The exhaustion of 2025 hit me like a two ton barrel between Christmas and New Year’s.
I was home for over two weeks. I worked for some of it, since I had used all my PTO, but I didn’t have to commute or put hard pants on. I had hoped the rest would be rejuvenating. Instead, it gave me a lot of time to think, and a lot of clarity. It didn’t do a damn thing for the exhaustion. I am still exhausted.
I don’t know when I became this person, this person who stays home and doesn’t see anyone or do anything for weeks at a time. I don’t know when my spark went out. I don’t know why my life feels so sticky, like I’m a fly stuck in a tar pit.
I knew recovering from burnout and trauma would be a long climb. I named the damn newsletter after that concept. But when you think you’re finally conquering Everest1, there’s that moment you realize that you forgot about the Death Zone, the place that leaves bodies frozen and forgotten on the slopes, still attached to their ropes, never to be retrieved. A reminder that sometimes the summit simply cannot be reached.
So you stop.
And here I am, exhausted, depleted, and cocooned in a tent with a heat source and some food. If I open the tent and continue on, there’s such a very long way to go. I doubt that I can get there. And I know that even if I do get there, it’s an awful long way back down, and an awful long way to fall if I slip.
And so, I have just stayed very still. Rationed my oxygen, been conservative with my food, and held out hope that more sleep would embolden me to undo the zipper of my tent and set back off on the voyage.
Worst of all, I’m not even sure what’s waiting for me up there is any better.
When I woke up to the news that Venezuela had been bombed and that the US military kidnapped Maduro and his wife, my first reaction was to start laughing like a crazy person. The next thing that happened was that my vision blurred, my ears started ringing, and I felt my head start to float off my body.
Hi, this is Kari’s Brain. I’m not available to take your call right now, but if you please leave a message, Kari’s Representative will be with you shortly.
Dissociation is a funny thing when you know you’re doing it. When I was younger, sometimes I’d fly into a rage and have almost no memory of it. Now I know it’s coming, and I can just let it happen or I can fight it. I fight it by doing this exercise a friend told me about. You center yourself back in the room using your five senses, and name something for each. I laid back down and started to name things.
I can feel the mattress underneath me.
I can still taste some garlic from pizza last night.
I can hear the cats fucking around in the litter box.
I can see the trees outside my window.
I can smell the coffee my husband is making.
I am safe inside my home.
I am safe inside my body.
Most of the time, it works. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just reminding yourself that you aren’t actually a weird traumatized ghost who can just float away. Your human brain needs to remember you’re just a human person here on Planet Earth, in America, in 2026.
A year you never could even conceive of when you were growing up.2
I have had a minor cold, on and off, for the past month. It’s not the flu, it’s not COVID, it’s not anything but a virus that hides and pops it’s head out every couple of weeks. I can’t get rid of it, and I know why, and there is nothing I can do but wait it out. Stay home when I am sick. Eat chicken soup and tea.
Usually the relapses last a day or two, I use up half a box of tissues, and then I wake up feeling a little better. I am never sick enough to be completely immobile, but just sick enough that I need to sleep a lot. I know The Body Keeps the Score is being debunked all over the internet, but you’ll excuse me if I disagree. Just because the guy who wrote it is an asshole and got some things wrong doesn’t mean that I don’t believe that trauma lives in your body and affects your health. It doesn’t mean that I think any of us are meant to live like this, spiritually or evolutionarily.
And so, a few days now after we attacked another country for oil, a few days after I saw massive amounts of propaganda that’s nearly identical to what was used to start the Iraq War (and hey, at least Dubya asked Congress!), the cold is back. My sinuses are clogged and I’m exhausted. I’m doing all the things one does to try and not get worse.
That’s really all we’ve been doing, isn’t it? Throwing remedies and money and words and hopes at the situation, trying to let it not get any worse. And just when we think we had it licked, it comes roaring back, and we understand once again that we have no control. That what we’ve been doing isn’t working.
We need a hell of a lot more than chicken soup and tea.
To be a millennial means you have endured sustained trauma for a quarter century.
I don’t pretend to speak for Gen X or the Zoomers. Their experience is their own. I don’t care who has it worse or has it better. I can only speak for my generation, the generation that has had the rug pulled out from under them every time they thought the earth might stop shaking, and a generation who saw the train roaring down the tracks and no one stopped it.
And then everyone was looking at us to stop it. But we couldn’t stop it, because we didn’t know how. No one taught us how to navigate a world this unstable. In fact, the adults who raised us conditioned us to trust institutions, trust that hard work would pay off, and that the center would hold. We endured while they heaped abuse on us in our homes and in the workplace, while they still abuse us in our homes and in our workplace.
We know better now. Because the institutions, the rules, the center — none of them held. And you’ll excuse me if I never believe another word that comes out of the mouths of Boomers, especially ones in positions of authority.
None of this held no matter how hard we worked. No matter how much we saved up. No matter how good we were. No matter how much money we sent to family. No matter much interest we paid on our student loans. No matter our degrees, our resume, our thousands of hours of unpaid labor. No matter how sick we got and how much we believed. No matter how many club bangers we still know by heart. No matter how much we drank, or didn’t drink, or smoked, or didn’t smoke.
There was a time we started turning on each other, chastising each other for differences of opinion or strategy rather than actually blaming the people who were weaponizing our struggles. I think — I hope — that time is mostly over, because we are all in the same shitty boat.
There are, of course, those of us that are lost to the cult, and we have to let them go. And we have our bad guys. Stephen Miller is a millennial. So was Charlie Kirk. We’re not all good guys, so let’s not pretend we are. Let’s not pretend we have nothing to answer for.
But, for those of us who are not purely good nor bad, but somewhere in between, and who know how much shit we are in? We immediately default to kindergarten rules. Hold hands, form a straight line. Find a buddy. Hide under your desk. Barricade the door.
But then what?
We hunker down and wait for….what?
Human beings will always choose safety, if safety is available. But any safety we think we have right now is an illusion, or temporary.
Maybe it always was.
I have to accept that the world has changed. That I have changed.
I am different now.
I’ve been betrayed in my life so many times that it’s not even funny, but the one person I refuse to accept betrayal from is my own damn self. I have to trust in myself, because if I don’t trust myself, I’ll never be able to trust anyone.
I can’t stay here. I can’t live in the Death Zone and breathe thinned air and eat soup out of a can. I can’t hide myself away. I can’t live in eternal winter. If I don’t accept change, if I stop trying, if I just accept the unacceptable, I will languish.
I’d rather fall off the edge than languish one more day.
And, knowing that, I must unzip the tent and step out into the blinding snow. One foot in front of the other. I have no fucking clue what’s up there, but all I can hope for is that if it can’t be ideal, at least it might be different.
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KBQ
can you tell I’ve been on Everest Tok?
WHERE IS MY FLYING CAR DAMMIT
Indeed. Death and dying (of individuals, of societies, of things one had reason to believe were reliable/dependable, of moral and ethical contracts…) are absolutely exhausting. So is moving forward. May you find some little pockets of ease and elasticity here and there, and a few extra packets of soup.
It's so exhausting for those of us paying attention; for those with keen pattern recognition. You've hunkered down because you know the climb is long, I think that's an amazing thing! We need more rest, even if it doesn't feel restful, to lace up for another day. It also allows others to say, "Hey, sit this bit out, I've got you. Unzip that tent when you can."