I'm no expert in the field of human fatigue. I'm not a biologist. I don't need to be. If we were even remotely aware of everything affecting us I reckon we'd all be a whole lot unhappier given the current state of our political climate and what has not gone beyond merely being called the 'state' of our ecological climate. We'd all be seated in lead bunkers, wearing tinfoil hats and playing Countdown just for the sheer irony of it. Happily, we are all slightly stupider than that. Never do we appreciate how blissful ignorance is until we honest-to-God try to start understanding things. So I'm in no great hurry to understand my tiredness. I just know that it exists.
In the same way that we have different levels of light, different levels of shadows, of love, of drunkenness, of idealism, of nervousness, of cleanliness, of income, of anything, humans have to put up with different levels of tiredness. There's concentrated tiredness, which I like to call 'lesson' tiredness, and anyone who has lived through any school lesson anywhere in the world will be able to empathise. It is tiredness which strikes and leaves you in what is practically a vegetative state. It creeps on all of a sudden at some point in time and leaves you gripped as though in a vice. You cannot move. You cannot speak. You can barely breathe. Your eyes are streaming. The last thing you can do is listen and make notes. If you were hooked up to a full-body monitor at that point, neither your heartbeat nor your pulse would register. You are, for all intents and purposes, Comatose. This tiredness is paralysing, and yet for some murkily unexplained reason the second you leave the lesson you are enduring or the company you are chained to all motor and cognitive functions return, amped up to 100% efficiency and willing to write the next great British novel. Look back on your day and it's like the middle of Saving Private Ryan: breathless opening, breathless ending, and then a whole chunk of the middle which seemed to have fallen into the earth. It's lost time and it's non-negotiable; you can't win that time back in a sort of quantum science game of roulette.
We also have the generic drowsiness, which is boring and therefore shall have no more space devoted to it, and we have the natural tiredness which is basically your mind telling you that your pyjamas, mattress and duvet are a remarkably good combination at this hour. For most of your life this feeling can be warded off - though never eliminated - with coffee and for some reason between the ages of 15 and 21 this emotion is ignored with increasing ease. House parties couldn't exist without this part of your common sense blinking out and shutting down but it does keep a tab, and presents it once you're sobered up or come down from your high or orgasmed or whatever your body does to give you a non-physical slap round the face. Personally I succumb to it much more quickly than anyone I know; I appreciate my eight hours and demand it to stay constant.
But the most pervasive, the most damning tiredness takes us right slap-bang pell-mell into the treacle-like embraces of fatigue. This isn't something you can simply sleep away. This is something cancerous, which erodes your strength so slyly that you don't notice. You simply wave it away as something rectified by another shot of caffeine, something light which can be ignored. 'You've been working hard, a few later nights than usual, you'll be fine soon'. Great, if that were the case. No, this tiredness dislikes you. It's not open. What it does is wait, hiding behind more innocent colours, until you realise its presence. And when you realise its presence, it almost feels like a shame.
You first click with the classic symptom of a pressing weight behind your eyes. Not painful, not particularly uncomfortable, just something you're aware of. And as that refuses to leave, no matter how many aspirins/caffeine pills you pop, you realise what it means. Your body is running on borrowed time. It's now bypassed empty and pulling bits of itself apart in order to supply energy. Your mind is overworked and starting to run more and more slowly, and you begin to crave sleep earlier and earlier. I'm at the point now where I'm drowsy at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, which I'm pretty sure is against the law for anyone except night shift workers and Spaniards. But the ending problem, the facet which adds a degree of indignity, of insult to injury, is how unfeeling this corrosive, pervasive tiredness is. It's not in direct combat with you, not seeking to ruin your best-laid plans by locking horns and simply begging to be defeated. No, this tiredness is simply here. It watches you dispassionately, like an apathetic schoolmaster to a class of children destined only to fail. It carves away at your soul and ignores any attempt to chastise or corral it into simply leaving you alone.
It leaves, and mine will leave, but it will take a few weeks, and like a heroine withdrawal it makes you feel like death warmed up just before it is exorcised. This weekend, when I can sleep as long as I want, I will feel like a zombie. Like a marionette. If someone glues strings to my arms I will be powerless to resist their directions. But that will be for but a few days, and then my body will revert to balancing itself out, just in time for October.
This month will leave its mark.
Are we rolling?
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