Yesterday was fine

Yesterday looked normal. I ate at the right times. I went to bed at a reasonable hour. I didn’t do anything I don’t usually do.

Then I woke up and the day was already wrong.

The sound of the kettle was offensive. My clothes felt like a decision I didn’t have the capacity to make. I sat down to start the things I normally start and everything felt like it was on the other side of glass. I knew what I was supposed to do. I just couldn’t get there.

This is a specific kind of day. I know burnout. It has a weight and a duration. I know perimenopause crash days. They arrive with their own particular flavour. This is something else. The day with no reason I can name.

And the absence of reason is part of what makes it hard. If I could point to something, I could work with it. Overdid it yesterday, so today is the cost. But yesterday was fine. That’s the one that breaks something in me a little, the day that just arrives without explanation.

What I’ve pieced together over time — from my own patterns and from what other people say when they describe the same thing — is that the nervous system doesn’t always bill you at the time. The stack accumulates without you knowing it’s accumulating. A friend who stayed for nine hours. A meeting that ran long. Traffic noise that registered just below the level of conscious irritation. A sound at 2am that you barely noticed. Alone, none of those are anything. Together, they are the fuse. And sometimes you don’t know the fuse is already lit until you open your eyes the next morning.

The sensory tolerance is the first thing to go. Sounds that would normally be background become sharp and personal. The smell of the neighbour’s cooking is too close. My own body feels slightly wrong, like something is inflamed without a specific location. And everything I try to make myself do hits a wall about three steps in.

There is no clean fix for this day. Getting outside sometimes shifts it, for an hour. Moving helps, or makes it worse. It’s not predictable. What I’ve stopped doing is trying to treat it like a normal day.

The mistake I used to make was to push through, then wonder why by evening I was either in a full meltdown or completely shut down and unable to leave the sofa. Pushing through the low tolerance day seems to extend it into the next day. Sometimes the day after that.

What works, when I can bring myself to do it, is essentially triage. This is not the day to schedule difficult things. Not the day to make big decisions or have the hard conversation or do the task that requires sustained executive function. This is the day I keep small, keep quiet, and don’t make it worse.

I used to think that was giving up. It’s the only thing that actually shortens it.

I still don’t always know why these days happen. Some of them line up with my hormonal cycle. Some follow a social event from the day before. Some seem to come from nowhere. What I’ve stopped doing is treating the absence of explanation as evidence that I’m doing something wrong.

The day arrived. I’m in it.