I woke angsty and my Oura ring confirms I’m unusually weary. I booked early Pilates but I’m late out the door because I break my own rule and open my laptop to peek at email before 8am, surreptitiously bent over the side of my bed like I’m waiting to be punished for it.

The punishment is that I’m too late for Pilates.

I narrowly escape a full shame spiral about time management and pivot to the gym. I exercise grumpily, making a self-indulgent game out of finding everyone I encounter annoying. The truth is, I don’t like myself this morning, and I don’t care to be evolved about it under the fluorescent lights at Lifetime.

I chant Japa to Saraswati on my way home as I scowl.

A business coaching client arrives at my house a few minutes after me. It’s our first session and she is shocked by how honest I am about how I market and run my business. Almost as if she cannot quite believe one could be both in integrity and successful. I feel a wave of grief realizing how much of the world operates with the assumption that you have to lie and manipulate to get ahead.

I’m running late yet again and haven’t eaten so I make gluten-free toast slathered in ghee and jam and a chicken sausage and call it a meal. The calories do nothing for my sour mood and I briefly critique my face in the mirror while I brush my teeth. I committed to this, I tell myself. You could still get in the mood.

It’s a 40-minute drive to my ex’s and halfway there, I decide it’s a mistake but keep going.

What started as a kinky midday arrangement suddenly feels inconvenient and awkward.

An hour later I’m grateful to be wrong.

That “80% of success is showing up” quote ticker-tapes across my mind and I roll my eyes at myself. Melted into his velvet couch, I make a mental note that explicit transactional arrangements may be the antidote to all this implicit transactional bullshit people are calling love.

I think love has more room to breathe when we stop pretending we don’t want things from each other.

I’m back in the car, this time chewing on what my ideal relationship really is, outside the confines of social conditioning and patriarchy. It feels a bit like trying to catch a rainbow. Someone cuts me off, and as I calmly move into the right lane, I smirk at how annoyingly effective a little cock energy can be for domming the brat right out of me. My mind feels quiet for the first time all day and the pervasive irritation that plagued my morning has left.

I pull into my driveway and hear a tap on my window— Dani is in garden gloves and a bucket hat and has stopped weeding to alert me that I’ve parked on top of the sprinkler hose.

I am a well fucked woman and it has made me oblivious. This is delightful.

I whip up some ground turkey and veg while I do a telemed call with a colleague about the emotional and psycho-spiritual aspects of an unusually heavy period. Does one need a pelvic ultrasound to check for fibroids, or is this clearly just a brilliant womb purge of your ex?

Then an afternoon coaching client. I feel tenderness for my own permeability as I cry when she cries. My forearms light up with goosebumps as I sense a swell of emotion move from her belly to her throat. What a gift to be able to feel like this, and yet the call ends with me steeping in a familiar frustration with the limitations of English, or maybe just with my own ability to articulate all that I see and sense. Sometimes English feels like my second language, and my first is something beyond words.

It’s about to rain but I cajole myself into walking the dog around the neighborhood to reset. I try to finish an audiobook but I have to pause it to marvel at the cherry blossoms. There is one impossibly beautiful tree that has me stop in my tracks. I almost can’t believe this much perfection exists on a dusty Thursday afternoon.

Back home, I plop down to meditate and drift into a mantra-fueled dream before throwing on some jeans to go meet a friend for dinner.

I feel lethargic, unsatisfied, and unsettled, and I dig through my drawer of goodies seeking something that might shift my state. I land on a pack of herbal cigarettes I bought in 2020 and jump in the car, lighter in hand.

First drag, rain dripping through my cracked window, and a chunk of ash lands on my jeans and burns a hole. I love these jeans. Fuck. I feel nothing inhaling this Damiana-mint herb blend and remember why these have sat in a drawer for six years.

Steak tacos and a mezcalita fuel a lively convo about marriage, domestication, motherhood and being a sexually liberated woman in today’s world. It’s everything the faux cigarette wasn’t. Full, I sit in my dark car before heading home and write. It feels like the release the whole day was building towards.

Home, curled up in bed with a dog at my hip, I feel saturated in my life. Fully here, fully participating, and I think… this is the whole point.