State of Weakness

It is not simply tiredness — it is something else. Deeper. You get up — and there is nothing. No substance, no carrying capacity, no inner engine. Your arms feel leaden, your legs no longer want to move. Climbing stairs becomes an effort. A shopping bag is suddenly heavy. Even speaking costs something. Sometimes everything goes dark before your eyes, you have to sit down, perhaps lie down — as though someone has flipped the main switch off and forgotten to flip it back up.

Medicine examines you for anemia, for thyroid function, for electrolytes, for the heart. Sometimes it finds something — and then treatment follows, and rightly so. But often it finds nothing definitive. And yet you are weak — not imagined, not lazy, genuinely weak — in a way that cannot be remedied by one night of sleep.