By the end of the day, even kindness felt like one more thing to produce

Dear Delyara, That’s a sentence I don’t like admitting. But it was true yesterday. Not because I stopped loving anyone. Because I was overdrawn. There comes a point on some days where warmth itself starts costing energy I no longer have access to easily. The voice softens by effort. The patience is manufactured. The listening is real but expensive. The affection is sincere but less spontaneous because the emotional budget has already been spent everywhere else. I think this is one of the least discussable parts of adult life, especially for women. We are expected to remain relational all the way to the edges of ourselves. Yesterday I reached those edges.