything I write. Even if other people tell me it’s really good, I read it and wonder, “who wrote this?” I don’t recognize the voice. Lately I started to connect some dots….that when I have an idea or some dialogue in my head, that sounds to me like it’s going to work out on paper, consistently I am disappointed and even angry with what I put on the page. I had started to really listen to those ideas in my head, and in that last 48 hours, understood that it’s not so much the actual ideas that are important, as the tone and manner of speaking that I can distinctly comprehend.

I started reviewing material I’d recently written, and have tried to figure out what voice is speaking when I write/type. Oh no, (loud groans), I do know that voice. That is the writing style I came up with in 8th grade, when I started having to write book reviews, journals, etc. I had to fill a set number of pages, I had to make my teacher think I was really smart and had read the whole book (Great Expectations? Hell No!), and of course, my opinions had to be politically correct, expressed inoffensively, and carefully calibrated to not give the teacher the slightest hint that I might be totally off-my-rocker.

I do have a shadow, though I never thought of her as quite that. I can see her, and now I know it is her that has been running the scripts in my brain. I think in pop psychology, she is my inner child. I have kept her under wraps, because I think she might really be my inner asshole. Well, wasn’t it Allen Ginsberg who said something about not being afraid to howl at the moon? Ok…I’ll give it a try.

Looking forward to hearing some of that hoooowwwling Avril. 🙂 Dawn

This is such a great post! Now that I have a full-time job, I’m starting to realize how crucial every extra bit of time is. There are days where I just want to lie on my couch and pretend my novel isn’t there. For me, I have to get off of the couch. I need to stand up and write at the counter. I make a cup of tea. I try to kickstart my brain again. Exercise helps, too! It gives me that extra bit of energy that I need.

Thanks for your advice! Jenny

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I seem to only write when I’m tired actually. I suppose it shows:

http://ideaofrimbaud.wordpress.com/

And even though that is a fairly shameless plug for this new blog, I appreciated this post. The idea of shadow is an interesting one. Sometimes, though, I find that what I have written in a moment of tired pique is worth exploring more. Am I naive for not wanting to touch that spontaneity? Or am I just too lazy to change my routine?

I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired / bored / uninterested that the best alternative was to eat Elmer’s glue.

Should I consider myself lucky?

wrong blog i guess, i’ve got ‘I biked two miles up painful hills to get my son some food to eat before he gets home day tried + tired from a bad sinus head later that day. (I don’t own a car.) Blea forget it I’m going to sleep anything writing right now would in sad state. Still I liked reading this.

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Langston Hughes Knows You’re Tired—But He’s Not Letting You Off the Hook

Books & Culture

The internet has fallen in love with a poem that reflects our fatigue, but there's a second half that demands our action.

My friends and I discuss the news once a week during our Zoom calls. The conversations are a mix of sympathy, frustration and opinions, but all I can bring myself to say is, “I’m tired.” Apparently, I wasn’t alone. It’s a sentiment reflected by Langston Hughes in a poem that has been posted all over Twitter and Tumblr since late May, in response to the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. In simple words that clearly resonates—I found a Tumblr post with 20,000 notes, and a tweet with more than 28,000 likes—Hughes describes our shared exhaustion: 

I’m so tired of waiting  Aren’t you, For the world to become good And beautiful and kind? 

In this poem, Hughes reflects our feelings of being buried  in injustice. There are moments where we can feel like we have no power over what’s going on. We’re just waiting for something to fall out of the sky and make the world good again. We acutely feel the time pass as we’re waiting. We answer, “Yes, I am tired of waiting.” 

It can be exhausting trying to stay optimistic while hearing the news of people dying from disease and murder and countless other atrocities. Between the relentless news cycle, easy access to social media, and rampant burnout, it can feel like the bad news just piles on, leaving no time to process. It can make a person bone-weary. I read a news headline, and I feel like I’m melting into my bed and becoming a puddle. “Tired” encapsulates this puddle feeling.

Between the relentless news cycle, easy access to social media, and rampant burnout, it can feel like the bad news just piles on, leaving no time to process.

Hughes’s career took off during the Harlem Renaissance. A lover of jazz, he used the music’s rhythm and diction to shape his poems, creating a song and word mix. Jazz poetry suited him as he rejected the classical approach to poetry, instead using common words and simple structures that almost anyone could read. That easygoing beat makes it quick to latch on to his words. Sometimes his poems even sound like comforting nursery rhymes. 

Hughes’s words are simple—“beautiful,” “kind,” and “good”—but they also convey a romantic air. There’s a soft mood to his words, despite the horrors he alludes to. The reader can imagine looking out at the world’s troubles, huddled inside a bubble, disappointed and wondering when things will look less bleak. Hughes’s words can decorate this little bubble creating a tragic but beautiful scene. After all, we all feel tired once in a while. 

There’s a version of this poem for everyone. A serene mountain backdrop to Hughes’s words make a great wallpaper or Facebook post in tough times. You can find beautiful calligraphy of his words on Pinterest to add to an Activism or Altruism inspiration board. There’s always Tumblr accounts filled with black text, white background quotes where “Tired” makes regular appearances.

But the words they’re sharing are only the first half of the poem. The second half is less romantic. 

Let us take a knife And cut the world in two— And see what worms are eating At the rind. 

Hughes wasn’t exhausted. He was fed up. He implores the reader not to wallow in exhaustion but to take action, and not just a performance of action but something deep. He wants action  that cuts the world in half, slicing down to the foundation of our beliefs and institutions, so we can recognize what is souring the world. 

With his “Let us,” Hughes invites others to join in improving the world. Though the Harlem Renaissance is marked as a celebration of Black culture, it was also a time of race riots and lynching, and the art of the time often reflected the inequality Black people faced. Themes like institutional racism, Black identity, and the after effects of slavery  were extremely common. Amongst these themes, Hughes specifically championed unity among all those of African descent. With this invitation he recognizes that change of any amount does not happen singularly but as a joint effort. This is not only a poem for staying in and peering at the trouble from a safe distance. 

We all have times when we feel exhausted, but when a Black man speaks of being tired you cannot ignore his call to action.

When only half the poem is presented, the context of this piece is completely lost. We all have times when we feel exhausted, but when a Black man speaks of being tired you cannot ignore his call to action.  

It’s easier and more comforting to focus on the first half of the poem. It’s easier to stay in the comfort of being tired, to use it as an excuse, rather than taking a brief rest before continuing the fight. We may not want to hear that change might require rioting, shouting, violence. At the very least it certainly isn’t comfortable. The knife and the worms are not #aesthetic.

