You were right in the middle of saying it. The word was there — you could feel the shape of it — and then it wasn’t. Just gone. A blank where something familiar should have been, and no amount of reaching for it in the moment made any difference. Or you walked into a room…
Something happens — something that by any reasonable measure should produce a response — and you wait for the feeling to arrive. And it doesn’t. Or it arrives so faintly, so far below the surface, that you can barely register it’s there at all. It might be good news that should produce relief or happiness….
You look at the list. It’s not a long list. None of the items on it are particularly difficult — you know how to do all of them, you’ve done similar things countless times before, and individually each one would take perhaps ten or twenty minutes at most. And yet something about looking at the…
It’s not the big things. You can usually manage the big things when you have to — when something genuinely urgent demands your attention, you find what’s needed and you do it. That part still works. It’s the ordinary things. The small, manageable, completely reasonable things that shouldn’t require any particular reserves of determination or…
It’s not even midday yet. Nothing particularly demanding has happened. No crisis, no difficult conversation, no enormous task that required everything you had. The morning has been fairly ordinary by any reasonable measure. And yet there it is — that familiar heaviness. The sense that your mind has already used something up that it can’t…
You’re in the conversation. You’re nodding in the right places. You can follow the thread if you concentrate hard enough. But there’s a layer of glass between you and the moment — thin, nearly invisible, but consistently there. Like you’re watching yourself participate rather than actually participating. Or you’re doing something routine — something you’ve…
It’s not that the thought isn’t there. That’s the strange part. You can almost feel it — just out of reach. Someone asks you something and you know you know the answer, but it takes a beat longer than it should to arrive. You’re in the middle of explaining something and the word you need…
You close the laptop. Or leave the office. Or reach whatever point marks the end of the working day for you. And you expect — on some level, even if you don’t consciously think about it — that something will lift. That the mental gears will shift. That you’ll cross some invisible threshold between the…
