The Audit
The thought pattern that's draining your energy
It starts as something small.
I am standing in my kitchen one afternoon and I notice I am hungry. Just the quiet, animal fact of a body that wants something. I stand near the counter and the thought forms itself without effort:
I want something warm.
A preference, arriving the way preferences arrive. Unbidden. Complete. Five words. A small truth. The kind that, in a person whose internal life is running normally, would be followed immediately by action. You want something warm. You make something warm. The moment closes.
I don’t make something warm.
What happens instead is something I have gotten very good at not noticing.
The thought arrives. And before I have moved a single inch toward the cabinet, something else arrives with it. Questions. Company that wasn’t invited and doesn’t announce itself.
Is it too late to eat?
Not too late in terms of time. Too late in terms of something else. Appropriateness. Sequence. Whether a person who had already had the right kind of afternoon would still need something warm right now.
I am still standing at the counter.
None of this feels like interrogation while it is happening. From inside it feels like thinking. Like being careful. Like making sure. The questions present themselves as reasonable. As the ordinary due diligence of a person who takes her choices seriously.
The inventory begins. What the scale said this morning. How my clothes have been fitting. Whether I worked out today and if not whether that changes things. What my last labs looked like and what my doctor said about my eating patterns. Whether the thing I want has enough protein or whether I should have the leftovers instead so nothing goes to waste. Whether this will mess up my appetite for dinner. What we are even having for dinner. What time we are eating and what else is happening around that. How hungry I actually need to be by then. Whether this counts as a heavy meal or a light one and what the rest of the day calls for.
I am reviewing a morning (maybe months) I have already lived, in order to determine whether I am permitted to want what I already want.
The original thought is still technically present. Somewhere. Under everything that arrived to assess it.
At some point the window closes.
I don’t make a decision. I don’t decide against the thing. I just notice, the way you notice a smell is gone without catching the moment it left, that I am no longer considering it. The question dissolved. I am doing something else now, or I am standing at the counter doing nothing, and the wanting has gone wherever small wantings go when they don’t survive the process of being considered.
I am a little more tired than I was five minutes ago.
Nothing happened. That is the problem. Nothing happened, and I am tired from it. And I couldn’t tell you at which moment I stopped choosing and started waiting. For clearance that didn’t come. For a verdict the system isn’t designed to deliver.
I have been calling this thinking for most of my life. Reasoning.
But it isn’t only food. It isn’t only the kitchen.
This is the email sitting in my drafts for three days because I couldn’t determine whether I was allowed to need what I was asking for. This is the jacket I almost bought and then put back because I couldn’t get through the audit fast enough before the wanting ran out. This is the conversation I rehearsed so many times that by the time I had it I couldn’t find the original feeling anymore. It had been reviewed out of existence.
The same system. The same questions. Running on everything.
I know what this is now. Not in the moment. In the moment it still feels like reasoning.
I eventually make something to eat. I don’t remember deciding to. I stand at the counter and reheat something from the refrigerator and eat it without tasting it and the moment is already gone. That’s not what I wanted.
But that thought doesn’t survive long either.
If you recognized this, you probably already know the place it shows up.
The thing that keeps not happening.
The decision that keeps turning into something else.
If you want to look at one of those together, I’m opening a small number of 15-minute Clarity Calls.
Bring one thing. Not everything. Just one.
We’ll look at what’s actually going on underneath it.
Not to fix it. Just to see it clearly enough that it stops looping the same way.
Or sign up for my next free live session here.