A poet of the people, I suspect Hughes would have loved seeing his poem shared all over social media to thousands. Hughes found great success with the average Black reader. His reach was so great Hughes may have read his poetry to more people than any other American poet, according to scholar Donald Bernard. Those audiences meant Hughes was the first Black American writer to live off his earnings from writing alone. He aimed to reach the masses of the Black community with his work either in his jazz poetry or work for the famous Black newspaper the Chicago Defender. He often celebrated the diversity of Black people, hoping Black artists would find inspiration within the community rather than looking to white creators. Dedicated to democratizing poetry for his people, we can imagine Hughes would be ecstatic to see his work shared to friends and followers online. He wanted his work to be easily consumed and shared, taking art out of the formal classroom and into the lives of people. 

Hughes saw the beauty and romance of his people, but his frustration with how Black people were treated is clearly evident in his work. And yet we repay him by taking a knife and cutting “Tired” in two—keeping the romantic portion, but not the poet’s ideas for change. We can swallow the emotion but not the action Hughes calls for, informed by his years living through a time of riots, lynching, and segregation.

We need the second half of the poem to remind us to keep fighting.

Cutting the poem is a disservice to Hughes and the struggles he endured and witnessed. They were struggles not unlike what we deal with now. As history circles back we’re left with people who will step up and work for something better and those who’ll let the world rot. Hughes didn’t want us to drop everything because we felt exhausted. And after picking ourselves up he didn’t want us to stop and stare at the worms ruining the world.  Acknowledging the fatigue is only the first step, and seeing the problem is only the second. We need the second half of the poem to remind us to keep fighting.

In cutting the world in half we can see past surface-level actions and demolish the core systems that are built with racism embedded in them. 

Loften Mitchel, a mentee of the poet, described Hughes’s legacy of creating a, “standard of brotherhood and friendship and cooperation.” Hughes wanted better for Black people, but we can’t achieve that by looking out at the world, content to feel the exhaustion of the movement but not participate in it. Don’t stay a puddle. 

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Aesthetic and award-winning.

Cloud Humidifier

June 22, 2021

Words by Shyrie Maharaj

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The author with her Aji in Fiji. Photos courtesy of the author.

A flower market in Kolkata.

The author at Taj Mahal in Agra.

The author's mom praying.

Hawa Mahal in Jaipur.

Amer Fort in Jaipur.

I am tired.

I am tired of questioning whether decisions made about me or for me have racist undertones. I am tired of seeing the white Western world profit off of its watered-down yoga and “golden milk” lattes, with no acknowledgement of the culture being appropriated.

I am tired of seeing people post about the microaggressions they face as members of the BIPOC community. It’s 2021. This shouldn’t still be happening.

I am tired of being embarrassed about my culture’s food. When I was in Grade 2, I starved rather than pull my Nani’s veggie curry out of my bag—I was terrified of having a “smelly” lunch.

I am tired of seeing brands sell forehead jewels and call it “fashion.” Ten years ago, when Indian women wore tikkas, they were called “dot heads.”

I am tired of prefacing sentences with, “My parents are modern—my mom was pretty much raised here,” so that I seem more white. So that people don’t think my parents are old-fashioned, stereotypical immigrants with accents. It’s taken me 28 years to realize that it’s not me who needs to assimilate, though—it’s their stereotypes that need to be broken. It’s their points of reference that need to change.

I am tired of seeing the dominant race profit off the culture and identity they made me so ashamed to be part of growing up.

I am tired of having to be the token Indian or BIPOC individual in the room, standing up for diversity or calling out appropriation. Black squares and Instagram Story shares are not enough. It’s time to see the results of our promised actions.

I am tired of being asked, “But no, where are you really from?” I’m really from my mother’s womb—is that good enough for you? My ancestors were tricked into indentured servitude, unknowingly taken from their motherland to Fiji. Now, we reside in Vancouver (on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples). I’ve spent 28 years trying to figure out “where” I’m from and “what” I am. Indian? Fijian? What I know for sure is that I’m Canadian. Because I was born here.

I am tired of referring to myself as an “Oreo” or “coconut”—brown on the outside but white on the inside. Why do we say that as if it’s something to brag about? I used to feel good when friends would tell me, “I forget that you’re not white.” But honestly, I am ashamed of that now. Because if you’re mistaking everything about me except for the color of my skin, that means I’ve lost my culture and my heritage.

I am tired from the time and effort I have taken to learn about racism and aggressions of all kinds against other minorities—while shouldering the same or similar issues myself. Where are the allies? Because from where I stand, it’s still the BIPOC community doing the damn work.

Ask JKE: “How Did You Prepare to Jump?”

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• Smart Living
• Mental Health

Why I'm Tired of Being a "Strong Woman"

When I was in kindergarten, I always drew my mother to be as tall as the whole paper — and all my other family members were always drawn significantly shorter than her. My teachers would question these works of art, but in my eyes, my mother towered over everything — taking it all in stride with a silent, unfaltering strength.

If the world is a scary place, then my mother is electrifying. She uses fashion as armor, and has the type of walk that lets you know she's always headed somewhere important — things she eventually passed on to me. Whenever she felt sad, she'd channel her energy into something productive, like painting our bathroom walls. If we ever struggled financially — or struggled in general — I'd never know about it because she always shouldered the burden without any indication of stress.

We were a party of two, an only-daughter-and-single-mother duo almost as close as Rory and Lorelai Gilmore. I wasn't always conscious of the meaning connected to the roles we played in each others' lives and how they affected our dynamic. But, more importantly, I wasn't aware of how I was internalizing some of the expectations that came with our roles.

As an adult, I know that our family dynamic molded and blessed me with a fierce independence and strong will, but it also crippled me with needing to uphold an ideal that hasn't always felt authentic to me. I fear asking for help. I fear inconveniencing the people around me. I fear allowing myself the luxury of genuine vulnerability.

As outsiders to mainstream American culture, being strong wasn't really a choice — it was survival.

For my mother and I, the mandate of embodying the strong woman archetype, especially as a Latina and Black Latina, respectively, helped us navigate our most trying situations, and forced us to always have things under control. As outsiders to mainstream American culture, being strong wasn't really a choice — it was survival.

Due to this pressure, I've felt like I have to constantly function at my highest capacity in every setting — which of course, is unrealistic and leaves me exhausted. I've felt the need to be able to show up as the most empathetic for my friendships, the most emotionally stable in my relationship, and the most creative, resourceful, and capable person at school and work. At times I've felt like I'm playing "The Sims," guiding my character through the many factors in her life and anxiously tracking her performance in all of them.

