I Think I'm Okay, Most Days.

It's Sunday afternoon, and I'm trying to relax.

I've done everything right. The laundry is folded. The emails are answered. I'm on the couch, feet tucked under a blanket, a cup of tea going cold beside me, which is, I'm told, what "rest" looks like.

It lasts four minutes, tops.

Then the guilt arrives. There's a closet I could organize. A draft I could start. A better version of me who would use this time well, and she's disappointed in the one on the couch.

Yet, if I ignore her, something worse takes her place. I start replaying conversations. Not the good ones. The ones that changed the trajectory or made an emotional impression. I comb through them like case files, looking for the moment I said too much, or not enough, or the right thing in the wrong tone. Looking for the clue that explains the silence.

I never find it. I keep looking anyway.

When the apartment is this quiet, I can hear the router humming in the corner. A small white box with a single light, glowing, doing its job quietly. It's possibly the most reliable thing in my apartment, so far. I've never once thanked it.

Nobody thinks about the Wi-Fi when it's working. That's the point. You connect without thinking. You stream, scroll, send, and somewhere, a signal holds everything together without asking for credit.

You only notice it when it goes out.

I think I'm the Wi-Fi.

For years, I was the connection people could count on. Strong signal. Full bars.

The one who remembers birthdays, allergies, and the name of the coworker who keeps taking credit for your work.
The one who knows how to keep the kids entertained and safe.
The one who stays calm when everyone is panicking.
The one who answers the group message and brings the dessert.
The one with a spare charger, a granola bar, and an Advil in her bag at all times.

The one nobody checks on. Especially now, when I'm the "jezebel" who became a catalyst for disruption.

That's the thing about reliable infrastructure. When it works long enough, people stop believing it can fail. They don't look at the signal. They assume.

I moved across the country. I kept working. I unpacked, found the grocery stores, and wrote essays about flour and hurricanes.

Full bars.

So, those who still reached out trusted I was fine.

To be fair, I made sure of it.

Somewhere along the way, I set my network to hidden. Strong signal, no name. Unless you already knew where to look, you'd never find it. I called that independence. I called it strength. I said "I've got it" so many times that people believed me, which was, I suppose, the point.

Then, the signal lagged. Buffered. Dropped.

Honestly, buffering is the worst part. Worse than an outage. An outage is at least clear. Buffering is the little wheel spinning, the half-loaded page, the message marked delivered with no reply. Not connected. Not disconnected. Just waiting to find out which.

I'm tired of buffering.

Here's the part I like admitting less: I'm also very good at making it worse.

I feel first and think later. My feelings sound the alarm before my logic has even checked the connection. One slow reply, one disorganized meeting, one missed deadline, and I'm not troubleshooting. I'm declaring a total outage, drafting the incident report, and assigning blame. Usually to myself.

I used to call that care. Passion, even.

Lately, I have less appetite for it. Not because I want to care less, but because I'm tired of my own emergency broadcasts.

My immune system is fried, and my body aches.

I'm tired of my brain and my heart treating every lag like the end of the network.

And if I'm being fully honest, if someone did reach out today, I'm not sure I'd answer. I've had "Do Not Disturb" on so long I've forgotten it's a setting.

I know how to reset a router. I know how to troubleshoot, reroute, and restore service for everyone else. I don't know how to say, "The signal's weak. Can you help?"

And someone I thought would want the password made it clear I'd only ever be on the guest network.

So, in the quiet, my mind goes somewhere I don't like.

It asks whether I was ever easy to care for, or just easy to rely on. Whether I let being needed stand in for being loved.

And then, on the worst days, it asks something sharper. Whether the silence isn't anyone's failure but mine. Whether I took too big a risk, and this is the downward slope. Whether everyone is finally about to see what I've been afraid of all along: that I'm the problem. That I'm not good. That I'm not capable of much of anything, really.

I don't believe that.

Okay, I don't believe it most days. But on the days I do, it's hard to remember that I have recovered from worse.

I had a song hit me in the gut this week: "I Think I'm Okay" by Machine Gun Kelly, YUNGBLUD, and Travis Barker. It's loud and a little reckless, the sound of someone insisting they're fine at a volume that suggests otherwise. I've had it on repeat, which, if you've been paying attention, is its own kind of answer.

Because that's been my status for months. Not good. Not bad. Just "okay," with an "I think" in front of it for plausible deniability.

I don't need a rescue. I'm not asking anyone to fly in and fix it.

I just want someone to notice the light before it goes out.

I've written before that I can't expect people to intuit what I haven't spoken. I still believe that. A hidden network can't blame anyone for not connecting. But it's still fucking exhausting to be the thing nobody notices until it breaks, even when you're the one who hid it.

Last week, the internet started to lag, and my meetings were choppy, so I did the classic fix. Unplugged the router. Counted to 30. Plugged it back in.

For 30 seconds, the apartment was completely silent. No signal. No connection.

Then the light came back, glowing, like nothing had happened.

Nobody noticed it was gone.

Not even me.

Maybe the first fix isn't the reset. Maybe it's letting the network show up in the list again, and seeing who tries to connect.