By the time I get home

By the time I get home from work, the list is still there.

Dinner. Laundry. The email to my sister. The call I keep moving. The grocery order I haven’t placed. The corner of the kitchen I said I would deal with last week. And below all of that, the real list — the social things, the relationships, the friend I haven’t seen since before winter, the person I meant to check in on.

I work not even full time. I know this. And by five in the afternoon I have nothing left. Not reduced — nothing. The kind of nothing where making dinner feels like a project, where a text from a friend feels like a demand.

For a long time I thought this was a discipline problem. Or an executive function problem specifically, which I could solve with better systems. I tried the systems. They helped somewhat and then ran into the same wall.

The wall is this: working costs more than it looks like it costs.

Other people at my job seem to arrive, do the work, and leave with something still in reserve. They make plans for the evening. They keep those plans. I watched them for years trying to reverse-engineer what they were doing that I wasn’t.

What I’ve been able to figure out: they aren’t running multiple parallel processes the whole time they’re at work. Every conversation is not a problem being monitored for subtext. Every ambiguous email is not something sitting in the background consuming attention for three hours. Getting from their desk to the kitchen and back is not a sensory event requiring recovery.

They are doing less, invisibly, because their nervous systems are spending less.

By the time I get home, I have been at it since before I even arrived. The commute. The sounds. The managing of how I walk in and what my face is doing. All of it draws from the same place. And that place doesn’t refill just because the work day ended.

I’ve stopped trying to be productive in the evenings. This felt like failure for a long time. Now it seems like accurate information. A fact about how I work.

The question I keep coming back to is what I actually want to spend what I have on. Because the capacity is what it is. The list will always be longer than the hours. The only real choice is which parts of it matter.

I don’t have a good answer yet.