For most of your life you’ve been doing two things at once. Living, and bracing against living. The bracing is so constant you stop noticing it. You think it’s just what being alive feels like.

Then one day, for no reason you can name, you stop. Not the living. The bracing.

The pain you were running from is still there. The joy you were clutching is still there. Nothing has changed except you are no longer at war with any of it. And in that quiet you realize the exhaustion you’ve been carrying your whole life wasn’t from the pain. It was from the fight.

You were never tired of your life. You were tired of refusing it.