Overextended

I am always overextending myself to be helpful, taking on extra shifts and late-night calls, piling on others' troubles while mine simmer below, offering up snippets of my free time to the peanut gallery in between. I read once about the importance of a self, but I cannot remember the last time I saw my own looking back at me in bus stop and computer screen reflections. The girl in the mirror is tired, always so very tired, from this vicious cycle of pain and reinvention and lost identity and the rebirth of her image from events that proved fatal, still eating away at her reincarnation.