You’re feeling depressed so you head home early.
Your mom asks if you’re okay the moment she sees you walk in the door. “Just tired,” you mutter half-heartedly.
Sooner or later, you start to believe it.
The “just tired”s build up slowly and quietly until you are legitimately fatigued.
You can’t sleep at night but you can’t bring yourself to get out of bed and do something productive in the morning. Your grades drop. A teacher eventually calls home. You start going in again, but you are reluctant enough to leave the sanctity of your bed each morning; school is another obstacle entirely. You scrape by with average grades. Your parents are just happy to see you “functioning” again.
You get a job. It *****, but the hours are decent and allow you plenty of time to sit alone at home. Eventually your minimally active drive begins to taper off. You stop trying hard; your manager notices. You eventually get demoted after being late one too many times.
You drag through the hours, watching other people move by in a blur, and you come to point where you stop in the middle of the freezer aisle with your shopping cart. (You can only bring yourself to make microwavable food these days.) The children in the seats of the other carts stare like they can tell something is amiss, something is different, perhaps your aura or your face or the way your clothes are hopelessly wrinkled. You can’t bring yourself to finish your shopping after that, so you leave your half-empty cart there in the middle of the aisle and walk back out to your car empty-handed.
This is your life, you think. This is your mediocre life. And you are tired of it.