Tuesday. 11 PM. Standing at my front door, jabbing my debit card at the lock with increasing fury. Multiple angles. Getting angry at the door for not cooperating, like we had a deal and the door was violating the terms.
It took four attempts before I looked at my hand.
That's the thing about autopilot. It doesn't just take the wheel — it takes your awareness that anyone is driving at all. You're not making decisions. You're running a program. And the program doesn't check whether you're holding keys or a debit card because the program doesn't check anything.
I'd been running on autopilot for months. Work, commute, dinner, screen, sleep. My body was handling logistics while my brain clocked out somewhere around the second cup of coffee each morning and didn't clock back in until something broke.
We do this constantly. We just don't usually get caught. The debit card moment is the visible version of every time you've driven home and can't remember the route, or opened the fridge and forgotten why, or walked into a room with full confidence and zero purpose.
Burnout doesn't announce itself. It just starts making small, weird errors — the kind you laugh about later and probably should have cried about then.
The lock didn't need my debit card. I needed to be in the same room as my hands.
