The meeting ended earlier than expected, which should have been a relief. Instead I sat at my desk for ten minutes doing nothing in particular — not resting, not thinking, just occupying the chair. My jaw was tight. The back of my eyes felt slightly pressured, the way they do after too much screen glare, though the blinds had been down all morning. I noticed I was running a quiet audit of everything I'd said in the call, looking for the moment I'd overstepped or underperformed. The feeling underneath all that: something close to low-grade shame, though I can't locate a cause for it yet.
I've been tracking mornings for nine days now. The experiment started simply enough: I wanted to see whether my mood at 9am correlated more strongly with how I'd slept or with what I'd done the hour before bed. The parameters are loose —
Sleep quality: a one-to-five note written before I get up