I had two options. My brain settled on a third.

My brain has declared war on itself, which sounds very dramatic and Braveheart until you find out the entire conflict is over whether I’m allowed to watch a documentary about competitive cheese rolling.

(This is a real sport. People throw a wheel of cheese down an almost vertical hill and then fling themselves after it, and there are ambulances waiting at the bottom AS A PLANNED AND EXPECTED PART OF THE DAY. I need to watch this more than I need several things I would list as essential, including possibly a spleen.)

But I can’t watch it, because there is a pile of tax receipts on my dining table that has been sitting there so long it has started forming opinions. It has a texture now. When the light hits it at a certain angle I feel like it’s making eye contact with me.

And the small furious man who lives in my head and carries a clipboard has issued an official ruling on the matter: NO CHEESE UNTIL TAXES.

Which seems fair, honestly. He’s not wrong. That’s the thing about him — he’s never technically wrong, he’s just wrong in a way that makes me unable to move.

Because I can’t do the taxes. Trying to do the taxes feels like swimming through cold porridge. My brain simply refuses. It goes somewhere else. It goes to a lovely field.

But I also can’t watch the cheese, because the receipts are in the other room screaming.

So for one entire hour I did neither, and instead alphabetized my spice rack, which is how I learned that I own two paprikas — which was a surprise, because I thought I had none. Then I lay on the floor and became deeply invested in a dust bunny under the couch.

My husband came in and asked what I was doing.

“Resisting tyranny,” I said, pointing to the dust bunny.

He nodded slowly and left, because after this many years he knows that whatever this is, it will pass, and also that I will probably name the dust bunny.

Her name is Deborah. She hasn’t done her taxes either. We’re taking it one day at a time.