The Invisible Weight of Looking Tired

The laptop hinge creaks. I am squinting at a pixelated version of my own forehead because I accidentally clicked the camera icon instead of the mute button. It is exactly 8:15 AM. I haven’t even brushed the existential dread out of my hair yet, let alone found a decent angle, and there I am, projected in high-definition to a virtual room of people who are mostly looking at their own reflections. My pulse jumps 15 beats. I am hyper-aware of the shadows under my eyes, which, in the harsh, blue-tinted light of the monitor, look like purple bruises left by a week of bad decisions. The thing is, I didn’t make any. I was in bed by 10:45 PM. I drank 5 glasses of water. I did everything the wellness industry told me to do to ensure a glowing, rested morning.

It’s a subtle reminder that my face is failing to meet the required standard of perpetual, caffeinated readiness that our culture demands. Why is it that ‘looking tired’ is the one thing people feel comfortable commenting on without an invitation? You wouldn’t tell a coworker they look like they’ve gained 15 pounds or that their skin looks particularly congested today, yet ‘you look tired’ is tossed around like a casual weather report.

I find myself staring at my own image, tilting the screen back 5 degrees to see if the shadows diminish. They don’t. They are structural. They are historical. They are, quite frankly, none of anyone’s business. This commentary on fatigue is a strange, modern micro-aggression, a way of pathologizing the very natural signs of living. We have been conditioned to view the hollow under the eye or the heaviness of a lid not as a marker of experience or even biology, but as a lack of discipline. If you look tired, you haven’t optimized enough. You haven’t bought the right serum. You haven’t ‘self-cared’ your way into a state of permanent luminescent vitality.

The Stylist and the Standard

Casey K.-H., a food stylist I worked with on a project 5 years ago, understands this better than anyone. Her job is literally to make things look ‘rested’ and fresh. She sprays 15 different types of glycerine on a wilted salad to make it look like it was plucked from the earth 5 seconds ago. She uses 5 different lights to eliminate the shadow under a steak.

‘If I don’t use at least 5 layers of concealer,’ she said, ‘people treat me like I’m grieving. They lower their voices. They ask if I need to take a personal day.’

– Casey K.-H., Food Stylist

Casey is 45 now, and she’s noticed the frequency of these comments increasing in direct proportion to her expertise. The more competent she becomes, the more the world seems concerned with how ‘exhausted’ she appears. It’s a specific brand of tyranny that disproportionately targets women. A man with bags under his eyes is ‘rugged’ or ‘hard-working.’ He’s a guy who’s been in the trenches, making things happen. He is 55 and looks every bit of it, and we call it ‘distinguished.’

But for Casey, and for me, those same marks are read as a deficit. They are a sign that we are losing our grip on the aesthetic currency that buys us entry into the ‘vital’ category of society. It’s a feminist issue that we’ve disguised as a beauty concern. When someone says ‘you look tired,’ what they are often saying is ‘your age is showing,’ or ‘you aren’t hiding your humanity well enough today.’

Reclaiming Congruence

This is where the intersection of self-care and medical aesthetics gets complicated. We want to look how we feel. If I feel like a powerhouse but I look like I’ve been wandering in a desert for 5 days, there is a genuine desire to bridge that gap. It’s not about vanity in the shallow sense; it’s about a congruence of self. I’ve often thought about visiting a place like

Anara Medspa & Cosmetic Laser Center not because I want to look like a different person, but because I want the person in the mirror to stop telling me I’m failing at being awake.

There is a legitimate power in choosing to address these things on your own terms. When we decide to take control of how the world perceives our ‘vitality,’ we are often reclaiming a narrative that has been stolen by the ‘you look tired’ brigade. The danger isn’t in the treatment; it’s in the reason we seek it. If we are doing it to silence the critics, we’ve already lost. If we are doing it because we want to look as vibrant as the 15 ideas we just came up with, then it’s an act of self-authorship.

I remember 5 years ago, I didn’t care about any of this… But biology is a persistent thing. The collagen leaves, the bone structure shifts by 5 millimeters, and suddenly, the shadows have more places to hide. I’ve tried the 5-minute cold plunge for the face. I’ve bought 5 different brands of high-end concealer that claim to use light-reflecting particles from some remote glacier. None of it works quite like the industry says it will because none of it addresses the underlying geometry of the face.

Casey K.-H. once told me that she spent $575 on a series of creams that did absolutely nothing except make her smell like a very expensive gardenia. She realized that the issue wasn’t her skin; it was the way the light was hitting her mid-face.

– A Realization About Light

We need to have a more honest conversation about what it means to ‘look tired.’ We need to admit that it’s often a code word for ‘not young.’ And we need to decide, individually and collectively, how much power we’re going to give that observation.

Still, the blue light of the Zoom call is unforgiving. I find myself looking at the ‘Touch Up My Appearance’ slider in the settings. I move it up 5 points, then 15. The edges of my face blur. The shadows soften. I look like a filtered version of a human being, a ghost of myself. I hate that I like it. I hate that it makes me feel ‘safer’ in a professional environment. But this is the world we’ve built, one where the appearance of energy is more important than the energy itself. We are all food stylists now, carefully arranging our own features to ensure we don’t look like we’ve been through the 5-act play that is a normal Tuesday.

Respecting the Element

I think back to a time when I saw my grandmother’s face, truly saw it, when she was about 65. She had deep, permanent hollows under her eyes. She looked, by modern standards, ‘exhausted.’ But she was the most energetic person I knew. She would garden for 5 hours straight, then cook a meal for 15 people without breaking a sweat. No one ever told her she looked tired. They told her she looked like she was in her element. We’ve lost that. We’ve replaced the respect for a life’s work with a critique of its leftovers.

As I finally click the ‘Leave Meeting’ button, 45 minutes later than expected, I catch one last glimpse of myself. I am, indeed, tired now. The meeting was 55 minutes of circular arguments and technical glitches. But the shadows under my eyes haven’t changed. They were there at the start, and they’re there now. They are just a part of the landscape. I think I’ll go for a walk. Maybe for 15 minutes, maybe for 45. I won’t wear any concealer. I’ll let the sun-the real, 5-billion-year-old sun-hit my face and create shadows wherever it wants. Because at the end of the day, looking tired is a small price to pay for the privilege of actually being awake to see it all happen.