I battle with tiredness quite a lot.

I’ve been asking myself where the fatigue is coming from recently, in an effort to alleviate it.

The main factor I’ve identified involves the permanent tension that exists between the “you” who you feel you are and the “you” you manifest.

There’s nothing startling or supernatural in this of course - feeling pressure to act a certain way in defiance of your true feelings is pretty universal. I think that once you start to veer away from physicalism, though, there’s a greater disparity between “internal” you and “external” you.

At any rate, having identified this as a big mental energy suck, I’m now trying to behave in a way that feels more consistent with my internal vision of myself/the world.

In this respect, the tiredness has almost become a pointer - whatever I’m confronted with, there’s a course of action, or a way of thinking, or a way of being that I feel I can “rest with” internally. That’s the best that I can describe it. I’d describe the opposite feeling as a mixture of debilitation and demotivation. Considering the difficulties associated with knowing one’s own mind and desires, it’s a useful tool to have.

Having decided on whatever path or action I can “rest with”, the next step is obviously following through, and this brings its own, different tensions. I think worrying about your public persona is one of the hardest physicalist hang-ups to shake, and, as a subjective idealist, some of the courses of action that feel “restful” to me look crazy to an average person. So there’s that to battle, but I’d still say that the fatigue that comes with fighting the stress of worrying whether you look like a crazy person is preferable to the deep internal exhaustion that comes from trying to smother your ideal self.

The other reason it’s exhausting is because it runs you up against the apparent physical world. Sometimes the restful path is “look different,” “stop being cold,” etc. But it’s not a bad thing, I think, for these thoughts to become reflexive, and to replace the current reflex, which goes something like:

• dissatisfying experience
• “What a pity change is impossible.”
• “Wait, maybe it isn’t impossible!”