When I was giving birth to my daughter, there came a point—about twelve hours into my unmedicated, at-home, every-90-seconds-a-contraction back-labor odyssey—where I was done. I looked up at my midwife, bleary and exhausted, and said, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” She smiled, beatifically, and said, “Okay. Let’s do something else.”

I’ve been exhausted for years. I’ve been low energy for so long that I began to think that it was just my “normal.” In fact, an acupuncturist I saw for my fatigue stated as much. “You were just born this way,” he said, like that was that.