What I Used to Do Before I Just Did It

I have been trying to notice the moment before I just do it.

Not everything — the dishes can be done without ceremony. But the things I do because I've decided, without quite deciding, that it's easier to do them than to wait, or ask, or explain: those are worth noticing.

There is a version of competence that is really just control. There is a version of I'll just do it myself that is really just the accumulated assumption that no one else will do it to the standard, at the time, in the way you'd have to describe in order to request it — and even that description would take longer than the thing itself.

I know this version of competence well. I built it carefully over several years of living alone, and then several more of living with someone who didn't notice what I did, and then several more of noticing what he didn't do.

The strange thing about starting again is that the habits didn't leave when he did. The defaults stayed. The instinct to track, to anticipate, to quietly pre-solve — that's still there, running in the background, narrating the household to myself in a voice nobody else hears.

The work this time isn't just dividing the tasks. It's noticing which tasks I've already invisibly claimed.

The towels, the coffee order, the dentist reminder, the expiry dates in the back of the fridge. I picked these up so quietly I can barely remember doing it. Putting them down requires something more deliberate than the picking up ever did.