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There are maybe two mornings a week when nothing is chasing me. No alarm doubling as a countdown, no bus schedule taped to the inside of my brain. Just the apartment, the light doing its slow climb up the kitchen wall, and ten minutes that belong to no one in particular.
I used to fill them the same way I filled every other morning, which is to say I didn’t notice them at all. I would still move fast out of habit, brush my teeth like I was being timed, put my hair up without looking in the mirror. It took me longer than I want to admit to realize that speed had become a personality trait rather than a necessity. I wasn’t rushing because I had somewhere to be. I was rushing because I didn’t know how not to.
What I actually do with them now
I sit on the edge of the tub with the water running, not yet in it, just listening to it fill. That’s not efficient. It’s not part of any routine I could describe to someone else with a straight face. But it’s become the thing that tells me the day is going to be a slow one, if I let it.
Some mornings I use the ten minutes to look at my own face without doing anything to it. Not fixing, not assessing, just looking the way you’d look at a photograph of someone else. My eyebrows have a gap on the left side where I over-plucked in my twenties and it never fully grew back. I used to hate that. Lately I just notice it, the way you’d notice a crack in a sidewalk you walk every day. It’s part of the route now.
I don’t think the ten minutes are supposed to produce anything. That might be the whole point, and I still find it hard to sit with.
The moisturizer test
On rushed mornings I put moisturizer on like I’m patching a tire, fast circles, done in eight seconds, already thinking about the next thing. On the slow mornings I put the same moisturizer on so slowly it almost feels ridiculous, one cheek and then the other, under the eyes last because that’s what my mother did and I never asked her why. It’s the same product. It is not the same act. I’ve started to think the product barely matters and the ten minutes are doing all the work, which is an uncomfortable thing to realize when you’ve spent money assuming otherwise.
I keep a small dish by the sink where I’ve started putting my rings before I wash my face, just so I have somewhere to look that isn’t the mirror. It’s a stupid, small ritual. I don’t know if ritual is even the right word for something this minor. But I notice when I skip it, the same way you notice a step missing on a staircase you know by heart.
What I’m still not sure about
I don’t know if the slowness is self-care or just self-indulgence wearing a nicer outfit. Some mornings it feels like the first thing, deliberate, earned, a small rebellion against a schedule that owns most of my week. Other mornings it feels like I’m just stalling, using the ten minutes as an excuse not to open my laptop and see what’s waiting for me there.
My friend Renata says she doesn’t have this problem, that she wakes up and moves through her morning at exactly one speed regardless of whether she has somewhere to be. I believe her, and I also don’t fully understand her, the same way I don’t understand people who don’t reread the same paragraph three times before falling asleep. We’re wired for different kinds of stillness, I think, or maybe I just haven’t found mine yet.
What I’ve tried instead
For a while I tried treating the ten minutes like a checklist item, telling myself I’d meditate, or stretch, or do something a magazine would approve of. That never lasted more than a day or two. It turns out assigning a purpose to the time defeats whatever made it valuable in the first place. The one morning I tried a guided breathing app, I spent the whole ten minutes annoyed at the narrator’s voice and glancing at the timer, which is close to the opposite of what I was going for. I deleted the app that afternoon and haven’t replaced it with anything.
What works better, when anything works at all, is having no plan for the ten minutes beyond showing up for them. I’ve started keeping a cheap notebook on the bathroom windowsill, not to journal in any structured way, just somewhere to jot down a single sentence if one occurs to me while I’m sitting there. Most days I write nothing. Some days it’s a stray thought about my grandmother, or a line from a dream I’m already forgetting. I don’t reread these entries. I think the notebook is less about keeping a record and more about giving my hands something to reach for that isn’t my phone.
The part where nothing gets fixed
I want to end this with something tidy, some conclusion about what the ten minutes taught me. I don’t have one. What I have is a Tuesday last month where I sat on the tub edge for what turned out to be closer to twenty minutes because I lost track, and when I finally stood up my knees had gone stiff and I laughed out loud at myself, alone, in an empty bathroom, for no reason I could explain to anyone.
That’s the closest I’ve come to understanding what the time is for. Not productivity, not even really self-care in the way magazines mean it. Just proof that I can occupy a space without needing to justify it. I’m still working out whether that’s a skill or just a mood that happens to visit on Sundays.
The water was cold by the time I got in it that day. I didn’t mind.
