I'm Everywhere and Nowhere
How I Lost My Mind Without Noticing
Series: Nowhere & Everywhere — What context switching is costing your mind, your body, your relationships, and your life
It was a Thursday afternoon in November.
I had just finished a meeting — I couldn’t tell you which one, because by that point in the week they had all blurred into a single long, unbroken hum. I sat back in my chair and tried to account for my day. What had I done? What had I decided? What had I moved forward?
Nothing came.
Not because nothing had happened. Plenty had happened. Twelve hours of standing meetings a week will make sure of that. Three teams, three completely different domains, three sets of problems all requiring a version of me that was fully present, fully informed, and fully capable of making decisions in real time. Platform operations. Data architecture. AI-native cybersecurity. Each one its own universe. Each one mine to navigate.
And underneath all of it, the pressure to implement AI across everything — a mandate that sounded like a solution but felt, from the inside, like being handed a live wire and told to build something with it. Leadership pushing us forward. Security pushing back. Nobody sure what the rules were. Everyone sure that moving too slowly was failure.
I sat in my chair on that Thursday afternoon in November, and I couldn’t remember a single thing I had done that day.
And the only thing my body wanted — the only thing that made any sense at all — was to lay down and cry.
And then I walked upstairs, because I work from home.
That November, my son had wrestling practice after school every night. Practice ended at 6pm, and I was the one picking him up. So after a full day of back-to-back meetings across three completely different worlds — platform operations, data architecture, AI-native cybersecurity — I didn’t even get to collapse. I had a hard stop. A real one. A kid waiting outside a gym at 6pm who needed his dad to show up.
My daughter needed attention too. My wife deserved a husband who actually was home — not just physically, but actually came upstairs, was present and engaged, the way she married me to be.
I knew this. I have always known this.
But knowing something and having the capacity to do it are two very different things.
What I gave them that November was the leftover version of me. The scraped-clean, nothing-left version. I walked through the door and my body was there, but I was still somewhere in the third meeting of the afternoon, still turning over a decision I couldn’t remember making, still carrying the ambient weight of everything unfinished. My son told me about practice and I heard the words but they didn’t fully land. My daughter wanted to show me something and I looked, but I wasn’t really looking. My wife tried to connect and I responded, but there was a glass wall between us that I put there without meaning to.
(It’s baseball season now. Different sport, same wall.)
I knew I should exercise. I knew I should cook something real. I knew I should call a friend — it seemed like it had been months since I’d actually talked to one. I knew I should read. My brain used to love to read.
Instead: doom scroll. Order food. Let the house be what it is.
It’s not laziness. It’s depletion. There is a difference. But when you’re living inside it, it’s nearly impossible to convince yourself of that.
I didn’t take that Thursday off.
There was no one to hand anything to. Three teams don’t pause because one person has hit a wall. The Slack messages don’t stop. The decisions don’t wait. The AI mandate doesn’t care that your brain feels like it’s running on fumes and static. So I pushed through — the way I always push through — and told myself that’s just what you do.
The following Tuesday, I told my manager.
I didn’t frame it dramatically. I didn’t say I’m falling apart or something has to change. I just told him I was hitting a wall. That I was running on empty. That I needed something to give somewhere.
He didn’t overthink it. He told me to find a day in the next week and go do something fun.
That was it. No formal process. No PTO request. Just — find a day, and go.
I took the day my manager gave me permission to take. I blocked the calendar, gave no explanation, and stepped away. And for one day, I wasn’t a technical product manager. I wasn’t the person responsible for three teams moving in three different directions. I wasn’t the one navigating the politics of AI implementation or absorbing the anxiety of people who don’t know what’s coming next. I wasn’t the dad running on empty or the husband behind the glass wall.
I was just a person, breathing.
It was enough to keep going. That’s the most honest thing I can say about it. Not enough to fix anything. Not enough to change the structure of my weeks or quiet the noise or close the gap between the father and husband I want to be and the one I’ve been showing up as. But enough to keep going.
Monday came. The meetings came back. The switching came back. The weight of all of it settled right back onto the same familiar places in my shoulders and my chest.
But something had changed. Not the circumstances — those are largely the same. Something in me had shifted. A small, quiet willingness to finally name what I was experiencing. To stop calling it busy and start calling it what it actually is.
This is the first piece in a series I’m calling Nowhere & Everywhere. It’s about what context switching — the constant, relentless demand to divide your attention across more roles, more platforms, more decisions than any human mind was built to hold — is doing to us. To our minds. Our bodies. Our relationships. Our ability to actually be present in the one life we have.
I don’t have this figured out. I’m writing this series from inside the experience, not from the other side of it. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, I hit that wall again. And I am heading back to work after 2 days off with just me and my son, who was off for Winter break.
But if you read that Thursday afternoon and recognized something — if you’ve sat in your own version of that chair, unable to account for your day, running on fumes you didn’t know you were out of — then this series is for you.
I wonder how long you’ve been pushing through your own Thursday afternoon.