Not “I am spinning my strength.” Not “My strength is spinning.” But — as if the exhaustion is happening to you, not by you. There’s a passivity here, but not helplessness. More like: Something is doing this to me, and I can’t quite catch what it is.

But you’ll hear it in the kitchen, in the hallway, on the phone between two people who know exactly what the other means. “Vos makhst du?” “Oy… s’iz mir drym mayn kraft.” No explanation needed. No follow-up required. The phrase is its own diagnosis and its own permission: I am allowed to be this tired. In an age of burnout culture, productivity hacking, and toxic positivity, drym mayn kraft feels almost prophetic. We have words like “exhaustion,” “fatigue,” “burnout” — clinical, medical, lifeless. They describe symptoms. They don’t describe the sensation of your own inner motor sputtering because the world has demanded too many rotations.

S’iz mir drym mayn kraft.

And that’s okay.

Here’s a feature-style piece on the Yiddish phrase (ס’יז מיר דרים מײַן קראַכט) — literally, “It’s spinning my strength around” or more naturally, “It’s draining my energy / wearing me out.” When Life Spins Your Strength Away: The Quiet Desperation of Drym Mayn Kraft There are some phrases in a language that don’t just describe a feeling — they perform it. Yiddish, that master key to the Jewish soul’s back room, specializes in such phrases. And among its most visceral, least theatrical, and most painfully recognizable is:

That “something” is life itself. The accumulation. The errands. The emotional labor. The news cycle. The silence from a friend. The noise from a neighbor. All of it spinning in a centrifuge, and you’re standing in the middle. You won’t find drym mayn kraft in the great Yiddish protest songs or the tear-soaked lullabies of the shtetl. It’s too small for poetry. Too big to ignore.