There have been countless times when a solution to my problems has simply been to ask for help — to allow myself to need . But in my mind, that would mean I'm admitting defeat — that I'm not actually handling everything all that well.

My obsession with perfectionism and embodying this picture of strength has been most challenging this past year, especially after starting grad school during a pandemic , when my functionality and mental capacity has felt lower than it's ever been. Settling into a new city during the busiest year of my life as a grad student has forced me to confront that my ideal of strength leaves no space for my humanness, and often leaves me isolated and burnt out. I learned that I needed to allow myself a plethora of vulnerable moments in order to build a community.

Recently, the concept of "softness" has shown up on my social media feed, and has been more widely discussed among communities of color — primarily among Black women. While there's not a set definition for the term, the idea behind softness is fairly simple: living your life in a way that makes space for your vulnerability, and by extension, your inner peace.

As I navigate my transition into embracing softness, I've realized my most meaningful relationships and cherished moments have been the ones where I've specifically asked for the things I needed.

Since my mother so gracefully carried us through our survival phases, I now have the luxury being able to sit down and reflect on not only how her strong will shaped me, but also how much I want to incorporate that independence into other parts of my existence. This entire process of learning to be more soft has required a lot of learning and unlearning, and rethinking what strength looks like.

As I navigate my transition into embracing softness, I've realized my most meaningful relationships and cherished moments have been the ones where I've specifically asked for the things I needed. Whether that was allowing my friends to take care of me, or allowing myself to be seen and loved fully, these too have been impactful moments in which I've understood that there is strength in vulnerability.

While my mother's example of a strong woman set me up for independence and stability, my version has some alterations. I'm someone who admits defeat, allows herself to be taken care of, and embraces vulnerability and emotion. Both my mother and I are strong in our own ways, but I've learned that strength can come in many forms. It just so happens that my form of strength allows room for me to feel more than I used to.

• Personal Essay

Psychotactics

Why Clients Buy—And Why They Don't

Why Writing Is So Exhausting (And How You Can Make It Less Of A Chore)

Author: Sean D'Souza

Is writing making you tired? Is there a way to overcome exhaustion when writing?

When we think of writing, we automatically assume it's the act of sitting down at the computer and creating a new article, report or book. What we seem to miss is that there are other factors that come well before the writing process that drain us more than the writing itself.

What's even more important is that there is a way to avoid the other factors—those minefields easily. While writing may still be difficult, there's no reason to make it even harder than it is.

Let's find out how to remove the unnecessary obstacles that are making us so tired while writing.

Right click below to save this episode. Re-release : Why Writing Is So Exhausting (And How You Can Make It Less Of A Chore) Original : Why Writing Is So Exhausting

This article is an AI-generated transcript.

Here's a question. Do you know what is the top-selling furniture product at Ikea?

Okay. Do you want a clue? Ikea has sold 110 million pieces of this furniture since it was introduced in 1978. Still don't know what it is? It's Billy, Billy, Billy!

Billy the bookcase has sold 110 million pieces. And amazing as that sounds, it's not the best selling product at Ikea. The best selling product is not a piece of furniture at all, but instead meatballs! Over a billion meatballs have been sold, and that's a ratio that's 22 times greater than Billy the bookcase.

This means the best selling product of a furniture store—is not furniture at all.

And this ties in nicely with what we're going to cover today, which is about article writing. And why we find it so exhausting to write an article. We often think that it's because of the topic or because of something that has to do with the article itself.

But this is the kind of like the Ikea story.

We think the main thing is the furniture, furniture, furniture, but the meatball bit can't be left out. The same applies to article writing. We are fixated with writing the article, but that's not always what we need to focus on.

It could be something else that we're doing that's causing all the trouble. It's not about the writing itself. It's about all the other stuff.

What is that other stuff?

The three things we're going to cover on article writing are:

1- The timing of the writing deadline. 2- How you approach your editing process when writing articles. 3- And finally, it's the result.

Let's start with the first one, which is if you write on the day of the deadline.

1- The timing of the writing deadline.

One of the things that I was really proud of when I was creating a presentation in Keynote was how long it took me to do such a task. It would often take me three weeks to four weeks. That's a whole month to do a single presentation. And I wore that like a badge of honour.

When I was making presentations on stage, I'd be sure to let the organizer know that it took a whole month to do that presentation. The presentations were good. They had tight animation.

They had loads of cartoons. And when you looked at the presentation, it looked like at least two, three weeks work, if not a month's work.

However, in time I found that I could do this in 15 days and then eventually in three days. This is precisely what I did when I had to make a presentation for the Brain Audit Webinar Series.

I waited for the last three days. And this is not uncommon for most of us when we have a deadline; we know when the deadline is showing up.

And usually, we are going to procrastinate until the very last moment. And at this point, I'm going to guess what you're thinking. You're going to think. Well, there's so much pressure. It's so frustrating. That's why it's exhausting.

No, no, no. Yes. There's no doubt that there is pressure because you're doing everything at the last minute, and you don't have breathing space if a computer stops working, or if someone has to go to the doctor or just about anything has to happen.

Now you did, you don't have any leeway, but that's not the main problem.

The main problem in writing is not in writing itself but about thinking and discussing.

• An article starts with an outline or a topic, just a random topic. It doesn't have to be the final headline. It could be just a random topic.
• And then after that, what you've got to do is think about it. Why are you writing this article?
• And then comes the discussion part. I tend to do this both on WhatsApp or through some messenger, or even on the forum in 5,000 BC or when I'm speaking to Renuka or anybody that I meet and what's happening is I'm clarifying the concepts in my head.

And nothing has been written down on paper yet.

When I follow that kind of system, then I start to edit. And this is the beauty of any kind of creative skill, whether it's writing or photography, or just about anything; the crux becomes what you keep out of it, what you get rid of.

We get stuck with writing because we're trying to put in too much stuff.

Too much stuff confuses us, confuses the reader, confuses everybody. It's very crucial not to be writing on the last three days.

If it takes you three days to create something, you cut out the thinking and discussing time, and that's when it becomes more frustrating. Everything is so much more tedious.

And this first point goes to show that it's not about the deadline.

The deadline can be crushing. But if we have that breathing space, then we think better. And when we think better, we move all the elements better. And then eventually, the writing is still frustrating, but not as frustrating as before.

Now, admittedly, no one can give you this magic bullet. We all know that we should be doing stuff in advance, and we don't do it.

But if you're wondering, why do I feel this way? Every single time?

It's because you're waiting for the last minute. You can't fix this problem by waiting for the last minute. You have to be circling the airport a few times before you get that clearance to land.

