Nine minutes of deep sleep. Six hours forty-five total. HRV 51, night 36, pulse 60 — numbers that explain nothing and everything about why my body arrived at 7am already tired, already behind.
Then the guilt showed up before I did.
Not a thought. A siren. You’re late. You’re skipping. You should be working — fired off by some nervous system subroutine installed over decades, running before the rest of me had logged on. I had to explain to my own brain, out loud, in the dark: I’m not employed. There’s nothing to skip.
Relief, and then something stranger underneath it — the quiet vertigo of no longer being counted. Not on a payroll. Not on a rota. A woman who used to write articles for other people’s brands, on other people’s deadlines, now writing for her own — and somehow the second version doesn’t register as work at all.
Same hands. Same craft. Same audience-serving sentences, built the same way, at the same desk. The difference isn’t the doing. It’s the absence: no one assigned this, no one is waiting for it the way a client waits, no official stamp confirming that yes, this counts. I built the whole operation myself and the operation still asks me for permission.
900 odd people didn’t ask my old employer whether I counted. A reader in Greece translated my sentences into a language I don’t speak, because something in them was worth carrying across. That’s not nothing. That’s not “not real work.” But the guilt doesn’t read spreadsheets. It reads schedules, and the schedule is gone, and the body hasn’t been told.
So I do the only thing available to me — I reject the shame narrative, again, every single time it fires. Not a victory lap. Just a small refusal, repeated. RSD says you’re not really working. I keep writing anyway, and I don’t need it to feel like work to know it is one.
The kettle’s boiled twice this morning and I haven’t touched either cup. Deep sleep: 9 minutes. Pride: still standing.
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