New Normal

There is always a moment — small, quiet, almost forgettable — when the spark stops being a warning and becomes a state. It never looks like a turning point from the outside. It’s not a dramatic shift. It’s not a cinematic beat. It’s a subtle internal click, a recalibration so slight that only someone who has lived this cycle as many times as I have would recognize it.

It’s the moment when the body stops whispering and starts insisting.

My heartbeat, which had been hovering closer to the surface, settles into a new rhythm — quicker, tighter, more efficient. Not pounding. Not racing. Just ready. My breathing follows suit, becoming a series of short, purposeful inhales, as if my lungs have decided that oxygen is a resource to be optimized, not savored.

My muscles feel coiled, not tense — like a runner waiting for a starting gun that hasn’t been fired yet but somehow already knows the race has begun.

This is the point where the physical shifts stop feeling unusual.

They become the new baseline.

The new normal.

The new weather.

Then the mind catches up.

Thoughts that were arriving in single file begin to overlap, braid, accelerate. They don’t feel intrusive. They feel brilliant. They feel necessary. They feel like revelations that must be acted on immediately or risk evaporating.

This is the danger — the way the chemistry disguises itself as clarity.

My attention becomes a spotlight that refuses to stay still. It darts from idea to idea, illuminating each one with a conviction that feels like truth. I can feel the speed increasing, not in a chaotic way, but in a way that feels like inevitability.

This is the moment where I stop thinking about things and start thinking through them — rapidly, relentlessly, with a precision that feels like power.

The world begins to respond differently too.

Not because it has changed.

Because I have.

Colors feel louder.

Sounds feel sharper.

Time feels thinner.

My children sense it before I speak. They watch me with the quiet vigilance of creatures who have learned to read the weather by instinct. Their eyes track my movements, their bodies adjusting to the shift in atmosphere before I’ve even acknowledged it myself.

This is the hinge — the threshold between noticing and becoming.

The moment when the spark behind the eyes becomes a glow, then a burn, then a steady internal blaze that lights everything from the inside out. The moment when momentum stops being something I generate and becomes something that carries me.

I don’t feel out of control.

I feel over-capable.

And that is always the first sign that I’m no longer on level ground.

This is the crossing.

The tilt.

The quiet, irreversible slide into the upward weather.

The moment when the spark becomes the sky.