That's the first thing that you need to look at. Are you writing for the deadline with just the allocated time? Well, that's problem number one, which takes us to problem number two, namely editing.

2) How you approach your editing process when writing articles.

We've been conducting article writing courses all the way from 2005, I think. And I have never met anyone – Who's not a perfectionist.

Every single client that we've ever had has been a perfectionist. So if you say, Oh wait, I'm a perfectionist at writing, then you're not someone special. Every single person that you will meet, or I will meet, is also a perfectionist at writing, which kind of begs the question:

What do you mean by perfectionist?

And when you ask people, what do you mean by you're a Perfectionist. They say, “Well, I can't submit any sloppy stuff. So I go back, and I edit everything, and I spend a lot of time with the starting paragraph. And then I go back, and it takes a long time to edit everything, to clean it up, to make it really good.”

Well, here's some news for you. Nobody's work is good. And we know this to be true because you can test it right now. Look at what you've written today.

And then you can look at that work three years from now. And then you can look at the work five years from now. The more space you have between now and five years, the more you will find today's work to be shoddy.

And this is for everyone. And this is for everything.

If I look back on the podcast that I created five years ago, well, they're very sloppy, and you don't have to take my word for it. Just go and scroll all the way down to the first Three Month Vacation podcast, and you will find that's not so great after all. So I don't go back and listen to the old podcast.

What has this got to do with writing?

The point is you can do much better, and you can become more of the perfectionist that you want to be by writing more frequently. Then by cleaning up one piece endlessly.

And this is what used to happen on the earlier article writing course.

We didn't have an allocation of time. We used to have just an assignment. So you have to write an article and then off you go write the article. And it only occurred to me that there was a problem when one of my clients said that she was spending three hours every night writing an article.

And of course, she was spending about an hour writing the article and then two hours editing it. And it might sound excessive to you that someone would go through so much trouble to clean up an article. The reality is that no matter how much she cleaned up the article, it was only about 2% or 3% better.

I'm plucking that figure out of thin air, which is to say the edited/perfectionist article was barely better than the one-hour-uneditied article.

On our article writing course, we started to put in timings.

As in: you have to write this article within an hour or within 45 minutes. And when that timer goes off, you have to stop.

And then you get 20-30 minutes to edit. But no more than that. The reason for that is that if you're exhausted from writing this article, and then you spend another big chunk of time editing the article, then your article is not much better, which is really sad when you think about it, because we all want to do the best that we can.

But it's not much better.

What makes the article better is for you to write the next day and the day after and the day after.

So frequency becomes the way that you get better at article writing; frequency becomes the way that writing becomes part of the system, and then you don't get so exhausted trying to be a perfectionist.

There is no perfectionism at all in the system that we've been following, which is to go back and clean it and edit it. And no, it doesn't work that way.

So here's what you need to do.

Step one: You need to have a timer set for one hour. I don't think you should spend more than an hour writing a single article. You have to finish writing the article from the beginning to the end.

This is not taking all the outlining and thinking. This is just you started writing, and you finished writing in one hour.

And then you allocate just 20 minutes for editing. Again, another timer goes off, and you stop. Now, if you keep space between writing and editing, you aren't rushing towards a deadline; well, your editing will be so much better.

So instead of 3%, maybe the article will be 4% better, but that's it.

The only way you can remove the exhaustion is to write on a consistent basis.

And the reason for this is very simple.

When we write on a regular basis, what we're doing is we're making mistakes, and we don't know the mistakes we're making, but our brain works out, “Oh, you did this today”.

And now you're doing that tomorrow. And it kind of fixes the mistakes, doing a course, learning how to write that, kind of remove some of the mistakes as well.

But editing is a curse

It's a curse, not because of anything, but because it's not improving your article as much as you think it is.

I have seen hundreds and hundreds of articles, and they've been edited to death, and they're not improving at the rate that the writer things to improving, and the writer can see this themselves years down the line, or even months down the line.

So do yourself a favour. Start two timers and get going.

And that's when you will find that instead of three hours of writing, you're only going to spend an hour and then later in the day or later, next day, you can do some editing and you're on your way. And that's when you find, Oh, wait, this article isn't as frustrating as exhausting.

Again, it's still hard work until you become very good at it.

But at least it's not as demoralizing as it is right now. That brings us to the end of the second part.

• The first thing is the deadline— If you're too close to the deadline, no breathing space, you're in trouble.
• The second thing is you're writing to that crazy deadline, but you're also editing like crazy thinking.

Your article is going to be 200% better or 300% better. Nope. 3% better.

Maybe, maybe. It's not worth spending all that time for 3%. Just tidy it up two months from now. That's when you'll have a better article two years from now.

This takes us to the third part, which is probably the most crucial of all.

3 – And finally, it's the result.

And precisely why article writing is so frustrating. What's it about ? What do you want the customer to do or think once you're done with the article?

Here's a little test, pick seven or eight random articles on the internet. And then just by the headline, try and figure out what is the result that they're trying to get.

And then maybe read the first paragraph. If you have some time and try and figure decipher, what kind of result you are going to get after reading that article, and you can do this on YouTube.

You can do this on podcasts. You can do this anywhere. Just try within the first few minutes. What is going to happen once you get to the end and I'm going to make it slightly easier for you.

I'm going to just pick some from YouTube because it's the same thing. That's just content anyway. Okay. Here's the first topic, iPad tips and tricks. Everything you need to know about the iPad.

Can you see the result? No, you can't. You can't cover it or everything in a single article. Of course, it's going to go off on a tangent.

Here is the second video title. And that is the best cheapest espresso setup, which is under 250 pounds. Is that promising a result? I think so you're going to have two or three units and you're going to look at which ones are the best ones.

And, and here's the third one, another coffee. How managing the temperature of the water improves the taste of the coffee?

And this simple strategy of knowing what results the client is going to get when they finish the article enables you to direct them precisely to that spot.

There's no fluffing in wondering where is this article going? No, you have a destination. And you can see this right in the headline. Even if it's a random headline, it's not a polished headline, it's just a working topic.

It doesn't matter. You can see that there is no result when we get to the end. There is no result. And because of that, the writer is also confused. The thoughts are confused. The ideas are confused. The discussion that follows from there is confused.

And then you're struggling, and this is not just for articles or videos, but even when I'm writing a book, I'll look at that section of that chapter and go, when the reader comes to the end of this page, or when the reader comes to the end of this section, what do they feel or what has changed their mindset or what can they do?

And when you have that kind of focus about when I get to the end, when the reader gets to the end, what's going to happen, are there a thought process or a physical change in what they do?

