Kate Didd

(Day 59)

It’s the first day of summer break and I am done.

Not done in the cute, champagne-pop, school’s-out way the memes suggest. Done in the way that means my body staged a full revolt last night and I couldn’t do anything but surrender to it.

The last two weeks have been a relentless parade of beautiful, important, exhausting things end-of-year concerts, band performances, sports celebrations, promotions, goodbyes, parties. The kind of things you show up for with your whole chest because you love your kids and you want to witness their lives. But somewhere in the middle of performing presence, I lost my own.

I forgot to eat. For 36 hours.

I forgot to brush my teeth. I worked two shifts. I sat in therapy with my kids, cheered at their activities, smiled through every goodbye, and celebrated every milestone and somewhere in all of that, I became a costume of myself. Going through motions so well-rehearsed they felt like living but weren’t.

And last night, my body sent the invoice.

I was curled in a ball. I felt like I’d been run through with a broadsword which sounds dramatic until you understand that’s exactly the kind of pain overstimulation and nervous system collapse can produce when you’ve been white-knuckling it for too long. There was electricity in my face. A heel driving into my ribs. My legs felt like they were breaking underneath me. And my hands, I kept staring at my hands, convinced I was bleeding out, caught somewhere between the Matrix and a dream inside a dream, asking myself is this real, am I real, is any of this actually happening?

I was so far outside myself I couldn’t find the door back in.

This is what extreme exhaustion does. This is what happens when a woman who carries everything her children’s emotional needs, her work, her household, her marriage, her own buried dreams runs completely dry. The body stops asking politely. It just takes the floor.

What I know now that I didn’t know before: this wasn’t a breakdown. This was a reset.

My husband is running a fever. The whole house has been sick. We’ve been doing all of this on empty storms keeping us up, both of us burning out in parallel, the kind of tired that lives in your bones. And even sick, even depleted, he felt me fighting my own mind.

He started with my face.

Slowly, methodically, he rubbed the tension out of my jaw, my temples, the place between my brows where I hold every unprocessed thing. Then down my arms. My back. My legs. My feet. Back up. Stomach. Chest. He regulated my nervous system from the neck down with his hands, just his hands, and then he brushed out my hair until I was completely gone out of my own head for the first time in weeks.

He helped me get dressed. He tucked me in. He turned off every light and crawled in beside me and I rolled into him the way I’ve done a thousand nights, not perfectly, not gracefully, but home and I slept for eight hours.

Eight hours.

The storm outside was just remnants by then. A echo of what it had been. And I think that’s what this whole season has felt like the aftermath of something that shook us, the body still remembering even when the mind has moved on. The nervous system doesn’t care about your timeline for healing. It will surface what it needs to surface exactly when your defenses are lowest.

I’ve learned to stop fighting that.

This morning I started summer break trying to exist.

That’s it. Just exist.

I made my husband an Epsom salt bath my little ritual magic, the thing that helps regulate everything when words aren’t enough. He got ready for his training. We held each other in that tired, loving, we’re still here way that long partnerships develop. And then we went about the quiet business of a slow morning.

I barely had the energy to get coffee. I don’t have the energy to wash my car. Maybe tomorrow.

And here’s what’s different now, what makes me genuinely proud of this moment I’m in: I know I’m stumbling. I can name it. I can see it clearly without catastrophizing it into something it isn’t. That awareness that gap between the stumble and the spiral is something I never had before. Living inside survival mode for years means you don’t get to pause and observe. You just run.

I’m not running anymore.

There’s no such thing as burnout in the way we’ve been sold it this permanent, catastrophic failure state we’re supposed to be ashamed of. There are seasons where the body needs to rest. Seasons where the most radical thing you can do is stop, curl up, and let someone who loves you put you back together piece by piece.

This is one of those seasons.

And even at my worst last night even in that fractured, hallucinatory, broadsword-in-the-chest worst I didn’t make it worse than it needed to be. I didn’t run. I didn’t rage. I didn’t disappear into old patterns that used to swallow me whole.

I let it move through me.

I let him in.

I slept.

That is everything. That is the whole win. And I am claiming it loudly, on the first day of summer, in my pajamas, with unwashed hair and a half-drunk cup of coffee because this kind of growth doesn’t always look like forward momentum. Sometimes it looks exactly like this: still standing, softly, in the middle of a stumble, recognizing it for what it is.

Not a crash.

A rest.