Wednesday again

It's ten to four on a Wednesday afternoon, some months on. You're at the kitchen table, and an email has come in from a client. It's polite and it's unhappy. Your stomach tightens.

You notice the tightening, and you notice that the thought of cheese has arrived with it, and this time you see the two things arrive together. You're not hungry. Lunch was at one and it was a proper lunch, with the cheese in it. You ask. Stress, the email.

You put the kettle on and go and stand on the back step while it boils. It's cold. The neighbour's cat is on the fence. You come in, make the tea, and go back to the table, and write the first sentence of the reply, which is "Thanks for flagging this, and I'm sorry it's caused a problem." It's now eight minutes past. The email is still unhappy, and you're still not looking forward to the rest of the reply, but the tight thing has loosened, and the cheese hasn't crossed your mind since the cat.

At ten past you check, out of habit. You could have the crackers. You don't want them.

It wasn't always like this. In the first week you did the ask and went to the fridge anyway, four times out of five, and wrote it down, and felt faintly ridiculous. In the second week the notebook showed you that it was stress at four and tiredness at half past nine and almost nothing else, and that was a smaller problem than the one you'd been carrying. In the third week you went to bed at ten instead of eating crisps and were surprised to find that you'd been tired, not bored, for about a year.

There have been visits since. A bad Sunday, after a worse call than usual, when you named it and rang your sister and still had the toast afterwards, sitting down, with butter, and it was fine, and it was a decision. A Thursday when the day did feel ruined for an hour and the sentence came back, and you answered it, and the day wasn't.

Meals are better. You arrive at them hungry, which you'd forgotten was a thing, and you sit down, and you have what you like. The hum under the day has mostly gone. You still have feelings, at roughly the rate you always did. You know most of their names now.

If you've read this far and changed nothing yet, try one thing. The next time you find yourself in the kitchen without having decided to go there, put the kettle on, and while it boils, ask what's actually going on. Then see what the feeling does in ten minutes without help.