The Weight of Translation

The thing about Wednesday is that it’s supposed to be the easy one. The hump day. The downhill bit. Everyone says so, and I used to believe them, back when I still had the energy to believe things that weren’t mine.

It’s half nine at night and I’m sitting on the bathroom floor because the sofa felt too open. The tiles are cold through my joggers and the extractor fan is doing that low drone it does when the humidity’s up, and it’s the most soothing sound in the flat right now. Better than the telly. Better than the group chat, which has been pinging since six with plans for Erin’s birthday that I can’t think about yet.

I keep trying to name what’s wrong. That’s what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it? Name it. Locate it. But it’s not in one place. It’s everywhere and nowhere, like a weather system.

I’m not ill. I slept last night. I ate lunch. I even went outside. I did all the things.

So why does it feel like I’ve been carrying a piano up a hill since Monday?

My phone buzzes. Not the group chat - it’s Sidney.

You surviving?

I stare at the message for a long time. Then I type: Bathroom floor.

Three dots. Then: Good tiles though.

I almost laugh. Almost. That’s something.

I’m a copy editor. I should say that, because it matters. I work for a mid-size publishing house in Finsbury Park - academic texts mostly, the kind of books that get cited in other books that nobody outside a university library will ever touch. My brain was built for this - the pattern recognition, the sustained attention, the quiet focus.

What my brain was not built for is the open-plan office they moved us into last September. Forty-eight desks. No partitions. A kitchen where someone is always microwaving fish. And Ray, my deskmate, who drums his fingers on his keyboard when he’s thinking, which is constantly, because Ray is a deeply thoughtful person who has no idea that his thoughtfulness has a sound.

Ray asked me today if I was okay. We were in the kitchen, him leaning against the counter with his chipped mug, me staring at the kettle like it owed me something.

“You seem a bit flat,” he said.

“Just tired.”

“You should try that sleep app. The one with the rain sounds.”

I nodded. Smiled. The smile took more effort than anything else I did all day.

Ray’s not unkind. He’s one of those people who genuinely wants to help but can only reach for solutions shaped like his own life. He once told me he deals with stress by going for a run, and the way he said it - like he was handing me a key - made me want to cry. Not because it was wrong. Because it was so far from the thing I actually needed that the distance itself was the problem.

What I needed was for someone to understand that I wasn’t tired from work. I was tired from the work around the work. The translation. The constant, invisible labour of converting myself into someone legible.

I don’t think I knew the word “masking” until I was thirty-two. That’s twenty-two years of doing a thing without a name for it. Twenty-two years of thinking the exhaustion was a personal failing - that everyone found it this hard and I was simply worse at hiding the strain.

There’s a memory I keep circling back to. I was maybe ten. Mrs Palmer asked me to man the lucky dip at the school fair. I said I didn’t want to because the bucket was full of shredded paper and the texture made my skin crawl. She laughed - not meanly, just the way adults laugh when children say something charmingly odd - and ruffled my hair.

I did the lucky dip. Smiled and handed out prizes for forty-five minutes. When I got home I sat in the airing cupboard and pressed my palms flat against the warm pipes until the feeling went away.

The diagnosis didn’t fix anything. People think the label is the key and once you have it the door opens into a room full of accommodations. But mostly what it gave me was a sharper awareness of how many rooms are not built for me, and a new kind of tiredness - the tiredness of knowing exactly what’s wrong and still not being able to explain it to the people you need to explain it to.

I told my old manager, Wendy, that I found the open-plan office overwhelming. That the noise made it hard to concentrate. She nodded and said, “Have you tried noise-cancelling headphones?”

I was wearing them at the time.

Everyone means well. That’s what makes it so exhausting - you can’t even be angry about it. You just absorb the gap between what you said and what they heard, and you carry that gap in your body, and after a while the gaps stack up and you can’t feel your edges anymore.

Sidney is the only person in my life who doesn’t require translation. We met three years ago at a support group held in a community centre with fluorescent lighting that buzzed at a frequency only I and apparently one other person could hear, and that person was Sidney, and we bonded in the car park over our shared conviction that the lights were a form of psychological warfare.

They said something to me a few months ago that I haven’t been able to put down. We were sitting in their car outside Tesco - neither of us wanted to go in yet, both doing that thing where you pretend you’re checking your phone but really you’re gathering yourself.

“The burnout isn’t from the job,” they said. “It’s from being misunderstood so consistently that you stop trying to be understood. You can rest from work. You can take a holiday. But you can’t rest from being misread. That follows you into every room.”

We sat in the car for another ten minutes. Then we bought pasta and bin bags and Hobnobs, and it was the most seen I’d felt in weeks. All it took was someone naming the thing without trying to fix it.

The extractor fan clicks off. The bathroom goes quiet.

I press my palms against the tiles. Cool, smooth, predictable. I let myself feel the edges of the day without trying to sort them into a story that makes sense to someone else.

The group chat pings again. Erin’s birthday. Saturday. Bowling and then drinks. I can already feel the future weight of it - the noise, the shoes that other people have worn, the monitoring of my own face to make sure I look like I’m having fun even when I am having fun, because apparently having fun in the wrong way is the same as not having fun at all.

But Erin sat next to me during my first week and said, “You don’t have to talk to me, but I’m going to talk to you, and you can just nod if you want.” She let me nod for three days before I said something back, and she didn’t comment on the delay, and that small act of patience is the reason I’ve lasted at this job longer than any other.

I want to go. That’s the part people don’t understand. I think part of it might be that wanting to and being able to are connected by a bridge I have to build fresh every time, and some days the materials just aren’t there.

I pick up my phone. Sidney’s message is still on the screen. Good tiles though.

I type: Erin’s birthday Saturday. Bowling.

A pause. Then: Loud.

Very loud.

What time?

Seven.

I could drive. Pick you up at quarter to. We could sit in the car park for a bit first.

I read the message three times. It’s not a solution. It’s not a fix. It’s a witness saying: I know the bridge is hard, and I’ll stand on your side of it while you build.

I type: Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

And I mean it. All three of them.

I stand up. My knees crack. The bathroom mirror catches me - tired face, hair flat on one side from leaning against the wall, the kind of expression that would make Ray suggest a sleep app.

But I hold my own gaze for a moment, and I think: I named the weather. I didn’t fix it. I didn’t wait for someone to fix it. I just found someone willing to stand in it with me, and I said yes, and that yes came from somewhere real.

The tiles are still cold. The group chat is still pinging. Wednesday is not, it turns out, the easy one.

But I’m off the bathroom floor. And I know what I’m doing Saturday. And the piano is still there, but I can feel my hands again, and that’s enough to start walking.