A radio host recently asked me what recurring themes I sense as I talk with my readers, engage online, and meet people across the country in my travels.

One word came to mind: exhaustion.

Millions of us are thoroughly depleted right now, having spent the past months in a dangerously elevated state, fueled solely by adrenaline, caffeine, shock, sorrow, and outrage. We've been sleeping terribly, eating poorly, exercising less, and in general allowing most forms of self-care to fall by the wayside; marshaling all our available resources toward surviving a non-stop onslaught of legislative assaults and unrestrained brutality by this predatory president and his cadre of billionaire bigots and sociopathic sycophants.

The cumulative affect of it all is that we, to a person—are flat worn-out.

I haven’t slept well since November 5th. I've either found myself struggling to fall asleep, wondering if we’ll be tweeted into nuclear annihilation; or awakened during the middle of the night, terrified of sick people I love losing their healthcare; or shaken awake in the morning by the sickening thought that "Yes, that monster is actually the President," and freshly grieving that he is in the White House instead of in prison where he belongs.

Each day seems to bring another real or manufactured emergency, tearing through our latest attempt at finding some normal, and demanding our immediate, undivided attention. Each night we put our heads on the pillow, alongside a heavy sense of dread and sadness at what we've just endured.

We are marrow-deep tired.

And this is all by design. This is how terrorists work. They rely on unpredictability: on continually creating chaos, on altering routine; on robbing their targets of safety, stability, and mental rest until they relent. It's impossible to sustain the level of urgency required to combat the volume and velocity of moral sewage we are immersed in without losing our minds—and so we need to step out of it for sanity's sake.

This is why, as we fight these repetitive atrocities, as we rally against Constitutional nightmares and civil rights violations, as we pushback against the relentless flood of horrible, we need to fight for ourselves. We need to guard our bodies, our minds, and our souls, because those are wars we cannot afford to lose. When we're no longer fully available to the people who love us, when we're too tired to create or laugh or feel joy, when we become hopeless and bitter—the terrorists have won.

We’ve all been doing our best to be resilient, to stay diligent, to persevere in the face of this prolific malfeasance—but damn it all, our emotional and physical systems weren’t built to carry this kind of prolonged trauma.

This week, I think I finally felt the weight of the past few weeks: of absorbing the incessant unthinkable news, of attending to the individual and collective traumas; of juggling the family conflicts, social media skirmishes, and existential crises all around us. I think my body and my heart finally said, "Enough" and I think I'm not alone.

And rather than giving you some seemingly buoyant, inspiring, "rah-rah" invocation, imploring you to do more, speak louder, fight harder, I wanted to share this one thing with you:

It's okay to be exhausted.

It's alright to be weary and frustrated and burned out; to admit when you're too tired to keep going and you need to step away and pause and breathe. That's the way you survive and outlive your terrorists: by refusing to become as miserable and nihilistic as they are.

Today, maybe give yourself the gift of logging out, of shutting down, of not fighting; of taking some time to paint, take your dog to the park, go to a movie, or lay in the grass and watch the clouds. It isn't irresponsible to do this and it doesn't mean you aren't compassionate or engaged or invested—it's honoring your own humanity and caring for your soul and yourself and those around you so that you'll be here for a long time. It’s remembering that you expiring early from the fight is not the goal, but fighting well so that you can outlive your oppressors.

Trust me, the monsters will keep doing what they do without tiring. They are not encumbered by empathy and humanity in the way that you are, and so they don’t feel the weight of the suffering the manufacture or the wounds they inflict. That’s why you need to gird yourself for a marathon.

The road out of this will be long, friends.

If you haven't slept well lately, get some sleep. Others will fight for you while you do. That's how community works, and whether or not you realize, you are part of a massive one, of fired-up, pissed-off, heart-broken human beings. We carry each other through these days.

Yes, sometimes you need to take on evil and sometimes you need to take a nap.

Maybe today, do the latter.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

Fight Evil, Resist Fascism, and Take a Nap