My ideal day begins with coping ahead, or as I like to call it, preemptive damage control. I’ve turned it into an art form, engineering every minute detail like it’s a bomb that might not detonate if I’m careful enough. If I can pull all the strings just right, maybe everything will hold—maybe I won’t disappoint anyone, least of all myself. 

It’s absurd, really, the way I grip so tightly to control, as if my constant vigilance could prevent the cracks from spreading. But what else is there? How else am I supposed to make sense of being here, in this moment, trying to pull some thread of meaning from the mundane? I’m just another flicker in the endless loop, but if I can make this one small flicker feel like it matters, maybe it will be enough to keep the void at bay. Maybe. 

And then there's mindfulness. Therapy acts like it's the magic pill for everything—just swallow it right, and the storm in your head will finally calm. "Be present," they say, "stay in the moment." , but that never felt natural to me. Being in the moment means being in my body, in my head, and neither of those places are the easiest to occupy. 

Today, I tried. I dusted the room, not because it needed it, but because I wanted to feel like I was clearing the cobwebs out of my head. I scrubbed the toilet like I was scraping some invisible grime off my life, believing for a second that maybe the cleaner my house was, the cleaner I could feel inside.  Each action was deliberate, every mundane task imbued with this quiet desperation to find meaning, to wring something valuable out of the everyday. I fed the cats, focusing on each scoop of food as if the routine could anchor me, and I chose my clothes with care, as if what I wore would dictate the version of myself I carried into the world. 

I think that’s the point—there’s no grand design, no perfect formula to crack. Life is this endless loop of dusting off the same mess, feeding the same cats, picking the same clothes, and somehow, that’s okay. It doesn’t need to mean more than it does. Maybe all the meaning is in the doing—just showing up for the small things, even when they don’t seem to add up to anything big. I’m here, right now, and maybe the beauty is in knowing that none of it really matters, but I get to decide that it does.