Hallelujah, Human Condition

I've always been in conflict with my body, but last year that conflict got a name.

Not in the dramatic sense. In the practical one.

Over the past few years, I've had to plan around my cycle the way you plan around a storm system. Fewer commitments. More painkillers than I'd like to admit. And more recently, a body that keeps score and can derail my entire day if I'm not careful.

Here's the thing about a body with its own calendar: it teaches you that cycles are not always something you choose. Sometimes they choose you, and all you get to decide is how you show up inside them.

Which would be manageable, if there were only one running at a time...

But no, there's a second cycle running underneath the hormones, and it doesn't wait its turn. This one works like an Etch-A-Sketch and it shows up most clearly around food. I'll eat cheesy eggs for breakfast every day for months then wake up one day and retch at the sight. I can't control the on/off switch here and that's mildly terrifying.

Then there's the third cycle, the quiet one that runs underneath the other two. The take-control, dopamine kind. The one where a new project feels like the answer to a question I hadn't finished asking, right up until it doesn't. The one where focus arrives like a gift and leaves like it was never invited.

And gods help it if I sense what I've started to refer to as a "power vacuum," or a lack of direction in a situation, because then dopamine, executive function, and my being the eldest daughter combine to transform me into some sort of alt-country Power Ranger taking the reins.

Three cycles. A hormonal one, a fixation one, a chemical one. All of them borrowing the same basic shape: begin hard, burn bright, run out, repeat. I used to think I just had a lot of interests and a complicated uterus. It took me a while to notice the pattern doing the same thing across all three, quietly, like a song playing in another room that I'd stopped consciously hearing.

I want to tell you I built these cycles on purpose, that there's a tidy origin story where I chose poorly and could have chosen otherwise. That's not exactly true.

I was barely twenty the first time someone put me in charge of a team, a functional area in a retail store. Full time, more than 40 hours some weeks, in a town two and a half hours from my college campus and 45 minutes from my parents' place. I was a full-time student, commuting between all three, and I was in a relationship that would define most of my twenties before I'd had the chance to define much of anything for myself.

There was no gap year in that arrangement. No unstructured stretch where I got to be bad at things quietly, correct course, try again. I went from being a teenager to running a schedule so tight it left no room for the kind of trial and error most people get to call their twenties. I didn't build steady habits because I never had the runway to build them. I built momentum instead, and momentum is not the same thing as a foundation.

Which brings me to the song stuck in my head for a while now. "Caffeine" is catchy in the way all earworms are; hooky and repetitive and impossible to shake once it's in. Underneath the hook, though, it's a song about reaching for one thing after another, hoping something finally holds, and never quite naming the reaching itself as the problem. It's blunt about how little of it works twice.

I don't know if California is one more thing on that list.

I want to say it's different. I want to say that moving here was the moment I finally stopped, that this is the structural change and not just the next fixation with better scenery. But I've said that before, about other things, and I've been wrong.

What I can say honestly is this: for the first time in my adult life, I have the space to ask the question at all. Not the answer. The space to fucking ask it.

Maybe that's not nothing.

Maybe the work isn't figuring out whether I've broken the cycle. Maybe it's staying curious enough, and still enough, to actually watch what happens next, instead of already reaching for whatever comes after this.

I don't know yet if this is the year the pattern breaks.

I just know it might be the first year I get to find out.