It doesn't matter, but you've set out in advance. What's going to happen in the end. And this is a beautiful process because it makes your life so simple as a writer.

Not easy, but much simpler than if you just wander into the article and go, okay, I'm just going to write an article. No, what's going to happen at the end.

If you determine that the title of your article changes, the tone of your article changes, everything changes. And of course it speeds up things because you know, I'm headed here.

It's like a road trip, you know exactly what you're going. And you're not just running left and right. Any place at all, you following a predetermined pathway and not surprisingly, that takes out a lot of the frustration from writing

We set out on a mission didn't we? We didn't look at writing and structure and how the headline works and how you need to start.

No, we looked at the outside stuff, the diversions, the things that get in your way that have nothing to do with the process of writing itself, which means that the next time you sit down to write, you should have these three things in front of you.

Or at least remember them so that you don't have the same problem. The first of course was the deadline.

We all know that we want to procrastinate and everybody procrastinates, you're not special, but procrastinate with some breathing time with at least doubled the breathing time, because you want to think it through, you want to discuss it.

And that's what makes it easier, easier to get rid of the stuff that gets in the way. Just by the discussion, you get clarity. As you find with many discussions, you get more clarity as you have to express yourself over and over again. And if you don't have that space, you're stuck. You only have that limited time.

And then if anything goes wrong, well, we know how that rolls out. Don't we? The second point is that everybody is a perfectionist. There is no such thing while I've never seen anyone. Who's not a perfectionist.

When it comes to writing. And yet I've never seen anyone whose work has improved a hundred percent or 50% or even 10% just because they spent all that additional time on editing.

What I have seen is that people who write on a consistent basis, they improve quite dramatically in a month. In two months and three months, you find it's much easier.

Your best friend and your most hated enemy is the timer. Keep a timer for the article, keep a timer for the editing, and you will find that the whole process is a lot less exhausting.

However, and this is the one thing that you have to remember if you don't know the result, when that article is written, when the reader comes to the last line or the last slide or the last, whatever, there should be a result.

And you should determine that result in advance. So if it is about how to change the temperature of the water and you get a better coffee now, you know exactly the direction that you need to go in.

And there's none of that fluffing around. I can't tell you how much of a relief it is when you know, precisely what the result is going to be.

And in today's world, where there are so many of these articles that are just nonsense. Your article stands out. Your video stands out just from the headline itself.

Forget about the article. Just the headline itself says this person has determined in advance where they're going, and that brings us to the end of this podcast. Determine your results in advance, and you see how much easier it's going to be to write articles.

A quick summary

1- If you write on the day of the deadline. 2- If you take more than 20 minutes to edit your work. 3- If you have no clue what the reader must do/or think when they finish reading your piece.

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Words That Burn Weekly Essay

Tired by Langston Hughes

A subtle call to action in a world gone wrong.

Want to listen before you read?

Hello and welcome to words that burn, the podcast taking a closer look at poetry. This week’s poem is Tired by Langston Hughes. This is not the first poet of the Harlem Renaissance to be covered on the podcast, Gwendolyn Brooks and the oft overlooked Fenton Johnson  have also featured, both episodes are linked in the description. Langston Hughes, however, looms over both. James Mercer Langston Hughes is probably the most recognised figure of that massive literary movement 1

This is a deceptively short poem and a wonderful cure for the notion that ‘’real poetry’’, and I use heavy quotes there, is somehow lengthy and wordy. Here the poet lives up to their reputation as being an accessible poet. 2 This poem Tired seems designed to reach as many people as possible, it avoids putting people off with the so-called wall of text. It refuses to cloak its meaning in gorgeous abstract imagery or ornamentation. Instead Langston Hughes, chooses to deliver a succinct and impactful call to action, hiding as exhaustion. 

It seems lately that I am drawn more and more to poems that look unflinchingly at the state of the world. That is to say, that many of the poems I’m reading are written in reaction to the state of the world today or rather the frustration of comparing the world as it is, to the way we feel it should be. Hughes puts it simply in that first simple half:

I am so tired of waiting, Aren't you, For the world to become good And beautiful and kind?

Here Hughes begins to weave his communication magic. His use of direct English is augmented by his choice of format; that second line aren’t you? Inviting us directly into conversation with him. This is no great rallying cry, no crushing weight of the responsibility of a revolution. Rather it is an appeal to our human nature through emotion; I’m so tired of waiting.  That most common of human emotions, especially today, is tiredness . Anyone reading or listening feels seen and heard. Those words sing to us. Inviting us gently to discourse.

He increases that appeal through direct language, verbs like  good, beautiful and kind are unambiguously positive, impossible to misconstrued and so difficult to ignore when they are absent.

Many of Hughes’ poems were short and to the point, for the simple reason, which he stated directly was: ‘’to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind” . 3 He took that goal even further by mimicking the cadence, rhythms and techniques of African American folk music too. Here he is discussing it briefly in 1967:

‘’ later on I quite consciously begin to try to create poetry in the style of our folk songs   our spirituals and our blues and our work songs.’’ 4

This is how Hughes became a natural leader of the Harlem Renaissance. As academic Cheryl A. Wall put it: 

‘’ The project of the New Negro Renaissance, as it was then called, was to achieve through art the equality that black Americans had been denied in the social, political, and economic realms. Segregation was the law in much of the United States, and the practice in the rest. Despite the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP, founded in 1909) and the National Urban League (founded in 1910), the fight for equality had been thwarted.’’ 5

In creating these direct, non alienating poems, Hughes found himself quickly becoming the Harlem Renaissance’s most popular writer. Given the nature of the poem, it’s even less surprising that Hughes found himself becoming a political figure. 6

I am definitely not the first to notice this poem's appeal. In 2020 the poem had its fifteen minutes of fame so to speak,being shared like wildfire across social media. Writer Jasmine Harris documented the phenomenon in an article, writing:

‘’[the poem]  has been posted all over Twitter and Tumblr since late May, in response to the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. In simple words that clearly resonates—I found a Tumblr post with 20,000 notes, and a tweet with more than 28,000 likes’’ 7

Harris goes on to note that while the first section appears everywhere, the second section of the poem is often left out:

Let us take a knife

And cut the world in two-

And see what worms are eating

At the rind.

There is an air of French revolution in that second part. Nothing so obvious as to be blatant violence, but enough to incite action in the listener. Let us take a knife is hard to ignore as a metaphor.  The poem has moved from a gentle sharing of exhaustion to a plan of action.

