The lock has been flashing and beeping at me for almost a week.
Not constantly. Just every time I unlocked the door — a small reminder that eventually it would stop working without the physical key. Twice in the past few days I'd thought, standing in the doorway: I should really find my key, just in case.
I didn't find the key.
But at some point I had remembered to pick up batteries. They were sitting somewhere, not forgotten exactly, just undealt with — part of the running inventory of small things I'm tracking without a system, carrying without acknowledgment.
Today I was cleaning and came across them.
And instead of putting them away, I changed the batteries.
Done.
And I had a moment — small and real — of look at me. Getting things done. Taking care of the not-so-little things.
And then, almost immediately, the other thought arrived.
The totality of it.
Not just the batteries. The monitoring of the batteries. The noticing that they were running low, the picking them up at the store, the carrying that information across a week, the two doorway moments of I should really find my key, the eventual doing of the thing. That's one item. One small closed loop in an inventory that never stops running.
It's not just remembering the pieces.
It's the constant tracking of the status of all the pieces. Knowing which ones are urgent, which ones can wait, which ones will become urgent if they wait too long. The expectation — mostly self-imposed, mostly invisible — that I should know the state of all of it at all times and know what to do with each piece when it surfaces.
The mental load isn't the tasks.
It's the management layer underneath the tasks that never turns off.
I don't have a perfect system for it. I probably never will. But standing there with the batteries in my hand, task complete, I found something that felt important:
I do an enormous amount of work.
Quietly. Consistently. Mostly without acknowledgment — including from myself.
The batteries got changed because I noticed they were running low, remembered to buy them, and found a moment to actually do it. That's not nothing. That's the whole chain, completed.
Look at me.
Truth line: I don't need a perfect system. I need to stop pretending the work I'm already doing doesn't count.
If you're new here: this is what I mean by returning to self—ordinary moments, honest noticing, and small choices that don't require self-abandonment. Start here: Why 55 Houseplants.
