There's an almond croissant that's been sitting under the cake dome in my kitchen for a week.
I buy them for my mother. She loves them. This one was left over the day she was rushed to the hospital, and it's been sitting there since, going stale under the glass, calling my name every time I walk past it.
At another time in my life, I would have eaten it. Stale, day-old, didn't matter. I've been there. I know exactly how that feels, and I know exactly how hard it is to pick back up the standards you dropped for the sake of convenience, or stress, or a hospital, or whatever reason we give ourselves in the moment.
This week, I threw it in the rubbish. Then I took the bag outside, so it would actually be gone from the house.
That's the whole story. But it isn't really about a croissant.
This has not been a normal week. My mother has been in the hospital, and I have medical power of attorney over her care, something I never saw myself having to deal with, and something I don't fully know how to describe even now. Every day this week I went to sit with her. Some days an hour. Some days three. She comes home tomorrow. The hospice team comes through next week to set her medication and the nursing rotation.
And life doesn't pause for any of it. FLOWTRADE still needs building. UNBREAKABLE still needs videos, ones where I'm expected to show up looking like nothing has changed. BNSA still needs sorting. I'm still trying to live something that resembles a normal life around the edges of all of it.
Normally I'm out of bed between 6:00 and 6:30. This week I found myself rolling over for "just five more minutes" more than once, waking up a full hour later than I meant to. A couple of mornings I forgot my vitamins. A couple of workouts got cut short by an exercise. The tendonitis in my left elbow has been giving me trouble, and some days that was reason enough to stop early.
None of that is failure. That's drift, in real time, doing exactly what I described it doing a few essays ago, whispering that today doesn't count, that tomorrow is soon enough.
Here's what stopped it from becoming more than a whisper.
I kept thinking about something the Stoics understood a long time before anyone called it self-care: take care of yourself first, so you can take care of the people you love, and so you don't become a burden to them.
That's not indulgence. It's the opposite of indulgence. If I let this week unravel me — the sleep, the training, the food, the standards: I am no use to my mother, and no use to anyone around her relying on me to hold something steady while everything else isn't.
So I kept doing the push-ups. I kept the hour of morning silence, even on the mornings I didn't want it. I went to the gym, even shortened. And I threw out the croissant.
I'm not the first person this has happened to, and I won't be the last. I'm not writing this looking for sympathy. I write because it's an outlet, because putting the words on paper helps me see things more clearly, helps me put my life into perspective, and helps me see exactly where drift tries to come in through the back door and set up permanent camp in my head.
This week, it almost did. It didn't.
