I run a brand with a shirt that says Rest Is Productive. There's a cow on it, jumping over the moon, absolutely at peace.
Here's the part most people don't know: I drew that design in a body that has never once woken up feeling rested. Not after eight hours. Not after ten. Not ever.
I have narcolepsy. It took twelve years to find that out. For twelve years, I kept getting answers. None of them explained why sleep never worked.
It started with Mountain Dew
I was sixteen. Junior year of high school. And suddenly — not gradually, suddenly — I was exhausted all the time.
I solved it the way a sixteen-year-old solves things: a bottle of Mountain Dew every school day. Two, if I could afford it. It's where my entire allowance went. Every day after first block, I made my stop like it was a prescription refill, because it basically was. Coffee in the mornings, too. Then I'd come home and crash — not "teenager takes a nap" crash. Had to. Non-negotiable.
I was a straight-A student who started struggling to keep my eyes open in class. And here's what happened next, which is the part I need you to hear: nobody took me to a doctor.
I got lectures instead. I was unmotivated. I was lazy. I had bad sleep hygiene. I needed to eat better, go to bed earlier, try harder. I was a kid reporting a sudden, dramatic change in my own body, and the answer was a character assessment.
So I did what kids do with the labels adults hand them: I believed them. I decided I was lazy at my core — and I tried to outrun it. Do more. Be more. Achieve more. Straight A's earned on a brain that was never, not once, actually awake. It didn't matter how much I did. The exhaustion stayed, and so did the word.
The tired that doesn't make sense
Everyone thinks they know what tired feels like, so for years, nobody — including me — thought mine was worth investigating. Tired is normal. Tired is having a lot going on. Tired is "you should go to bed earlier," which people love to say, as if I hadn't thought of it.
But my tired didn't follow the rules. Sleep didn't fix it. A full night left me feeling like I'd pulled an all-nighter. The closest way I can describe it is this: imagine how you'd feel after staying awake for two or three days straight. The fog. The heaviness. The way your thoughts arrive late and out of order.
Now imagine feeling that way after sleeping. Every day. For years. While everyone around you sleeps eight hours and wakes up like a cast member in a cereal commercial.
What was actually happening
In Type 1 narcolepsy — the kind I have — the immune system attacks the brain cells that make orexin, the chemical that regulates your sleep-wake cycle and lets your brain drop into deep, restorative sleep. No orexin, no deep rest. The sleep happens; the restoration doesn't. It's like plugging in your phone every night and waking up to 20%. The cord was in. The outlet works. Something inside just doesn't hold the charge.
Type 1 also comes with cataplexy — sudden loss of muscle tone, triggered by strong emotion. I'm fully conscious when it happens; my limbs just become impossibly heavy, like my body briefly hangs up the phone on my brain.
And no, I don't collapse mid-sentence into my soup. Hollywood plays that version for laughs, and it's most people's entire education on narcolepsy. Real sleep attacks feel like a tide rising, not a trapdoor opening. You don't lose consciousness mid-thought. You lose the ability to pretend you're fine — which might be the more inconvenient symptom.
Twelve years
College was harder. I'd fall asleep reading my textbooks. I'd reread the same paragraph ten times and still not absorb a word of it. I cried a lot. And I kept self-medicating with the only drug available to a broke student: caffeine. I discovered Starbucks, and Frappuccinos, and I am not exaggerating when I tell you I was drinking two or three ventis a day, plus a bottle or two of Coke, just to stay upright.
Here's the math nobody warns you about: I entered high school at 110 pounds. By college graduation, three years into treating a neurological disease with liquid sugar, I was 260.
At my first job, I fell asleep on my lunch break and got in trouble — it "looked bad." So I started sleeping in my car instead. At a later job, I took mini-naps in the restroom, five to eight minutes at a time, every hour. Another job had a single-stall bathroom with a real door, and I'd bring in a jacket, bunch it up as a pillow, and nap on the bathroom floor several times a day. On weekends, I'd sometimes sleep straight through to Monday.
