The rebuild is working: Why am I so Tired?

Sometimes the collapse is not the disaster—it’s the slow leak of energy while you’re trying to rebuild everything at once.

If you’re in that stretch where you’re doing “all the right things” and still feeling wrung out—reworking your routines, handling paperwork, carrying other people’s responsibilities, trying to stay functional at work while your brain runs on a different clock—this one is for you. This is one of those moments where exhaustion can look like failure, even when it’s actually evidence that you’ve been carrying a lot.

Hello, Standing on the Ledge. How are you today?

Me? I’m tired. Really tired.

Kind of funny, too—I had the whole weekend off, got a lot of sleep, and still feel like I’m dragging. I’ve been restructuring the website, working on the third edition of the book, and getting ready to implement some changes my brother recommended. One of the big ones is changing the layout and letting a little more of me show up in the book. Not too personal—but more personal than before. More human. More lived-in.

And somewhere in all of that, I slid right back into an old routine: up all night, sleeping through the day.

That used to work better with my old schedule. Now? Not so much. As long as I can get up in time for work, I can limp it along—but this job starts earlier than the last one, and the margin for error is a lot smaller.

Last night I got home around 11-ish, sat down at the computer, and the next thing I knew it was 7 in the morning. I should have been in bed hours earlier.

Sometimes the problem is not that you stopped moving. It’s that you kept moving past the point where your body was done.

I’ve also been working on my conflict management course. The next graded discussion is up, and I honestly don’t know how well it’s going to be received. Funny thing is, on the website I’ll do citations like crazy—but for academic work, I hate doing citations. Go figure.

I got the taxes paid yesterday—or more accurately, I paid the accountant for the taxes. Now I’m in that waiting space, hoping the T4s get sent out to my employees on time. I know they’ll be filed electronically to CRA, but I had asked for paper forms to be mailed too, and I’m not convinced that part will happen by the end of the month.

We’ll see.

And now it’s on to personal taxes, trying to sort out finances, trying to keep my place, and trying to figure out whether I need a second part-time job to make the numbers work.

I don’t know yet.

That’s the truth of it: a lot of moving pieces, a lot of uncertainty, and a lot of effort happening at the same time.

Rebuilding doesn’t always feel like progress. Sometimes it feels like paperwork, fatigue, and holding the line.

The socio-psych lens

What I’m describing here is not just “being tired.” It’s a mix of role strain—worker, writer, student, business owner, employer, taxpayer, future-planner—all competing for the same limited time and attention.¹ When too many roles hit at once, even productive days can feel like you’re falling behind.

There’s also a sociological imagination piece to this: what looks like a private struggle (“Why can’t I get my sleep schedule straight?” “Why do I feel overwhelmed?”) is often tied to larger systems—work schedules, administrative deadlines, economic pressure, institutional timelines, and the reality of rebuilding after disruption.² In other words, this isn’t just a character issue. It’s a person trying to function inside overlapping demands.

On the psychological side, stress has a way of bending time and routine. You can sit down “for a few minutes” and suddenly lose a whole night because your brain is still trying to solve everything before it lets you rest. That kind of prolonged load adds up, and the wear-and-tear is real.³

Financial uncertainty adds another layer. When housing, income, and obligations all feel unstable at once, your mind naturally shifts into threat-management mode. It starts scanning for gaps, risks, and what might go wrong next. That response makes sense—but it can also keep you in a constant state of tension.⁴

And yes, there’s even a little Goffman in the mix here: the strange split between how we perform competence in one setting and how we feel in another. I can be meticulous and citation-heavy on the site, then resent the same task in a formal academic context. Same skill, different stage, different social rules, different emotional cost.⁵

So if today feels messy, that does not automatically mean you’re failing. It may mean you are in a high-load chapter of rebuilding, and your system is telling the truth about the weight.

That’s where I’m at today. Tired, still moving, still building, still trying to do this properly.

Godspeed. Signing off.

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References

1. Goode, W. J. (1960). A theory of role strain. American Sociological Review, 25(4), 483–496. ↩
2. Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. Oxford University Press. ↩
3. McEwen, B. S. (1998). Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators. New England Journal of Medicine, 338(3), 171–179. ↩
4. Hobfoll, S. E. (1989). Conservation of resources: A new attempt at conceptualizing stress. American Psychologist, 44(3), 513–524. ↩
5. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday. ↩