I am the kind of exhausted that you only get from working mostly 18 hour days every day for nine years.

The kind of exhausted that means you accidentally leave the gas hob on all night.

And leave the house in the day forgetting there’s a candle still burning on the windowsill.

The kind of tired where you hear your business/life partner giving himself a pep talk to try and convince himself to get up in the morning because he is equally tired.

The kind of sleep deprived that means you carefully make a lunch that makes no sense (but if everything is still in date it’s a miracle and you’ll take it).

And then forget to take it with you anyway.

The kind of busy that means you start making a back up lunch at work at 4pm.

Which is actually also your breakfast.

And then you try to eat it while doing a live chat but someone else comes to talk to you in person so it goes cold anyway.

The kind of tired that means when something goes wrong the most you can manage is an internal sigh.

There is no energy to get mad or cry about it. The little energy that is left is required to solve the problem.

The kind of exhausted where people say, “You should take a break. You work too hard. Go on holiday!”

And you think about how you don’t even have time to pee. And that the last two times you went on holiday, there were still people demanding things of you, they were just doing it while you were on a sun lounger or in a spa hotel instead of at your desk/sofa.

The kind of exhausted where people say, “Why don’t you hire someone?”

And you think about how you already hired five people but it turned out you were doing the job of ten people. And that hiring even one person is harder than dating someone and a hell of a lot more expensive.

The kind of busy where people say, “Just leave it, you don’t have to reply right away.”

And you think about how if you do that, not only will you come back to hundreds of things to reply to, there will also be the follow ups and the social media message follow ups, and the fourth message from the same person saying “No rush, but…” as brand new things come in.

The kind of tired when people ask, “How was your weekend?”

And you have to think about how to reply because all the weekend means to you is maybe managing to catch up on emails for a few hours while people aren’t replying as fast.

The kind of busy where you get home and finally try to have a hot meal by ordering in.

And even though there are over 650 restaurants and takeaways that deliver to your house, most of them are already closed, and most of the rest are usually closing before you can finish ordering.

And while you’re silently staring at a wall in the dark because you are completely overstimulated and overpeopled, waiting to see if your food will arrive or they’ll just cancel the order because it’s too late, you open your laptop again because you are still desperately behind despite spending 8 hours that day in your inbox (in among everything else you have to do).

To more of the dreaded, “Did you get my email?”

As they say, they want what you have, but they don’t want what it takes to get there.