I'm extremely on time. I just don't feel like I'm in the right week.

The older I get, the less the date matters. I know the date. I can find it if needed. This isn't confusion. It's just that the number doesn't feel especially relevant most days. What matters more is the season. When the sun shows up. When it disappears. How long the day actually feels.

I started noticing this while growing plants indoors. You have to pay attention to light in a very annoying, unromantic way. Duration. Distance. Recovery. Too much light stresses them out. Too little and nothing happens.

I say this as my dill is currently dying.

I adjust grow lights constantly and at some point had the extremely annoying thought:

should I have one of these pointed at me?

I know I'm not a plant. But also… am I not a living thing that responds to light?

For years I had what I called my lazy weeks. Predictable enough to be familiar, but only after days of asking myself, WHY CAN'T YOU GET ANYTHING DONE?! Weeks where my output dropped. Focus thinned. Everything felt heavier to start. Not sad. Not sick. Just… slow to load. Like a laptop with too many tabs to count.

I just don't have the same capacity. So I called them lazy weeks. Which felt accurate at the time, in the way self-blame likes to make itself known.

It took me an embarrassing amount of time to notice the pattern.

They weren't random. They were cyclical. Obviously.

And I wish I could say I renamed lazy weeks on my own, but this was all thanks to my therapist. Thank you for your service.

Which immediately raises the least helpful question imaginable:

Okay. And now what?

It's not like I can email work and say, "Hey, heads up, I'm operating at about 25% this week, so please lower expectations."

The world is not built around women's biological rhythms. That's not new information. It's just still irritating to encounter it inside your own body. So instead I push and I compensate and I get very good at producing through depletion. And then I judge myself for needing recovery from doing the thing I didn't want to do in the first place.

The only thing that actually changed anything wasn't my schedule. It was literally the words coming out of my mouth, or floating around inside my head.

I stopped calling them lazy weeks.

They have been rebranded to rest week.

Not because I suddenly had time to rest properly. I didn't. But "lazy" sounds like a character flaw. And "rest" sounds like a phase.

That one word didn't fix the system. It just stopped turning something predictable into something moral. Which helps more than I expected.

Around the same time, I listened to an episode of Science Vs about the moon and sleep. I assumed it would fully debunk the idea. It didn't. (Which was inconvenient, because I was kind of hoping it wasn't me.)

They looked at multiple studies showing people tend to sleep less around the full moon, even when you control for light exposure, modern schedules, and whether people are aware of the moon phase at all. The effect isn't huge, but it's there.

What stuck with me wasn't the moon controls us. It was that we're still tracking rhythms the calendar doesn't care about. Light. Dark. Hormones. Recovery. Cycles that don't hit the reset button on Mondays.

The calendar is confident. My body is not.

The calendar treats every hour as interchangeable. My body does not.

There are weeks where thinking feels endless. Weeks where it feels like dragging my feet through the mud. Days where I can stack tasks easily. Days where one email feels like a completely unreasonable request that should have never been asked of me in the first place.

The calendar doesn't know where I am hormonally. Or neurologically. Or energetically. It just keeps assigning boxes. And I keep trying to fit into them without asking whether the timing makes sense.

I'm not saying we should abandon calendars. I still need my reminders. I'm just tired of assuming that when my internal timing doesn't line up with external time, the problem must be me.

So now I mostly treat it like weather. I don't fight it. Sometimes I plan around it or I forget and get mad. Sometimes I pretend it's not happening. This is just the rhythm I seem to have. I don't love it. I don't hate it.

Anyway. This seems to be how it works for me. At least today.