Some struggles feel older than your own life. You cannot remember a time before the fear, the tightness in the chest, the urge to pull away, the sentence that plays on a loop: "I will be left. I will fail. I am the problem. Nothing I do will be enough."

Dave is 48. Most mornings he walks into his home office with a clear intention… and then stands there.... Brain Fog. He cannot remember why he came. He looks at the desk. A paper catches his eye, and the task snaps back: the invoice, the call, the form. The thought was never gone. It just would not surface until something outside his head handed it to him. With friends it is similar. He is present, then he is not. The conversation moves, and he is still on the last sentence.