3 unrelatable-to-me things people say

There are some things that people say that are completely unrelatable to me, and I wonder if people say them just because they’ve heard other people say them for time immemorial.

Here are 3 examples of them:

“I’m too tired to fall asleep.” What does that even mean? I love to sleep. I sometimes feel very tired. But, I’ve never felt anything that I’d even be tempted to describe as “too tired to sleep.” “I can’t sleep.” Yes, that I’ve felt, but it’s almost always because I can’t stop thinking about all kinds of ridiculous things.

“My muscles are in knots.” I’ve had spasms. I’ve had numbness. I’ve had aches. But a knot? Is that even physically possible? And what pushes something beyond a spasm, numbness, or an ache—all the way to a knot?

“My character decided to do something completely unexpected.” Successful writers love to say this in interviews. When I was younger, I wrote 9 chapters of a novel and not once did my characters “do” or “decide” anything that I didn’t write on the page. In fact, I abandoned my novel because I couldn’t figure out a good way to get my protagonist pregnant, and she sure as hell didn’t step up—expectedly or unexpectedly—to show me.