I am exhausted in the way that demands new language. Not the tiredness of a long day, but the bone-deep fatigue of watching fascism rise, of living through the warmest Chicago November I can remember, of seeing a world I love show signs of fever. Some days I feel wrung out, my essence reduced to coffee rings and calendar alerts, to-do lists and crisis headlines.
But my exhaustion is just one drop in an ocean of collective weariness. I think of mothers – their revolutionary patience, their double shifts of paid work and invisible labor. I think of every parent who has stretched themselves between feeding the machine and feeding their dreams: caretaker and worker, citizen and neighbor, organizer and survivor. Their tired eyes teach me that exhaustion can be a form of prophecy. Their stretched lives show me how being tired and being tender can be the same thing.
In my fatigue, I find solidarity. We are all working overtime at the end of the world – not just mothers, but all of us who labor to birth something better from the ruins of what's crumbling. This is a collective exhaustion, a shared labor. We are all midwifing tomorrow between timecard punches, between crisis and care, between what we must do and what we long to do.
The Day Shift
The machine of late capitalism churns our dreams into metrics, our care into billable hours, our human longings into productivity charts. We tap keyboards under fluorescent lights, watching our lives dissolve into spreadsheet cells, while insurance algorithms decide whose pain matters, whose healing counts, whose life deserves saving. The morning shift demands everything and feeds nothing. It runs on scarcity, on fear, on the myth that we are all islands, on the lie that worth comes from what we produce.
You can love your dayshift while being wrung dry by it, your essence distilled to coffee rings and calendar pings
The Night Shift
The night cradles softer rhythms: soup simmering on stovetops, children's laughter down hallways, the steady pulse of possibility. We gather in living rooms and basement meetups, our hands remembering ancient wisdom – how to hold space for grief, how to stitch community from threads of solitude, how to midwife tomorrow into being. The nightshift feeds everything and demands nothing. It runs on abundance, on trust, on the truth that we are all connected, on the knowing that worth flows from how we tend to each other. We are unlearning isolation, remembering how to hold each other's stories like water in cupped palms. This too is labor. This too is revolution.
The Future
We dream of having just one job: to be fully human, to love without measure, to tend to each other and this earth that holds us all. No timecard to punch except the rhythm of seasons, no metrics except the depth of our connections, no productivity except the fruit of our collective care. But for now, we work double shifts – one to survive, and one to midwife that world into being.
The exhaustion lives in our bones now, a familiar ache. How could it not? We're straddling two worlds – one foot in the system that demands our surrender, one foot in the future we're willing into being. Some days the contractions of hope and despair come so close together we can barely breathe between them. Still, we push. Still, we reach for each other in the dark.
What we dream feels both impossible and inevitable: healthcare that remembers the heart beats in a body that thinks and feels and dreams, education that nourishes souls, food systems that feed the future instead of starving it, an Earth still breathing beneath the fever we gave her. We keep building anyway – shelters of community, bridges of mutual aid, gardens in the ruins of what's crumbling.
We keep showing up for this nightshift of nurturing tomorrow. We gather after hours, sharing meals and stories and strategies for survival. These are the birth practices of the world to come. In the warmth of collective care, in the fierce tenderness of protecting one another, we catch glimpses of what we're laboring to create.
The morning shift may own our hands, but the nightshift claims our hearts.
Yes, we are tired. But this fatigue is not surrender – it's the bone-deep weariness of those who labor for love. While the world sleeps, we tend to its fever, we dress its wounds, we whisper stories of how good it could be. Like all mothers, we know that rest is not a betrayal of the work – it's how we survive to mother another day. The revolution will need us tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. So we take turns: holding the vigil, stirring the pot, rocking our collective dreams to sleep. Some nights we are the ones who need to be held, to be fed, to be mothered. This too is part of the work.
This world-making is a long labor. We pace ourselves, pass the torch, share the load.
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