This Morning, I Wasn’t Just Tired

I was chemically offline

“When your body wakes up, but your mind stays submerged.”

Last night, I took my ADHD medication, Jornay PM, three hours late. It’s a delayed-release med, designed to activate while I sleep so I can function in the morning. But when it’s late, the whole system shifts.

So this morning, I woke up fogged.

My body was vertical.

My brain… wasn’t.

I was conscious, but unreachable.

Like I’d booted up with half my system offline.

Thoughts didn’t form. Focus didn’t land.

I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to do, or why I was trying.

And as if that wasn’t enough, my thigh was flaring with pain from a chronic condition I live with:

(HS = hidradenitis suppurativa)

A skin disease that causes painful bumps, often in places that make everyday movement, and sitting, really hard.

So I sat there, aching, offline, and ashamed.

Even after breakfast. Even after water. Even after effort.

And through the fog, a voice whispered what so many disabled, neurodivergent, and chronically ill people hear inside:

“If this were a job, I’d be fired.”

“If people saw this version of me, they wouldn’t keep me.”

“This isn’t a delay. This is failure.”

But that voice is lying.

Here’s the truth:

I wasn’t lazy.

I wasn’t broken.

I was experiencing neurochemical lag, the cost of a slight change in a tightly regulated system.

What most people don’t realize is that there are entire mornings (and sometimes days) that disappear not because of lack of effort, but because of the silent, invisible mechanics of how our bodies metabolize time, pain, and medication.

And when the world expects you to perform like a clean-running machine, this slow, foggy version of you becomes hard to justify.

Even to yourself.

But I’m learning something:

It still counts.

It counts that I showed up in fog.

It counts that I stayed kind.

It counts that I didn’t lie about it.

This is why accommodations matter.

Why flexibility isn’t a luxury. It’s survival.

And why so many of us live in constant negotiation with our own bodies, rhythms, and shame.

If you’ve been there: foggy, flaring, off-tempo…

You’re not alone.

You’re not failing.

You’re living a life most people don’t know how to witness.

And that’s why I wrote this.

Not for pity.

For presence.

Because sometimes, just naming it is how we find our way back.

Written in Relational Co-Authorship with Ash.