I did go to sleep specialists. I did the sleep studies. No sleep apnea, they said. And then the specialist gave me his diagnosis anyway: I was tired because I was fat.
Read that again. The caffeine I used to survive the symptom caused the weight — and the weight became the reason no one would look past it. My coping mechanism was put on trial as the cause. Case closed, next patient.
So I did the only thing left. Through diet and exercise, I lost the weight — all the way down to a size 4 at 26. I went back to that same sleep doctor and said: I lost the weight. I'm still exhausted. And now I'm nodding off at red lights.
That's when he ordered the multiple sleep latency test — the MSLT, which measures how fast your brain drops into REM when you nap. I passed with flying colors. Which is the one test you really don't want to ace.
Twelve years after a sixteen-year-old started spending her allowance on Mountain Dew to survive the school day, I finally had a name for it: narcolepsy. And with a name came what I'd needed the entire time — actual medication, for an actual neurological disease.
The average time to a narcolepsy diagnosis is eight to fifteen years, so my twelve is depressingly ordinary. That's not a system with a rare glitch — that's a system that routinely lets people spend a decade believing their brain chemistry is a personality flaw. Narcolepsy hides inside more familiar diagnoses — depression, epilepsy, even schizophrenia — or, in my case, behind assumptions about body size. "I'm always tired" is one of the easiest symptoms in medicine to dismiss. And when you've spent years exhausted, you stop reporting it, because you assume it's just who you are.
Getting the diagnosis didn't fix my sleep. (Neither has the ongoing insurance-and-paperwork obstacle course of getting medication approved — a saga for another essay, or a support group.) But the diagnosis fixed something else: the story. Twelve years of "lazy" reorganized itself, overnight, into twelve years of straight A's, degrees, and full-time jobs, achieved on a brain running on empty. I wasn't weak. I was carrying an invisible weight, uphill, every single day — and mistaking exhaustion for weakness.
If you've ever gotten a late diagnosis — of anything — you know that feeling. The grief and the relief show up in the same breath.
Why there's a cow on the shirt
When I drew Rest Is Productive, it wasn't a cute slogan or a soft-girl aesthetic choice. It was a fight I was picking — with hustle culture, sure, but mostly with the voice in my own head that spent twelve years calling rest "falling behind."
For some of us, rest isn't a reward you earn by finishing the list. It isn't even self-care, exactly. It's medicine — dosed daily, non-negotiable, prescribed by a body that will simply take it by force if you don't offer it willingly. My body taught me that the hard way. The cow gets to learn it while jumping over a moon, because at my brand, even the hard lessons get to be a little whimsical.
I run a rest-and-mental-health company in a body that never feels rested. For a long time that felt like an embarrassing contradiction. Now I think it's the credential. I don't make reminders for people who have it figured out. I make the reminders I needed — and this one, I needed for twelve years.
If any of this sounds familiar
If you're always tired and sleep never fixes it — if you've built your whole day around caffeine and secret naps, if strong laughter makes your knees give a little, if you've been "just tired" since you were a teenager — please hear the sentence I needed someone to say at sixteen: that's not a character flaw, it's a symptom, and it's worth investigating. And if a doctor waves it off without testing you — because of your weight, your age, your anything — that's a verdict on their curiosity, not your body. Ask again. Ask someone else.
Talk to a board-certified sleep specialist. You can find one at sleepeducation.org. Most people with narcolepsy are still undiagnosed or misdiagnosed — which means most of us are still out there believing we're lazy.
You're not lazy. You might just be running the world's longest all-nighter.
And whatever your body's story turns out to be: rest is not a reward for finishing. You don't earn it. You require it.
The cow and I both mean that.
Author's note: If you're curious, Rest Is Productive lives in The Rest Revolutionary collection — hand-drawn, like everything here, by someone who takes rest extremely seriously and extremely involuntarily. And if you cope with the hard stuff by laughing at it, you already know where to find me.
