Uncage your heart, free your heart, let it be wild.

This is the incantation printed on the paper tag attached to my bag of tea. I tug and rip it off the staple before throwing the wasted satchel in the trash.

It’s 9:45 at night. I am trying to come back into my body.

I claw my hands against the pillowy mountains that are my knees, sitting cross-legged on the sofa with a laptop over my feet.

Today was supposed to be a productive day.

This morning I resolved to try a new prescription.

The capsules are white on one half and translucent teal on the other, with tiny balls you can see through a window. Each ball is the size of a celery seed but smooth like plastic.

I’ve been avoiding this moment my whole life. Or, at least since the first time I learned kids were selling their Adderall to richer kids who wanted to ace their exams.

I wonder how this medication will make me feel. Will it be like the first time you get glasses and realize there are leaves on trees? Will the laser-focus take me over and steer my body like an animated corpse?

I swallow the pill at precisely 8:00 AM. 12 minutes later I’m no longer interested in the texture of my food. The broccoli on my plate tastes like a tree stump. The piece of torn sourdough is a stale sponge.

I open my to-do list for today, hoping I can direct some engineered motivation toward a worthy cause.

My list looks like this:

TO-DO // TODAY

• Wash bathmats
• Meal plan for the week
• Pick up pants from Gill’s alterations
• Source 100 sponsorship leads for upcoming hackathon
• Try and send feedback for a beta app invite I received

On my calendar, there is only one hard-and-fast event:

1:00 PM hot yoga

But the alterations shop closes at 3:00 PM and the good butcher shop closes at 6:00. I need to be careful I don’t lose track of the time.

First I throw the bath mats in the wash.

Then I put on my over-ear headphones, tee up Alexandre Desplat’s soundtrack from Tree of Life and lock in on my machine.

For the next three hours and thirty minutes I zero out my inbox, reconcile my budget and work on my kitchen inventory app while also planning meals for the week. While I’m waiting for my AI agent to run, I email my financial advisor to ask about rolling over an old 401k. I send a note to somebody I really hope will join us as a judge for the hackathon next month.

I feel slightly more alert than usual and a bit more energetic. On a normal day, I might have to rev up my engine with a bunch of lowball tasks before my hyperfocus would kick in. Then I’d have a hard time switching between things. Today my husband notices that I’m stopping and acknowledging him when he speaks to me. Even with the music playing, I’m not so deeply lost in my work that I can’t be pulled out of it.

Interesting.

Unlike a typical day, I’m doing okay pausing and watching the clock.

“I need to leave in the next 15 minutes if I’m going to make it to the alterations shop before yoga.”

The clerk hands me a plastic bag from under the counter. Four pairs of Alex Mill trousers and one denim shirt, all neatly repaired with new Corozo buttons.

When I arrive at the yoga studio, the room smells like sweaty feet. In the middle of practice, I look down at my mat and notice it’s filthy. Is that bird shit on the back corner of my mat?

Each forward fold makes me worry my breakfast is going to come up the wrong way. My drishti is bouncing around, scanning the corners of the geometric mandala painted at the front of the room.

Leaving class, I identify a strange and unfamiliar feeling: happiness. Cheerfulness, even.

A girl at the front desk says “thank you for coming in.” I chirp back “thank you for being here!” and I actually mean it.

On the walk home, I watch three teenage girls jaywalking dangerously across the street between the Walgreens and the Starbucks. But instead of yelling out, “Jesus Christ, could you teenyboppers be any lazier?? The crosswalk is RIGHT THERE,” I successfully identify that as not my problem and proceed along my way.

I have temporarily transformed into the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood version of myself. There are yellow butterflies fluttering and roses the color of vanilla whipped cream hanging over a white picket fence. I wave to the USPS driver as I wait for her to pass me on a narrow street. I smile at a dog that’s sleeping on a sofa in my neighbor’s window.

Placebo effect? Liquid luck? Maybe that pill wasn’t anything but sugar. Maybe I’m only having a good day because I think I’m destined to have a good day.

But when I get into the shower, back facing the water, I start to feel a bit manic. How long have I been washing my hair? Am I shaving my legs too quickly?

I am Jessie Spano when she takes too many caffeine pills. I’m so excited. I’m so scared.

At this point it’s 3:00 PM and I need to eat lunch. But I also need to fold laundry and go out for groceries. I scrub my yoga mat with vinegar and sweep the leaves off the front porch steps before throwing an ice pack into the chest of the cooler.

The good butcher shop is immediately across the street from a Kroger. But it’s 90 degrees outside and even hotter in a parked vehicle. Today’s challenge is Supermarket Sweep but the game is: can I get a week’s worth of groceries at the market without spoiling the $100 worth of meat and eggs packed in my trunk?

By the time I get home it’s 5 o’clock. I’m anxious because I haven’t even touched my sponsorship outreach list and I’m functionally out of time. I clean out the fridge, log my grocery receipts, and start chopping vegetables.

While I’m browning the chuck beef, I realize my Staub cocotte isn’t large enough to hold everything in this recipe. We pull out the big Lodge that usually only gets used for Christmas Eve gumbo.

Our Hawaiian-style curried beef stew needs a full hour on the stove. I spend the simmer time testing the beta app I wanted to check out, sending feedback along through a Google form.

Stew is done at 8:00 PM. “Bowl food” in front of an episode of Silo.

“Wow if this show isn’t one for the times we’re living in.”

All of the laundry is clean and folded. Multiple loads of dishes have been run. Leftovers are packed in the freezer and the counters are wiped clean.

No euphoria. No crash.

But was this day a successful day?

I feed a screenshot of my calendar log to ChatGPT.

How many hours of this day did I spend on domestic labor? 9 hours and 25 minutes.

9 hours and 25 minutes.

Maybe a bit less, if you categorize vibe coding an app as entertainment instead of designing a utility to make a housechore more manageable.

It’s Saturday. I took new medication chemically designed to optimize my focus. And I spent nearly every waking moment I had cooking or cleaning or driving back and forth between errands. There aren’t even any kids in my house. How on Earth are some people fitting playdates and soccer matches into the same Saturday? “You have the same 24 hours as Beyonce.” Are we sure?

Defeated, I move the most important task from my TODAY list to the top of the queue for tomorrow.

Tomorrow I have 9 hours before Mahjong. That’s 9 hours I want to spend on work for myself instead of work for running this house.

I think I can do it. I know I can do it.

Uncage your heart. Free your heart.

Forgive yourself for what you did before you knew better.

Let your wild heart steer the machine.