It’s 11pm and you’ve already redesigned your career in your head, half written a novel you’ll never open a document for, mapped out the physical therapy protocol that will finally fix your hip, planned the trip you’re too unwell to take, and had an entire imagined argument with someone about an idea you’re still unsure you believe. Your body has been on the couch this whole time. It hasn’t moved in three hours. It couldn’t.
Nobody warns you about this part when they talk about your bright brain or your high-capacity mind. They talk about it like a gift with no shadow side, something you get to keep in a drawer and pull out whenever convenient. They skip the part where a mind like this never idles. It doesn’t take a day off just because the body demands one. It keeps generating: possibilities, plans, entire alternate versions of your life, at a rate your actual, physical, single, finite body was never built to sustain, even on a good day, let alone a day that already has a ceiling on it.
You end up living two timelines at once. One is the life your mind keeps producing, fully rendered, plausible, occasionally brilliant. The other is the life your body can actually deliver, governed by how many spoons are left, whether today is a flare day, whether “productive” means you wrote a paragraph instead of a book, whether you can shower and leave the house or only manage one.
The gap between those two timelines is where the grief lives.
It’s Unfair.
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