You woke up exhausted again. Not tired-from-a-bad-night exhausted. The kind of exhausted that lives in your bones. The kind that a full night of sleep wouldn’t even touch.

There’s a kind of loneliness that has nothing to do with being alone. It’s the kind that shows up in a full room. At a family dinner.

Imagine a child who asks Santa for a toy. Commits to that one thing, writes it on the list, believes in it completely. Christmas morning comes and the toy is there — but it's broken. Not a little broken. Irreparably, visibly, permanently broken.

She skips meals. She sleeps last. She says “I’m fine” so often it’s become a reflex, not a sentence. And when someone asks what she needs, she goes blank — because she stopped tracking that information a long time ago.

I know her. I was her.

For years I thought something was clinically wrong with me. Turns out, I wasn’t broken — I was grieving. And no one had ever told me those were two different things.