For a long time, I thought I was doing rest wrong.

I was trying all the things you're supposed to try. Taking a long weekend when I could, having an early night, getting outside for walks, catching up with friends. And I'd come back to my usual routine, work, life, everything, feeling more or less the same. Still running on fumes. Still waiting to feel like myself again. I started to wonder if something was just a bit broken in me, like maybe I had forgotten what I needed to allow myself to recharge.

It took me longer than I'd like to admit to realise the problem wasn't something fundamentally wrong with me. It was that I was borrowing someone else's answers to a question I hadn't really asked myself yet. There's a specific kind of depletion that hits when your work is taking more than it gives, when you're not quite sure who you're becoming yet and when the life you're living feels slightly out of sync with the one you actually want. That kind of tired isn't fixed by getting more sleep alone (although a good sleep is a bit of a miracle cure for a lot of things!). It runs deeper than that. And I think a lot of us spend years in that place without understanding why we're still so exhausted despite doing all the right things.