I wake up some mornings and my head’s already running — could’ve slept earlier, could’ve finished that thing — and I haven’t even moved yet, haven’t opened my eyes all the way, and already I’m standing in my own courtroom with toothpaste foam everywhere, sentencing myself to being behind at 7:47 AM. Before coffee.
Which feels like a design flaw, honestly, like whoever built humans forgot to add a buffer between waking up and the self-criticism startup sequence.
What nobody tells you about fresh starts is they carry this weird compound interest.
When you’re restarting something for the fourth or seventh time –running, sleeping normally, drinking enough water, whatever—there’s this heaviness that isn’t about the actual task.
It’s the metadata. The knowledge that you’ve stood exactly here before, said “okay, this time,” and watched it dissolve.
I know the trail hasn’t moved. I still know where the rocks roll, where my lungs burn, which part of the climb makes me want to quit.
But now I’m climbing with this extra weight of knowing I’m the person who has to keep starting over.
The shoes are better, but the faith is… well. You climb anyway because standing at the bottom forever feels even worse than the deja vu of failing again. At least the view is familiar.
I burned the toast last Tuesday. Not charcoal, just that aggressive brown at the edges, and I stood there staring at it like it was a personality test I was failing.
I do this with emails too—I’ll rewrite one line until it sounds like a press release from someone who definitely has their life sorted, and I think I do this because somewhere I got the idea that if I make everything polished enough, nobody will notice I’m improvising.
But lately I’ve been sending the wobbly sentences. Serving the burnt toast.
The person receiving the email doesn’t know I spent twenty minutes on it; they just needed a yes or no. The toast still gets eaten.
You just scrape harder, and honestly it tastes the same.
Evenings are when I get weird.
I open the fridge and stare at week-old cabbage like it contains answers.
Or I scroll through texts from three months ago, rereading conversations that are already over, which I know is mentally unhealthy but I do it anyway.
It’s fidgeting for the mind—my brain pacing around the room, looking for comfort in a cold box that only has condiments.
So now I splash water on my face instead. Cold, shocking, interrupts the loop.
I water the plants I definitely watered yesterday.
Sometimes you just need to do something with your hands that isn’t trying to find meaning in a jar of pickles.
I wrote down everything I was avoiding on a napkin last week.
Expected an inventory of my cowardice. Sat on the couch bracing for impact.
But I looked at the list—call the dentist, finish that draft, figure out the taxes—and it was just… tasks?
Like I’d been carrying around this boulder and finally looked at it and realized it was mostly Styrofoam. I laughed into my coffee. All that dread for a to-do list that would take three hours total.
Apparently my monsters are manageable. They’re just annoying and persistent, like a fly that won’t leave the kitchen.
What actually helps are the deeply unsexy things.
Folding the blanket so the bed looks finished even though I’m just going to destroy it again tonight.
Drinking water before I touch my phone, which is embarrassingly difficult.
They don’t go on a resume. They’re not achievements.
But they’re handholds when the day feels slippery, which is most days.
Washing one cup reminds you there’s rhythm hiding in the simplest gestures—even if that sounds like something you’d read on a motivational mug, it actually works.
I stopped turning hobbies into proof.
Made a playlist called “sad traffic jams” that nobody’s going to hear.
Cooked something experimental that tasted like confusion and just ate it without documenting the failure. It feels like stealing, keeping some things entirely mine.
Like I have this room inside my life where I don’t have to perform the version of me that has everything figured out.
Privacy isn’t withholding anymore—it’s breathing differently. Keeping the spark safe from overexposure, or just having something that doesn’t need a caption.
Changes happen in the gaps.
I walked away from a conversation yesterday without rehearsing it twenty times in my head. Didn’t even realize until I was home, keys in hand, thinking about dinner instead.
Nobody said anything. There was no moment of transformation. Just… Tuesday was slightly less exhausting than last Tuesday, and I almost missed it entirely because I was busy looking for the big breakthrough that wasn’t there.
Maybe that’s the tempo—moving through days that don’t declare progress, carrying the same broken promises and burnt toast, but climbing anyway.
One uneven morning at a time.
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