Exhausted and Awake

Fatigue and sleep should be opposites.

Fatigue should lead to sleep. Sleep should restore energy. The body should follow a simple, logical cycle: exhaustion followed by rest, rest followed by recovery.

Multiple sclerosis does not follow logic.

I live in a body that is exhausted and awake at the same time.

Fatigue exists constantly. It is not the kind of tiredness that follows a long day or a late night. It is neurological. It lives deeper than muscles. It settles into the nervous system, heavy and inescapable. It makes simple tasks feel disproportionate. It turns ordinary effort into something that must be carefully rationed.

This kind of fatigue should make sleep easy.

It does not.

Night arrives, and exhaustion remains. The body feels heavy. The mind feels alert. Sleep exists somewhere just out of reach. The same nervous system that creates fatigue refuses to allow rest. The same body that demands recovery cannot access it.

The contradiction makes no sense.

Days are shaped by exhaustion. Even small activities require planning. Energy disappears without warning. Fatigue arrives as certainty. Sleep arrives as uncertainty.

Night becomes its own kind of negotiation.

Lying still in the dark, waiting for sleep to come, creates a different kind of exhaustion. Time passes slowly. The body remains tired. The mind remains awake. Frustration builds quietly.

Fatigue and insomnia coexist without cancelling each other out.

Morning arrives without resolution. Sleep may have come briefly, or not at all. Fatigue remains unchanged. The body begins again from a place that never fully recovered.

This cycle repeats.

There is a particular kind of helplessness in being unable to do the one thing your body needs most. Sleep is supposed to be automatic. It is supposed to exist without effort. Losing that automatic certainty changes the relationship with rest entirely.

Rest becomes something pursued rather than received.

Fatigue without sleep creates a sense of disconnection from the body. Signals feel contradictory. Needs feel unmet. The nervous system feels unreliable. Trust becomes difficult to maintain when the body refuses to restore itself in predictable ways.

Multiple sclerosis disrupts communication between the brain and body. That disruption extends into sleep itself. The nervous system remains active when it should quiet. Fatigue remains present even when rest occurs.

The body exists in a state of imbalance.

This imbalance creates confusion as much as exhaustion. Fatigue suggests sleep should come easily. Insomnia suggests the opposite. Living between those realities creates a sense that the body no longer follows rules that once felt guaranteed.

Nothing about this new normal follows expectation.

There is grief in that unpredictability. Grief for the simplicity of falling asleep without thought. Grief for waking up restored rather than depleted. Grief for the quiet reliability of a body that once followed its own rhythms without resistance.

Acceptance arrives slowly.

Sleep cannot be forced. Fatigue cannot be ignored. Both exist without permission. Both shape daily life in ways that require adaptation rather than control.

There are nights when sleep eventually comes. There are nights when it does not. There are days shaped by exhaustion regardless of what happened the night before.

This reality exists without logic.

Fatigue without sleep feels like betrayal at first. Over time, it becomes part of the landscape. It becomes something navigated rather than solved.

The contradiction remains.

Exhausted and awake.

Tired and unable to rest.

Living in a body that needs sleep and resists it at the same time.

It makes no sense.

It does not need to.

It is simply part of this new normal.