The Day I Called the Bluff

It was not a good morning.

I remember it clearly. A Saturday in the fall. My wife wanted to go downtown to pick up some materials for a home renovation we had in process. What most people would perceive as a completely normal errand.

In my life at that point, the idea of navigating downtown traffic, finding parking, being out in a busy and stimulating environment for a few hours while my nervous system was already running hot — it took on proportions of a major project. The symptoms were already humming when I woke up. That specific kind of morning where you know before your feet hit the floor that it's going to be one of those days.

For a long time, my response to mornings like that was to take stock. To check in on every symptom. To assess whether today was going to be manageable or not, as if I were running a daily risk report on my own body. I had developed rituals around this. Ways of testing the waters before committing to a day.

That Saturday, something was different.

The moment

I don't know exactly what shifted. I had been doing the reading, working the concepts, trying to build a different relationship with what I was feeling. And somewhere in that process, something had started to take hold — not enough that I felt better, but enough that I was starting to get angry.

Not at my wife. Not at the errand. At the condition.

I had let it run my Saturdays for long enough.

When I got in the car, the symptoms were still there. The nervous system was still casting its full warning about the imminent danger of going to a home improvement store on a Saturday afternoon. It was trying to convince me this was a threat that required a response.

For the first time, I didn't push through it, grit my teeth, or white-knuckle my way through the day. I called the bluff. I dismissed it with an energy I hadn't been able to find before — not angry at the symptoms, but genuinely unimpressed by them. I stared it down and invited it to do its worst.

You are not stopping me. You may come along for the ride, but you are not in charge of my day unless I allow you to be.

What actually happened

I won't pretend it was a turning point in the cinematic sense. I felt bad the entire day. The symptoms didn't ease off because I decided to stop fearing them. That's probably not what you were hoping to hear.

But here's what I want you to understand about that day: it was a win.

I still remember moments of it I genuinely enjoyed — watching my wife pick out materials, the ordinary pleasure of being out together on a fall afternoon. And more than that, I went home that evening genuinely satisfied with what I had done. Not because I felt better. Because I had sent a clear message to the condition.

That is discomfort, not danger, in practice. Not a magic fix. Not a day where the symptoms disappeared. It was a day where I reclassified them, kept going, and started — very slowly — to rebuild a different relationship with what I was feeling.

Why ordinary days matter

What I didn't fully understand at the time was that those days — the ones where you drag everything along with you and still show up — are doing something.

The work you do by living externally while allowing your nervous system to do whatever it wants is allowing your system to reset, whether you can feel it in the moment or not.

These days create the foundation for recovery, even when it doesn't feel like it in the moment.

Not every day has to be a breakthrough. Most of them won't be. The most ordinary ones — the grocery runs, the Saturday errands, the unremarkable Tuesdays where you just kept going — those are the ones that actually move the needle.

Keep showing up for those days. They count more than they feel like they do.