We watched her stride into the room like a martyr in activewear, clutching two shopping bags, three lists, and one aggressively scented gingerbread latte. Her eyes carried that familiar glaze of seasonal martyrdom, the look of someone who has survived Westfield in December and wants the world to applaud her bravery with a slow-clap and a parade.
She began her monologue before her coat even touched the back of the chair.
“I’m just so tired. Honestly. I have so much on. Christmas is just… exhausting.”
There it was. The declaration. The festive flare shot into the sky.
As if she alone had been summoned to decorate the entire Southern Hemisphere by hand.
We nodded as she detailed every moment of her Yuletide suffering. The present wrapping. The cooking. The emotional weight of choosing napkin colours. The online orders that haven’t even shipped yet. The burden of managing a social calendar engineered in hell. It was a dramatic reading of her own life, performed in the key of victimhood.
But here’s the thing we quietly noticed, somewhere between her story about hand-rolling shortbread and her confession that she hasn’t sat down since October: she genuinely believed she was the only tired person in the room.
As though everyone else had been gently floating through December on a cloud of peppermint serenity while she alone pulled the sleigh.
We didn’t interrupt. We let her finish. But inside, a deeper truth hummed: this wasn’t a Christmas problem. This was a universal human reflex dressed in tinsel.
Because the moment someone says, “I’m just so busy,” what they really mean is, “Please acknowledge the magnitude of my struggle. My life is harder than yours. I deserve the gold medal in the Tiredness Olympics.”
It is the soft-spoken vanity of exhaustion.
The humblebrag of martyrdom.
The performance art of sighing a little louder than necessary.
And Christmas simply amplifies the stage.
We’ve all met this character. She appears at school pick-ups, workplaces, brunches, and anywhere with a table large enough to accommodate her emotional carry-on luggage. She is the epicentre of her own weather pattern: a drizzle of fatigue, a gust of obligation, a thunderclap of how no one understands how much she has on.
Meanwhile, every other human within earshot is quietly juggling their own collapsing towers of responsibility:
parents with kids melting down over advent calendars,
workers sprinting toward year-end deadlines,
the childless who somehow still end up doing Secret Santa because they “seem festive,”
and the millions trying to maintain basic sanity while the world demands celebration on cue.
But none of that matters in the realm of the Christmas Martyr.
Her tiredness is exceptional.
Her busy-ness is bespoke.
Her suffering is artisanal, handcrafted, and locally sourced from her own imagination.
And that’s the broader revelation, isn’t it?
Nobody believes they’re average when describing their pain.
Everyone wants their exhaustion to be special, a shimmering badge of honour pinned to the chest.
Yet the truth is simple, unavoidable, and brutally unpoetic:
Everyone is tired.
Everyone is busy.
Everyone is carrying something heavy into the silly season.
The only real difference is who needs to announce it.
As for our festive heroine, she is still talking, still sighing, still listing the endless demands placed on her shoulders. Someone offers her a mince pie. She declines, muttering something about gluten and obligations.
We sip our coffee, take in the spectacle, and quietly conclude that the greatest Christmas tradition isn’t the tree or the carols or the panic-buying of socks.
It is forgetting—every single year—that we are not the main character in the collective chaos.
Still, let her speak.
It’s Christmas, after all.
And nothing says “peace on earth” like one more person explaining how busy they are.
