You only feel the day once it's over

On the relief that arrives when you stop, and what its size tells you.

It was last night. I got into bed and stopped, and the relief was amazing.

That’s the sentence I keep returning to. The bed and the stopping and the amazingness of being still.

I’d been moving since seven. Working, writing, picking up Bertie, making food, opening the dishwasher, opening the laptop, walking the dogs, opening the laptop again. Pete was away. The list was producing itself. I was inside it in the way you are when you can’t see the edges of the thing you’re inside.

And then I got into bed and I stopped and what arrived was the word amazing.

The word matters. Amazing is what surfaces when you put something down and only then realise you’d been holding it. Amazing is the size of the cost made visible by the ending of it. The day had been doing something to me that I couldn’t feel it doing while it was being done.

I lay there for a moment trying to work out what it had been doing.

Here is the thing that has stayed with me. You only know what the day was costing you by the size of the relief when it ends. The relief is the receipt. You can’t feel the cost while you’re paying it. You can only feel the absence of payment once you’ve stopped.

Which means the day didn’t register as a day. It registered as motion. Switching from one thing to the next, and one cognitive mode to the next, and one room to the next. And the switching was so continuous that I couldn’t see it as switching. I just was it.

The body switches faster than the head. The body moves from the desk to the kitchen and the head is still on the sentence. The body opens the dishwasher and the head is still on the dog. By bedtime the head has been somewhere else for most of the day, never quite where the body was, never quite given enough time to land before being asked to leave again.

When I try to count the switches I lose track somewhere around lunchtime. Work to laundry. Laundry to work. Work to writing, which is its own switching, two modes underneath the same umbrella. Writing to dogs. Dogs to Bertie. Bertie to email. Email to dishwasher. Each one a small reset. Each one a small toll I didn’t see myself paying.

I think this is what working from home does. More than that I think it is what a portfolio life does. There is no commute that separates the day. There is no door that closes on work. With Pete away there isn’t another adult to hand any of it to. The day becomes one undifferentiated surface on which everything happens, and the only differentiator is what I switch my attention to next.

The cost accumulates somewhere I can’t reach until the day ends.

I don’t know, on any given day, what the day is doing to me.

I find out only when I stop. Most days I don’t stop until I get into bed, by which point the day has been and gone and I have no purchase on it. I can’t tell you what was hard about it, because I was inside it. I can only tell you that when it ended, the relief was the size of something I hadn’t been able to see.

This is, I think, the particular trap of the life I have made. The list is what it is. Some of it I love. Some of it I’m paid for. The rest is just what running a life asks of you, the work that’s neither love nor income but still has to be done. None of it can be dropped, because what would I drop and why. The cost is in the variety. Each mode demands its own kind of attention, and the switching between modes has a toll that doesn’t show itself until the switching stops.

There is a word I’ve used before for what happens to women in midlife. Erosion. The slow wear. This is something underneath erosion. The day passes and you don’t feel the day. The week passes and you don’t feel the week. You only feel the absence when the absence is allowed to arrive. Which is most often, for me, in bed.

I lie there and think: what is a day made of, if I can only feel it once it’s over.

What is the day I am living, if the only true measure of it is the relief at its ending.

What have I been carrying that I don’t know I have been carrying. What is in there, in the amazing.