How a simple list helped find some clarity

There are days when your body raises a white flag long before your mind is willing to admit something’s wrong. Mine started waving its own surrender somewhere between the jaw tension, the shallow sleep, and the moment I realized I’d begun relying on melatonin to hope for deeper rest. I wouldn’t call it burnout exactly. I’ve met burnout several times, actually, and this felt more like its restless cousin: the one who can’t sit still, can’t be entertained, can’t finish the ice cream you usually destroy in one sitting. A kind of annoying internal static humming you can’t get rid of.

We don’t talk enough about these in-between states. The ones that aren’t crises but also aren’t nothing. The ones where you feel like a tab left open in your own head, running a process you can’t quite name. And I cannot stand multiple open tabs! Not on my desktop browser and definitely not in my mind. Especially not in my mind. This is why I write, why I have notebooks and pens scattered around the house and stuffed in my bag, why my phone is filled with half-formed notes.

I kept waiting for the feeling to tell me something; to give me a hint, a direction, even a vague Pinterest quote. And yes, I found myself drifting to Pinterest again, even though I rarely use it anymore. I was hoping the algorithm would spark an idea. But nothing. Instead, I cycled through my usual distractions as if I were testing batteries in a remote: videos, books, scrolling, silence, noise. None of it worked.

I tried blaming doomscrolling, but honestly, that felt too convenient, too easy an excuse. Like blaming astrology for sending a risky text. (And yes, I looked there, too, mercury retrograde until 29 Nov, they say) Doomscrolling may chip away at attention spans, but this felt more existential than algorithmic.

It felt like searching for a word permanently on the tip of your tongue. And you can’t get it out. Ugh.

Did I say that the ice cream trick failed me? That’s usually fail-proof. I knew something was off. It’s usually my emergency button, my “break glass in case of existential uncertainty.” But I set it down, half-eaten, not soothed, not distracted. Just… over it. With additional calories.

Which led me to the next coping mechanism: shopping. Retail therapy, ugh.

There’s something about walking into a store, not because you need anything, but because you need to feel something that isn’t dread or boredom or low-grade dissatisfaction. I don’t even like shopping most days (I just mentioned that not so long ago!), but that didn’t stop me from finding gifts for family members. Lovely gifts. And not cheap. Gifts that whispered, Maybe this makes up for the lost time, the absences, the missed mundane moments.

There was a moment, standing there with my card in hand, when a small, quiet internal adult tapped me on the shoulder and murmured: Maybe we go home now. Maybe we eat lunch there. Maybe we calm the chaos without converting it into purchases.

Uncharacteristically, I listened. I made food with what I already had at home. I ate it. And genuinely enjoyed it. And I promptly forgot what it was. But I was proud, because it was a moment of choosing grounding over distraction. A micro-victory, but a victory nonetheless.

Since inspiration refused to walk through the front door, I tried a side entrance: a brain dump. Not a curated list or a dutiful “top priorities” flowchart, just raw inventory. Every task, big or small, from wishful thinking to the irritatingly administrative things like filing doctors’ invoices. (Plural. Apparently, I had two outstanding.)

Somehow it worked. Putting everything down on the page quieted the noise, or at least dialed it down enough to let something truer surface.

I checked off fourteen items that weekend. Fourteen. Enough to convince me that the problem wasn’t a lack of inspiration but rather, accumulation. Maybe I wasn’t searching for a spark after all; maybe I was drowning in unprocessed mental clutter. And like physical clutter, you don’t see the scale of it until everything is laid out before you (hence, I reset my wardrobe and my makeup selection. Up next: my skin care and books). Some tasks resolved ongoing annoyances that had been quietly draining energy: bank issues, phone problems, and paperwork.

I named the list “EOY 2025 Brain Dump,” partly as organization, partly as ritual. That made the most sense. These are things I do not wish to carry with me to the next year. A pre-reset. A clearing of the runway before a new year and, more importantly, a new age (gulp),

I didn’t aim to accomplish anything grand in the last quarter of 2025. Honestly, my only real goal was to get through the year alive, preferably with some humor intact. This year’s north star was “soft and flow” (Read Here: Soft & Flow, January 2025), a gentle rebellion against the instinct to optimize ourselves into oblivion, and just to you know, let life.

And yet somewhere in the midst of feeling lost, restless, stuck, and vaguely unsatisfied, a new word surfaced for next year: resolute.

A word that doesn’t contradict soft and flow but grows from it. Resolution not as productivity binges or reinvention arcs, but as holding steady (Related: This season of life, Nov 2025). Choosing direction over drift. Clarity over clutter. Showing up deliberately rather than reactively. (Insert more mindfulness here. Yes, this phrase is intentionally here and not just a mental note.)

Somewhere in all this, a familiar analogy surfaced. It’s like driving at night. You can’t see your destination. You can only see the stretch of road illuminated by your headlights, a few meters at a time. But that’s enough. The only way to see more is to move forward. Sitting in the driver’s seat thinking about the journey won’t reveal anything new. Action creates visibility. One small task. One list item. One clarified thought. That’s the beam of light. The rest reveals itself only after you take the next step.

My intention with the shopping freeze, the lists, and the self-observation was simple: stop accumulating things when what I truly need is to process and make the most of what I already have. The skincare and makeup inventory I keep postponing is just a metaphor for that. It’s not about products, it’s about space. About knowing what’s in front of me before deciding what comes next.

The Takeaway: The Pause Is the Point

Sometimes restlessness isn’t a problem to fix. It’s a signal or a quiet, persistent tug that something in your internal system needs attention. Not externally, not materially, but in the small admin of the soul.

The itch you can’t scratch often isn’t solved by inspiration. It’s solved by noticing. By choosing not to run from discomfort, but to sit with it long enough to learn where it points.

And sometimes, it points exactly here: toward a little clarity, a little order, and the calm that comes from checking even one small thing off a long-avoided list.