Hughes wrote this poem in 1930 8 and was no doubt aware that things were not changing for black people in the United States. In 1937 he gave the speech, which echoed the sentiment of this poem:

“We are tired of a world where, when we raise our voices against oppression, we are immediately jailed, intimidated, beaten, sometimes lynched.’’ 9

Anyone would be tired in the face of such injustice. Many were, I mentioned Fenton Johnson at the top of the episode, another member of the Harlem renaissance. He also published a poem entitled Tired but ends in a bitter acceptance of the state of the world. Hughes would not grant himself or his reader this escape. His call to action calls for a removal of the things that have made it so.  

There is a recognition in the words cut the world in two that this undertaking is a herculean task that will leave his world unrecognisable but for Hughes only a radical course of action will reveal what worms are eating at the rind. 

That final line is insidious and one that burrowed its way into my own mind. I could not shake the notion that some systems in the world were rotten. It is no wonder this second half is often omitted from social media posts and pinterest. It lacks the gentle appeal of the first half. Its lines are full of sickening frustration and quiet radicalism. 

What was once a soft poem, exploring the exhaustion of modern life becomes a subtle demand for action from Hughes.

There is a strong subversive tone at work in the poem. This subversion was well trodden territory for Hughes, who spent much of his thirties exploring alternative ideologies, the type which might deliver African Americans from the dystopian conditions they were occupying. 10

Many years later, in 1953, these political poems came back to haunt him as he was forced to testify before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations led by Senator Edward McCarthy. 11 This era became known as ‘’Mccarthyism.’’

Following this experience, which was harrowing as torture was alleged prior to the trial 12 , Hughes stepped away from radical poetry.

Despite that, the legacy of this poem endures. It instantly struck a chord in me when I read it and based on 2020 did the same for thousands of people. It addresses the unease that many of us feel daily; that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. For Hughes it was civil rights, in 2020 it was Black Lives Matter and those issues of systemic racism still exist today. It could equally be applied to climate anxiety or political corruption too.

Crucially however, Hughes reminds us that all is not lost, through collective action; let us take a knife we might somehow set the course of the world right but more than that we must not give in and succumb to the exhaustion that is so omnipresent in modern times.

What did you think of the poem? I'd like to point out, as always, that this is my interpretation and as such very much up for debate. 

You can find the show notes for the episode in the description  below

If you enjoyed the poem and would like to get in touch check out the links in the description. I’m one instagram and twitter in case you’d like bonus content.

If you really enjoyed the episode please consider giving me a review wherever you listen, it helps me out massively.

I have an additional favour to ask this week: the Irish podcast awards are currently open for voting and the listeners choice award is linked below. If you’ve been enjoying the show please consider voting for it.

This week's episode was written and produced by me, Benjamin Collopy, the music in this week's episode was by Mattia Vlad Morleo and is used under creative commons license, you can find a link to his work in the description.

Want to hear the epdisode?

Rampersad, Arnold (Introduction) (1997). Alain Locke (ed.). The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (1st Touchstone ed.). New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0684838311.

 Conan, Neil. “Celebrating The Legacy Of Langston Hughes.” Broadcast. Talk Of The Nation. NPR, February 1, 2012. 

Rampersad, Arnold. Essay. In The Life of Langston Hughes Vol.II, 414. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 

Langston Hughes Speaking at UCLA 2/16/1967. YouTube. UCLA Comm Studies, 2014.

 Wall, Cheryl A. “Chapter One: When the Negro Was in Vogue.” Essay. In The Harlem Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction, 20. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016

 Harris, Jasmine“Langston Hughes Knows You're Tired-but He's Not Letting You off the Hook.” Electric Literature. Electric Lit, July 30, 2020. https://electricliterature.com/langston-hughes-knows-youre-tired-but-hes-not-letting-you-off-the-hook/. 

Hughes, Langston. “Tired .” New Masses, February 1931.

Graham, Shane D. “2. Marks of A Rebellious Slave.” Essay. In Cultural Entanglements Langston Hughes and the Rise of African and Caribbean Literature, 114. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2020.

 Graham, Shane D. “2. Marks of A Rebellious Slave.” Essay. In Cultural Entanglements Langston Hughes and the Rise of African and Caribbean Literature, 114. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2020.

Sharf, James C. (1981). "Testimony of Richard T. Seymour, before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Senate Committee on the Judiciary". doi:10.1037/e578982009-004.

 Sharf, James C. (1981). "Testimony of Richard T. Seymour, before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Senate Committee on the Judiciary". doi : 10.1037/e578982009-004 .

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Summary and Study Guide

“Tired” is one of Langston Hughes’s less publicized poems. First published in the February 1931 edition of an American Marxist journal called New Masses , the lyrics touch on the themes of injustice, inequality, and oppression—ideas that occur throughout Hughes's work and in his better-known poems like “The Ballad of the Landlord” (1940) and “ Harlem ” (1951). Hughes was a part of the Harlem Renaissance. The movement acquired its name from the predominantly Black New York City neighborhood. In the 1920s and 1930s, many Black artists in Harlem began to create critical works that helped them and future Black artists express themselves boldly and unapologetically. These artists reshaped Black literature and transformed American literature overall. Hughes’s voice was one of the most prominent. A prolific writer, Hughes wrote newspaper columns, plays, screenplays, fiction, a novel, books for children, two autobiographies, and countless poems. As with many of Hughes’s works, “Tired” relates to his lifelong commitment to writing about the manifold wrongs of the world.

Poet Biography

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Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902. His mother, Carrie Langston, came from a prosperous family: Her father was a successful grocer and farmer, and her youngest brother became the president of Howard University. Creative and passionate, Carrie wanted to be a performer, but the racist and sexist norms of the 19th-century quashed her dream. Eventually, Carrie met James Nathaniel Hughes. Langston Hughes was not their first child. In 1900, Carrie gave birth to a boy who didn’t survive infancy. A year after Hughes’s birth, James moved to Mexico City. Carrie left Hughes with her mother, Mary, and followed James to Mexico. In Lawrence, Kansas, Hughes was unhappy with his grandmother, Mary. She had trouble providing food and paying the mortgage, which made Hughes hungry and scared about the future. However, he began to develop a love of books.

Hughes’s parents fought often and eventually separated. Carrie remarried, and Hughes spent a great deal of his adolescence moving around the Midwest with his mother and stepfather. In eighth grade, Hughes was named class poet. At graduation, Hughes recited his poem and received a loud ovation. The power of poetry inspired Hughes to keep writing.

