I'm tired. Proper tired. The kind where you close the laptop at one in the morning and your eyes stay open out of habit.
But this tiredness is different, and it took me a while to work out why.
All my life I jumped like a monkey from tree to tree. Job to job, field to field. Sales, management, marketing, electrics. New certificate, new title, new promise. Always chasing something: better money, better boss, better future. Every jump felt logical at the time.
And every jump came with the same entrance fee. The audition. Convincing someone that I'm the one. That I can do it, that I'll learn fast, that I'm worth the chance. I got good at it. I did it for twenty-something years.
I'm not doing it anymore. Not because I can't. Because I ran out of whatever it takes to keep proving myself to people who never once said the simple thing.
That's what wore me down, more than any shift ever did. You can fix the problem at midnight, hold the whole thing together, and the silence afterwards is the whole reward. Big company, small company, same silence. "You did a good job" is apparently the most expensive sentence in business.
So here's what changed. I still work the jobs. I still close the laptop at midnight, sometimes later. Same hours as always.
But now some of those hours are mine. This project. This site. Nobody above me. Nobody to convince. Nobody to clap either, and I had to get used to that. Turns out working without applause is a skill, the same way smiling on a bad day is one.
Where is this heading? Still foggy. I'd love to tell you I have a plan with dates and boxes. You know me by now.
But the feeling is not foggy. That's the one clear thing I've got, and it's enough.
I'm tired. But the tiredness is mine. I built it myself, every hour of it.
Tonight I deserve more sleep. Between us, I know it's not going to happen.
I love what I do. First time I can say that without hesitating.