In this ever-tiring world, they say rest is the greatest reward—but to me, it’s a punishment. Thus, if I could ask for something, it would be another task, another stuff to finish, another work to do. Rest just feels too quiet and too honest that it makes me remember what I’ve been trying to forget. And that’s when I understood: stillness, to me, is the moment when exhaustion finds its voice.
It’s actually ironic. There are days when I curse the weight of everything I have to do—the endless exams, the overlapping deadlines, the constant need to keep up. But still there’s a huge part of me that craves them. Because the way the world blurs when everything happens at once makes me forget that I’ve been lost for a while now. Maybe this is my way of holding myself together… and maybe it’s easier to be busy than to face what’s quiet inside me.
The responsibilities, the deadlines, the little pressures—they keep me awake most nights, but I’ve grown used to it. The long hours just feel kinder when they’re filled with motion, and there’s something almost tender about the routine. The way it numbs, the way it fills the space. So as long as my hands are full, my heart will feel a little less heavy. Maybe that’s the closest I get to calm these days—not silence, but the soft buzz of something keeping me from falling apart.
Burnout, they call it. I call it breathing. I’ve lived in the hum of exhaustion for so long that silence feels like a trap. The stillness presses too close, and I find myself filling the hours with anything I can find. I move constantly just to keep the silence from touching me. And still, it waits, patient and sharp. It sits at the edges of my awareness, reminding me of all the things I do not want to face.
So I do, and do, and do, as if the motion could keep me alive. And maybe it does, in a way, but not in the way anyone would call living. I’m tired in every direction, tired in my mind, in my hands, in the hollow spaces I thought I could fill with work. I keep moving because if I stop, everything I’ve been ignoring comes rushing in—the doubts, the guilt, the ache I thought I could outrun. And yes, I am afraid to face the silence, I am afraid to face myself. So I move, endlessly, quietly, desperately.
But I’ve run out of things to do. The lists are gone, the tasks are done, and all that remains is me and the silence. It sits across from me, sharp, heavy, pressing against me in ways I don’t know how to name. I sit with it. I do not move. I do not fight. I let it settle because I have nothing else left, and maybe that is enough.
