Tears in the kitchen. Three bananas on the counter and a recipe I know by heart but cannot, for the life of me, turn into a sequence of actions.

Seven ingredients. Too many decisions. My brain could not do seven. So I broke it down. Dry ingredients in one bowl. Wet in the other. Three and four. Manageable. The bread was good. I ate it in bed and felt unreasonably proud of myself.

The locus coeruleus is the brain’s attention control room. When norepinephrine depletes, everything arrives at equal volume. A dog barking becomes as important as the eggs.

An old friend helps out in the kitchen. And the moment when I realised the invisible labour I’d been doing for decades had only become visible because I could no longer do it.

Music: Jude Cosmo, Queen of Angeles; Waveshaper, Our Time (Instrumental)

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