Two Kinds of Tired

I had carpal tunnel release surgery recently. It’s healing faster than I expected, which is a genuinely nice thing to be able to report.

The feeling is coming back in my fingers. Not all at once - it shows up in spurts, and mostly you notice it by noticing something you wouldn’t have noticed before.

Do you know what it’s like to touch the tips of your fingers together for the first time?

Typing. Shaping wood into guitars. Playing those guitars. Things I do with these hands, which have been missing the feeling.

And now I have to wait to get back to the shaping, because I’d damage the ligament in ways I don’t want to know.

That’s the good news, and it’s real. Here’s the other thing.

I’m tired. Not sleepy - weary. The kind where the tiredness sits in the decision-making rather than the eyelids.

And I can’t tell you where it’s coming from.

It could be the healing. A body repairing itself runs a deficit, and nobody hands you an itemized bill for it. It could be that recovery just makes everything louder - you’re already operating at reduced capacity, so the ordinary noise costs more than it used to.

Or it could be July of 2026, and the general condition of things.

I’m not going to litigate the politics here. I don’t think my read on it would improve anybody’s day, mine included. But I’d be lying if I described the last stretch as restful, and I don’t think I’m unusual in that. Asked directly, something like three-quarters of people say they’re exhausted by how much is happening - and most of them say they intend to keep paying attention anyway. That combination is the whole problem. It isn’t apathy. It’s the cost of refusing to be apathetic.

So which one is it?

I spend my working life on systems where the first job is isolating the variable. Change one thing, watch what moves, learn something. It’s a good method, and it does not work here. I can’t run a version of the last month where my wrist is fine and everything else is identical. There’s one instance, no staging environment, and every input arrives at once.

Where I’ve landed is that it’s probably both, and that the ratio matters less than I want it to. The healing is going well. The weariness is real. Neither cancels the other, and waiting to find out which is which is mostly just a way of not resting.

So: the hands are better. That part I’m sure about.