Letters for just a hard day
Some days are just heavy and you cannot quite say why. Nothing is wrong, exactly. You are just tired in a way sleep does not fix, and small things feel large. Coffee tastes wrong. The radio is too loud. A short reply from someone you love lands wrong. The day stretches out and you start wondering if something is wrong with you that you cannot name. Often nothing is. Sometimes it is hormones, the weather, the news, a date on the calendar your body remembers when your mind has forgotten, the thing you did not realise was bothering you, or just a Tuesday with a Tuesday's particular weight. The letters in this theme do not try to diagnose the day. They just sit with it, written by people who have had plenty of their own and know that recognition often helps more than answers.
I'm just tired today and I don't really know why.
Slept enough. Ate something. Nothing terrible happened. And here I am at lunchtime feeling like I've been awake for a week, and the email I need to write has been in draft form for two days, and I keep opening the same three apps in a circle and not reading anything in any of them.
If this is you — please don't make a project of it. You don't need to figure out why you're tired. You don't need to optimise your sleep, your hydration, your morning routine. Some days are just like this. They pass. You don't have to interrogate them.
Tomorrow might be different. Today is what it is. Soup helps. So does going to bed early and not telling anyone you went to bed early.