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After quarrelsome visits with his father in Mexico, Hughes moved to New York and enrolled in Columbia University in 1921. A year later, Hughes left Columbia. After traveling and working on ships, Hughes returned to New York in 1925, where he met Alain Locke, who, that year, edited the influential anthology of Black writers, The New Negro . He also met Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, and many other critical figures associated with the Black artistic boom in New York City that became known as the Harlem Renaissance.

A big supporter of Harlem Renaissance artists was Carl Van Vechten, who showed Hughes’s poetry to Alfred A. Knopf. In 1926, Knopf published Hughes’s first poetry collection The Weary Blues . That same year, Hughes published “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” in The Nation . In this seminal essay, Hughes draws attention to the central traits of the Harlem Renaissance and the mission of many other Black artists.

In 1927, Hughes published his second volume of poetry Fine Clothes to the Jew (Alfred A. Knopf), which portrayed some of the ugliness in the Black community. In 1930, Hughes published his first novel Not Without Laughter (Random House). In 1931, Hughes visited the American South and met the Scottsboro Boys—nine Black teens falsely accused of raping two white women on a train near Scottsboro, Alabama. Later in the decade, Hughes traveled to the Soviet Union and Spain, where he reported on the Spanish Civil War as a newspaper correspondent.

The year 1940 began with the publication of The Big Sea . Richard Wright also published his violent and controversial novel Native Son (Harper & Brothers) in 1940, and Hughes criticized its bellicose message. Later, Hughes voiced his disagreement with the radical politics of the Black writer Amiri Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones) and the revolutionary organization the Black Panthers. In turn, writers like Baraka and James Baldwin criticized Hughes as overly basic and insufficiently transgressive. In 1951, Hughes published Montage of a Dream Deferred (Henry Holt and Company). A year later, he wrote the introduction to the centenary edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin . In a famous essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1955), Baldwin lambasted Stowe’s antislavery novel for whitewashing Black people.

As Hughes’s relationship with publications like New Masses indicates, Hughes was sympathetic toward communism and its emphasis on the working class. During the 1940s and 1950s, the supposed threat of communism preoccupied politicians like Senator Joseph McCarthy. This period was called the Second Red Scare, and it led to myriad rumors and accusations. In 1953, Hughes spoke to McCarthy’s Subcommittee on Investigations and distanced himself from communism. Hughes’s didn’t implicate other people, but his disavowal caused a split between him and notable Black figures like the writer W. E. B. Du Bois and the actor Paul Robeson.

Despite the ideological discord, Hughes remained productive. In 1959, Knopf published his Selected Poems , and in 1961, he was inducted into the illustrious National Institute of Arts and Letters. A year later, he began his weekly column for The New York Post . In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson made Hughes the leader of an American delegation to the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar. Then, in May of 1967, Hughes died in a New York hospital due to prostate cancer.

Hughes, Langston. “ Tired .” 1931. Genius .

Langston Hughes’s poem “Tired” starts with a declaration: “I am so tired of waiting” (Line 1). In Line 2, the speaker addresses the audience and asks the reader or listener, “Aren’t you”? Next, the speaker explains that he is tired of waiting “[f]or the world to become good / And beautiful and kind” (Lines 3-4). Thus, the speaker wants to know if the reader feels the same about how long it’s taking the world to blossom into a decent, lovely place.

Halfway through the poem, the speaker suggests a remedy to the problem articulated in the first part of the poem. Offering a solution to the bad, ugly, and mean world, the speaker proposes, “Let us take a knife / And cut the world in two” (Lines 5-6). In the final two lines of the poem, the speaker explains the intended results of this action. By slicing the world in two, the speaker and the reader can “see what worms are eating / At the rind” (Lines 7-8). Now, with the world cut open, it’s possible to identify the bad actors (the worms) who are comprising (eating) society (the rind).

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I Am Tired by Fernando Pessoa: poem analysis

• fernando-pessoa

This is an analysis of the poem I Am Tired that begins with:

I am tired, that is clear, Because, at certain stage, people have to be tired....

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• Analysis of Sonnet I
• Analysis of Harvestwoman
• Analysis of Sonnet VIII

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PROGRESSIVE ENGLISH

Other ways to say I am tired in English/ Advanced English language learning

• Expressions

What comes to mind when you hear the word “tired”? Do you envision moral, mental, or physical fatigue? After a long day at work or while watching a long show in the audience, you can use the adjective “tired.” It is a word with a wide variety of meanings, to briefly describe it. We can also express our level of fatigue in many different figurative ways.

If you want to speak basic English, you don’t need to know many expressions, but it’s beneficial to know multiple ways to state things if you want to speak advanced or fluent English.

Understanding various expressions not only improves our ability to communicate with others but also makes our language more interesting. Advanced or native English speakers may employ a wide range of idioms and expressions. It will be challenging to converse with that person if we are unfamiliar with many expressions.

Let’s look at a few different English expressions for tiredness and fatigue. Here are a few other ways to say “I’m tired” in English.

• I’m dead tired
• I’m worn out
• I am drained
• I’m exhausted
• I’m burnt out
• I’m fatigued
• I’m flat out tired
• I’m running on fumes
• I’m dog tired
• I’m tired to the bone
• I’m knackered
• I’m dead on my feet
• I’m dragging
• I’m running on empty
• I’m tired out
• I’m gonna hit the sack
• I’m whacked
• I’m stuffed.
• I’m bunched
• I’m shattered
• I’m wrecked
• I’m shagged
• I’m on my last leg
• I’m at the end of my rope
• I’m off to bed
• I’m dead to the world
• I can hardly keep my eyes open
• I’m dead beat
• I’m washed out

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'Silent and tired Trump' is 'barely a witness to his own trial': reporter

O ver the past six weeks, former President Donald Trump has been largely away from the campaign trail, and has instead been confined to a chilly courtroom he's referred to as " the icebox ." One reporter who has covered the trial from the very beginning noted that Trump has been asleep for most of it.

In a recent essay for the Independent , journalist Alex Woodward described the bizarre trial proceedings as they unfolded day-to-day. He wrote that the Manhattan courtroom where New York Supreme Court justice Juan Merchan has been presiding over the trial is constantly abuzz with a hodgepodge of both high-profile news anchors like CNN's Jake Tapper and Fox News' Jeanine Pirro, along with "veteran court reporters and exhausted print journalists operating on little sleep." Another person apparently not getting enough sleep is the 45th president of the United States, who Woodward said often has trouble keeping his eyes open for most of the day.

"After snaking through two lines for metal detectors downstairs, up the elevators back to the 15th floor, through another two rows of bag checks and another set of metal detectors, we filed back into the courtroom before the former president trudged inside and plopped himself at the defense table ," Woodward wrote, describing the immediate aftermath of a man self-immolating outside of the courthouse during the last day of jury selection.

