The First Honest Dinner

The fatigue I carried that Sunday wasn’t just in my muscles. It had settled into something deeper, the kind of exhaustion that lives in your bones and hums there constantly, a low-frequency reminder that you have been running on empty for a very long time.

I was twenty-two, eighteen months into a nursing program that had restructured my entire existence around the question of how much a human body could endure before it stopped cooperating. The answer, I was learning, was more than you’d think and less than you’d hope. I had pulled three double shifts that week at St. Mary’s. I was surviving on vending machine coffee, protein bars, and the particular kind of willpower that comes continue reading …