Okay, can we talk about this for a second?

I did three loads of laundry, made six lunches, texted back a group chat I’d been ignoring for two days, and somehow still ended the day feeling like I hadn’t actually done anything. How is that even possible? That’s the part nobody tells you about the mental load.

It doesn’t show up on the to-do list. It’s not a task you can check off. It’s the thousand tiny things you’re carrying around in your head all day just so nothing falls through the cracks. The appointment three weeks from now. The fact that you’re almost out of the one specific brand of something that someone in your house will only use. The thing you need to order. The thing you need to remember to ask. The thing you need to remind someone else about because you’re pretty sure they’ll forget. The thing you remembered at 2:13 in the afternoon that has absolutely nothing to do with what you were doing at 2:13 in the afternoon.

None of that shows up anywhere. There’s no line item for “remembered everything.” And when you finally sit down at 8:47 p.m., you’re not just tired from doing. You’re tired from remembering.

I used to think the answer was a better planner. I bought a few, actually. Beautiful ones. Functional ones. Ones with monthly spreads and habit trackers and little boxes for gratitude. They helped for about two weeks each. Then the actual problem came right back.

Because the problem was never that I didn’t have a place to write things down. The problem was that I was trying to hold everything in my head at once, all day, just in case. What actually helped wasn’t some magical new system. 

It was permission. Permission to write something down the second I thought of it instead of trusting myself to remember it later. Permission to say, “I don’t know. Let me check,” instead of feeling like I needed to have an immediate answer for every single thing anyone needed. And probably the biggest one of all, permission to let a few things simply not be remembered by me. Because there are other capable adults who can remember their own appointments, tasks, things they need, and things they said they were going to do.

That last one took me the longest to actually believe, and I still have to work at it. I think a lot of us quietly assume that if we don’t hold every little detail of life in our heads, something will fall apart. And sometimes something does fall apart. Briefly. And then it turns out to be okay. The world does not end. Slowly, I started carrying a little less. One small thing at a time.

I’m not going to tell you I’ve solved the mental load, because I don’t think that’s really a thing that gets solved. It’s more like something you learn to set down in pieces, on purpose, instead of carrying all of it, all the time, without even noticing you picked it up. I’m still working on it. And peri-menopause is definitely not helping.

So if you’re sitting there at the end of a day when you technically “didn’t do much,” but you’re exhausted anyway, I see you. Because me too. You weren’t tired from doing. You were tired from remembering. And that counts. Even if nobody put it on the calendar.

With love,

Mindy