READ MORE: 'He sets people off': Here's what prospective hush money jurors said about Trump

"There, we continued to bear witness to a silent and tired Trump, who slouches, stares and keeps his eyes shut for six to seven hours a day, three to four days a week — a view that’s been afforded to only his entourage and the handfuls of attorneys, court officers, journalists and members of the public allowed inside," he continued. "He lumbers in and out of the court, sits briefly by himself at the defense table before his attorneys join him, then keeps his eyes closed for most of the day."

"His mouth falls open occasionally, before he appears to snap awake and scrunch his face as if he’s listening harder," he added. "He sinks into his chair and disappears, barely a witness to his own trial."

During multiple occasions, other journalists have also noted Trump's pattern of falling asleep during the proceedings that will determine his freedom. Earlier this month, MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin said the former president's lawyers tried " a number of different devices to keep Trump awake ," with mixed results.

"When there are sidebars, an attorney doesn't leave his side anymore, because leaving him alone means leaving him to potentially sleep. He has a stack of papers with him at all times now to go through. But neither of those things seem to have protected Trump from his own exhaustion," Rubin said. "More than not, when I looked up to see how Trump was receiving the testimony, Trump was not receiving it all, because his eyes were closed."

READ MORE: 'Such low energy': Trump relentlessly mocked for once again falling asleep during trial

Both the prosecution and the defense are back in court after the Memorial Day weekend to make their closing arguments. Defense counsel Todd Blanche is currently presenting his closing arguments to the jury, and prosecutors with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office will follow.

Jury deliberations will begin after both sides have presented their closing arguments. Last week, Politico legal correspondent Josh Gerstein said he didn't expect jurors to take more than two or three days to decide on a verdict.

Trump is facing 34 felony counts of falsification of business records. Judge Merchan has told jurors that while they must unanimously agree that Trump falsified records in each of the 34 counts to cover up a separate "predicate crime ," they didn't have to all agree on what crime was allegedly being covered up.

Click here to read Woodward's full essay in the Independent.

READ MORE: Judge Merchan to jury: Here's what needs to be proven in order to convict Trump of felonies

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Guest Essay

Biden Underestimates How Much Black Americans Care About This Issue

By Jerel Ezell

Dr. Ezell is an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies environmental politics and race.

Black voters will not only be a driving force in the 2024 elections; they will most likely be the driving force . Recent polls showed that roughly 20 percent of Black voters said they would probably vote for Donald Trump if the election were held today — the highest level of Black support for any Republican presidential candidate since the civil rights era. An additional 8 percent said they wouldn’t vote at all.

Democratic campaign officials are rightly worried, but there’s still time for President Biden to make up the ground he has lost. One way he could do it is by talking to Black America, especially young Black voters, about a sleeper issue: the climate crisis.

As an environment and climate researcher, I have found that despite the growing threat posed by climate change, politicians often seem to downplay the crisis when courting Black communities. Democratic strategists seem to see climate change as a key political issue only for white liberal elites and assume that other groups, like Black voters, are either unaware of or apathetic about it.

In reality, Black Americans are growing increasingly concerned about climate change.

An April poll from CBS News showed that 88 percent of Black adults said it was “somewhat” or “very important.” That makes sense: The most severe harms from climate change, from heat waves to extreme flooding, are already falling disproportionately on their communities. And it’s starting to be reflected in their political priorities. A poll conducted by the Brookings Institution last September showed that climate change is now a greater political concern for Black Americans than abortion or the state of democracy.

If Democrats are serious about making inroads with some of the people they have lost in these communities, they should begin by talking to voters about what the climate crisis looks like for them. In major Democratic strongholds such as Cleveland, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, heat waves and flooding are driving up electricity bills and destroying homes. If Mr. Biden were to routinely speak about these challenges and commit to creating forums for Black Americans to discuss climate concerns with government officials, his administration could earn back some of the faith it has squandered.

As a start, Mr. Biden could focus more intently on young Black people, a group passionate about climate change. Until May 19, when he gave the commencement address at Morehouse College, the president had largely refrained from direct engagement with young Black audiences on the campaign trail. When he speaks to Black voters, climate often is a footnote, or it’s mentioned in a policy buffet along with the economy, abortion and voting rights. During his speech at Morehouse, he mentioned the climate crisis explicitly only in a stray line about “heeding your generation’s call to a community free of gun violence and a planet free of climate crisis and showing your power to change the world.”

There’s a better way to talk about the issue, one that might galvanize Black voters to turn out in November. It’s not with airy calls for solving a global climate crisis but with a sharp message designed specifically for young Black Americans that focuses on how the Biden administration is investing in clean energy hubs, green work force development, tax credits for home improvement measures and community grants. Mr. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act earmarked roughly $2 billion for community-level climate justice initiatives, such as grants for green technology and reducing the health risks from heat and pollution that have ravaged Black communities, and there’s more money waiting to be doled out.

Mr. Biden has talked about this to some extent. At a recent campaign event in Detroit he told the audience, “We’re making the most significant investment ever in climate, including the most significant action on environmental justice ever. Every child in America deserves to breathe clean air.” And at an event with donors in Chicago he said, “We made the most significant investment in climate ever — ever, ever, ever.”

But somehow it isn’t breaking through to the rank and file. In a recent national poll, 56 percent of Black voters said they had heard “not much” or “nothing at all” about what Mr. Biden has accomplished on climate change. That needs to change.

Historically, the Democratic Party has courted Black voters by pledging to lower their health care costs, support their small businesses, bolster child tax credits and protect voting rights. When it has come time for major, strategic, long-term investments — in job creation, infrastructure, housing and schools — Democrats have been mostly derelict. What’s needed now is sustained interest and support to win back this important group.

This election could come down to several thousand votes in a few key states. If a renewed focus on climate change could help turn Black voters out in, say, Detroit or Philadelphia, it’s worth trying.

Black Americans’ longstanding commitment to the Democratic Party was born out of a desire to be a partner in the future of the country rather than to be an occasional beneficiary. But the polls suggest their patience with the Democratic Party’s election-year-only overtures has finally worn thin. Mr. Biden must make good on the investment that has been made in him by supporting Black America’s future. Given what’s at stake for young Black America as the climate crisis accelerates in the next few years, 2024 is perhaps the best, and last, opportunity for Democrats to take the lead in climate justice instead of playing catch-up, again, for another generation of Black Americans.

Jerel Ezell is a Fulbright scholar and an assistant professor in community health sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studies environmental politics and race.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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