The story everyone tells, the instant overwhelming love thing, I think it sets you up to feel like something is wrong with you when it doesn't arrive on schedule. Maybe it does happen like that for some people. But a slow build is also real. It's not a flaw, it's just a different shape.
It wasn't a character flaw that needed resolving. It was a thing that was happening in my body. I know that now in a way I didn't when I was in it. Not sure knowing it then would have helped though, honestly.
The thing I came away with, and I'm still not sure I fully believe it, is that the content mattered less than the timing. It wasn't that the news was especially bad that year, I mean it was, but it's always something. It was more that taking it in right before sleep, every single night, sort of stacks up in a way that's completely invisible until it isn't. Each individual night felt like nothing. Thirty minutes of scrolling. Unremarkable. But it was thirty minutes of cortisol or whatever the body does with that kind of information, right before the part where you're supposed to let everything settle.
I kept thinking about how I'd never have played something dissonant and unresolved right before bed and expected to sleep well. But that's basically what I was doing every night for a year.
I don't know. Maybe that's too neat an explanation. Maybe the work stress really was most of it and the phone was just. I go back and forth on this honestly.
They do not hear the rules you say. They watch the thing you do at three in the afternoon when you think nobody is looking. I thought I was just knackered and cutting corners, I did not think I was teaching anything. Turns out I was teaching constantly.
I think I was scared of them being bored because when I was growing up boredom felt like something was wrong. My mum worked a lot and there was nobody home after school most days and bored meant lonely. So I think I just. I don't know. Filled it all in so they wouldn't feel that.
But they weren't lonely. They had each other and they had us and they just needed an afternoon with nothing in it. The sticks and crates thing. Theo spent four hours one Sunday drawing a map of an imaginary country and naming all the towns. He never would have done that before because there was never four hours.
I'm not saying I had it all wrong. The swimming has been good for him, he genuinely loves it. But most of the rest of it was mine not his. I was handing him a packed schedule and calling it opportunity.
I put the phone in the kitchen overnight now. That is the entire change, nothing dramatic, no app, no sleep coach, just the phone on the kitchen counter instead of the pillow. The chest thing mostly went. I still get it occasionally, usually when I have slipped back into old habits a few nights running. I think I knew technically that what I was filling my head with right before sleep was just sitting there while I tried to rest. I just didn't believe it applied to me specifically. That is probably a nurse thing, or maybe just a person thing.
Staying angry at someone who has probably forgotten the thing ever happened is not protection, it is just a habit that keeps running. It did not hurt her. She was fine, got a job somewhere else, probably did not think about me at all. I was the one replaying a planning meeting from 2019 while making pasta on a Tuesday.
The feed isn't a lie exactly but it's not the whole thing either. It's the bit people chose to show on a good day with decent lighting. I knew that already, I think most people do, but knowing it and actually believing it are different.
The strange thing is I still catch myself doing it. I will be sitting in the garden with a cup of tea and a biscuit, perfectly warm afternoon, and some part of my brain goes quiet in this disapproving way. Like I have nipped out of work early. I am seventy three. I have not had a job in five years. The biscuit is a bourbon. None of it matters and yet there I am.