kate keeps sending me job postings. senior project manager, blah blah blah. like i haven't told her, a million times, i don't WANT that anymore, i don't WANT to manage anyone's projects, especially not some pointless tech thing that will be obsolete in six months. i think she thinks i'm just being dramatic, that i'll snap out of it eventually and go back to being… useful? productive? whatever. but i actually think i might be… happy? sometimes? like that moment this morning, when i was making tea, and the sun hit the steam just right, and it smelled like… peace. is that even a thing you can smell? or maybe it's just the chamomile, but even that, the deliberate act of choosing the chamomile over the black tea i used to mainline, feels like progress, some tiny shift away from the always-on, always-striving machine i used to be, a machine that even now, when i should be doing literally nothing, is still sending phantom emails, still scheduling imaginary meetings, still trying to optimize the unoptimizable, but there was a real moment of happiness, that's important. that's something.