Well, ladies
I dropped a bowl on Thursday morning. Nothing special. A cereal bowl. It hit the kitchen floor and broke into three clean pieces and before I had even bent down to pick them up I said, out loud, to no one, "of course you did."
Not "whoops." Not a sigh. "Of course you did." Like I had been expecting myself to fail and the bowl was confirmation.
I crouched there holding the three pieces and I thought about that sentence for a long time. Longer than a broken bowl deserves. Because it was not about the bowl. It was about the voice that said it and how fast it arrived.
I have been paying attention to that voice for about six weeks now. Not on purpose. It started after Dani wrote about grip strength and said "your hands are not weak, they are under-asked." I read that sentence and something shifted. Not dramatically. Just a quarter turn, like a lens adjusting.
Because I had been telling myself a different version. My version was: you are getting worse. At everything. Quietly, steadily worse. Dropping bowls, forgetting names, losing the thread mid-sentence. And the voice that narrates all of this sounds calm and reasonable, like a friend being honest, but it is not honest. It is just fast. ☕
The first sentence is always the real one. Not the second, where you correct yourself. Not the third, where you rationalize. The first one. The one that fires before you have a chance to edit it.
"Of course you did."
"You always do this."
"What is wrong with you."
Those are not thoughts. Those are habits. They are grooves your brain wears into itself through repetition, the same way your hip flexors shorten from sitting. Nobody taught them to you. You taught them to yourself, one small failure at a time, and now they arrive faster than your actual opinion.
Clare would say rewrite the script. She would make it a system. Three alternative sentences on a card in her wallet, pull it out when the voice starts. I love Clare but I cannot laminate my way out of this. 😌
What I have been doing is smaller.
When the voice says the first sentence, I write it down. Not to analyze it. Not to argue with it. Just to see it outside my head where it is a sentence on paper instead of a fact about me.
"Of course you did." On paper, that is a strange thing to say to someone who dropped a bowl. On paper it sounds mean. In my head it sounded like the truth.
That is the gap. The voice sounds true because it is yours. On paper it sounds like something you would never say to Dani, or Clare, or any woman you care about. You would say "it is just a bowl." You would say "do not worry about it." You would not say "of course you did" as if dropping a cereal bowl is evidence of a pattern.
I have been doing this for six weeks. Not every thought. Just the first one after something goes wrong. Spilled coffee. Lost keys. Forgot to reply to an email for two days. Whatever the voice leaps on.
I write the sentence down and most of the time it embarrasses me a little. That embarrassment is the whole exercise. It means I can hear it now. ✨
Here is today. The next time something small goes wrong, catch the first sentence. Do not fix it. Do not replace it. Just write it down somewhere. A napkin. Your phone. The back of a receipt.
Read it back and ask yourself: would I say this to someone I love?
You already know the answer. 🤍
