Always On

Janelle was sixteen when she first discovered the high.

It came wrapped in fluorescent lights and the smell of floor wax at Johnson’s Grocery, where she was hired to bag groceries and push carts in the Florida heat. The job wasn’t glamorous, but there was something intoxicating about being useful. Mr. Johnson would nod at her from across the store, clipboard in hand, and say, “Janelle, we need you to produce.” Five minutes later, it was “Janelle, register three.” Then, “Janelle, can you help clean up that spill near the bakery?”

She was everywhere. She was needed.

Within six months, she was training in every department. Mr. Johnson joked that she knew the store better than he did. She laughed, but inside, something glowed, a warm pulse of purpose that hummed under her skin. Each new task was a spark; each “Thank you, Janelle” was fuel. She stayed late to straighten shelves after closing, ran through training manuals during lunch, and volunteered for holiday shifts.

Her mother used to call the store to tell her to come home. “Baby, they’re not going to fall apart without you,” she’d say.

But Janelle wasn’t so sure. The thought of things running smoothly without her made her chest tighten.

By seventeen, she was living for the hum of the automatic doors, the chatter of customers, the squeak of her sneakers on polished linoleum. She’d look at the clock at midnight, exhausted but smiling. Sleep was an inconvenience.

Years later, the grocery store had become a blur in her rearview mirror, replaced by the steady rhythm of counting cash and stamping deposit slips at the bank.

At the teller’s counter, she discovered a new kind of rush: efficiency. The way she could handle a line of customers faster than anyone else, balance her drawer to the cent, anticipate needs before anyone asked. Her manager, a stern woman named Clara, told her she had “potential.”

Potential meant more responsibility, which meant longer hours, which meant she was back in her element.

She didn’t mind skipping lunches or coming in on Saturdays. When the other tellers clocked out, Janelle stayed, meticulously straightening stacks of deposit slips and organizing bills by serial number. She told herself it was just a good work ethic.

When her boyfriend, Daniel, asked why she couldn’t take a weekend off, she smiled and said, “I like it.”

He didn’t understand that the silence of being idle was unbearable. When she wasn’t working, she could hear the creak of the apartment walls, the ticking of the clock, the faint hum of her own thoughts. Work drowned all of that out.

They broke up a year later. She barely noticed.

Her next job as a barista came with caffeine and chaos, two of her favorite things. The hiss of the espresso machine, the swirl of milk froth, the blur of names shouted across the counter. She learned drink recipes by heart within a week, memorized regulars’ orders within two.

“Triple espresso, oat milk, one pump caramel,” she’d call out before the customer even reached the register.

She was a star employee. Always first in, last out. When the manager offered her the assistant position, she didn’t hesitate.

But soon the high faded again. She found herself checking schedules obsessively, rearranging shift coverage so she could work doubles. She volunteered for inventory counts and drive-thru duty.

She told herself she was building her future, until she realized she didn’t have one outside of work.

Friends stopped inviting her to brunches she couldn’t attend. Family birthdays came and went. She was too busy, too tired, too important elsewhere.

Victoria’s Secret was next. A job she swore would be temporary until it wasn’t.

The polished marble floors and soft pink glow of the store made her feel powerful. Managerial, even. By twenty-seven, she was running her own location. There were performance charts, inventory goals, team huddles. She loved the numbers, the reports, the endless ladder of “nexts.”

Her employees called her “The Hurricane” , always moving, never stopping.

She wore the title like armor.

When corporate came down for evaluations, her store was spotless. Her numbers were unmatched. Her staff, though weary, respected her.

But she began waking in the middle of the night with her jaw clenched and her heart racing, thinking she’d forgotten to lock the register. Once, she drove thirty minutes back to the store at 2 a.m. just to make sure.

Her mother called again, older now, her voice soft with worry. “You’ve been working yourself to death since you were a teenager, Janelle. Don’t you ever get tired?”

“Tired means I’m not doing enough,” Janelle replied, half-joking.

Her mother sighed. “Baby, you’re not a machine.”

But Janelle wasn’t so sure about that either.

It wasn’t until her early thirties that she found photography. A friend invited her to assist on a shoot, and Janelle felt something shift the moment she looked through the lens. It wasn’t just work, it was control, art, precision, motion. She could chase moments, frame perfection, capture time itself.

Freelancing seemed like the perfect marriage of work and freedom. She could take on as many gigs as she wanted, manage her own schedule, and answer to no one.

So she did.

Weddings on weekends, portraits on weekdays, product shoots in between. She edited late into the night, eyes burning from the glow of her monitor, heartbeat syncing with the soft click of the mouse. She skipped meals, forgot appointments, and ignored texts.

“Just one more project,” she’d whisper to herself at 3 a.m., exporting files.

Her apartment became a blur of coffee cups and camera bags. The walls were plastered with client calendars and sticky notes full of deadlines. She thrived in the motion. It felt like she’d finally built the perfect machine: herself.

Until the day it broke.

The morning of the wedding shoot was blistering hot. The bride wanted beach photos at sunrise. Janelle arrived before dawn, lugging tripods and lenses across the sand. She hadn’t slept in thirty hours. Her body was running on caffeine and adrenaline, her mind humming with angles and shutter speeds.

The light was perfect. The waves, gentle. The couple, glowing.

She crouched low, framing the shot. For a moment, everything aligned, the sun behind them, her finger on the trigger, time suspended in a single breath.

Then the world tilted.

The horizon spun. Her stomach dropped. The sand rose to meet her.

When she woke, it was to the sterile white of a hospital room. Her camera sat on a tray beside her bed, its lens capped. An IV trailed from her arm.

“You collapsed from exhaustion,” the nurse said gently. “Severe dehydration, sleep deprivation. You’re lucky someone saw you fall.”

Lucky.

Janelle turned her head toward the window. The sunset outside was soft and fading. She thought of all the sunsets she’d captured through her lens, all the mornings she’d chased light while ignoring the dark circles under her own eyes.

Her phone buzzed with new messages, clients, deadlines, missed calls. For once, she didn’t reach for it.

She lay there, still and silent, feeling the foreign weight of being unneeded.

It scared her at first. The emptiness. The quiet.

But as the hours passed, something inside her loosened.

She thought of sixteen-year-old Janelle, eager and bright, desperate to be indispensable. She thought of her mother’s voice, you’re not a machine.

Maybe she didn’t have to be.

Outside, the light dimmed to gold, and for the first time in decades, Janelle didn’t try to capture it. She simply watched as it faded.