I Can Handle a Room Full of Consultants. I Cannot Find a PE Kit.

I'm good at my job.

Genuinely.

Put me in front of a room full of consultants and I'm completely comfortable.

I can answer difficult questions.

Handle objections.

Present complex information.

Navigate challenging conversations.

I've spent more than twenty years developing those skills.

And yet.

At 7:42 on a Tuesday morning, if somebody asks:

"Mum, where's my PE kit, my Hairbrush and my reading record?"

I become completely unemployable.

Sometimes I feel like I live two entirely separate lives.

At work, I'm organised.

Professional.

Capable.

I know where my laptop is.

I remember meetings.

I can explain complicated things to intelligent people.

I usually arrive with matching shoes.

Then there's Home Kate.

Home Kate wanders around the kitchen carrying a yoghurt, a school letter and a vague sense of urgency.

Home Kate opens the fridge and discovers three jars of pesto despite having absolutely no memory of purchasing any of them.

Home Kate spends ten minutes looking for reading glasses that are already on her head.

The strange thing is that these aren't two different people.

They're exactly the same person.

It feels like I spend my life looking for PE Kits or Hairbrushes or Reading Records

At that point it's less of a search and more of a part-time job.

We checked bedrooms.

Cupboards.

The utility room.

The car.

Then we checked all the places we'd already checked because apparently that's a critical part of the process.

By the end, I wasn't looking for these things anymore.

I was pursuing justice.

It had become a battle of wills between me and a small bag of sports clothing, a prickly torture device or another unfilled piece of evidence to prove i'm failing

Eventually they are all found exactly where somebody had confidently assured me it definitely wasn't.

No explanation was provided.

Life moved on.

The funny thing about moments like these is that they sound ridiculous.

And they are ridiculous.

But if we're not careful, we start turning these small everyday incidents into evidence about ourselves.

We forget something.

And suddenly:

"I'm useless."

We miss a date.

"I'm so disorganised."

We lose our patience.

"I'm failing."

A missing PE kit becomes proof that we're somehow not coping.

But if a colleague told us they were managing a demanding career, a household, family logistics, emotional support, school administration and about fifty other responsibilities simultaneously, we probably wouldn't call them disorganised.

We'd call them busy.

We'd call them overloaded.

We'd probably wonder how they're managing at all.

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For years I assumed I needed a better system.

A better planner.

A better routine.

A better memory.

Possibly a colour-coded spreadsheet.

Because apparently every adult problem eventually becomes a spreadsheet.

But eventually I realised something important.

Organisation helps with tasks.

It doesn't necessarily reduce cognitive load.

A calendar can tell me when Sports Day is.

It can't stop me thinking about Sports Day three weeks beforehand.

A reminder can tell me to send an email.

It can't carry the emotional weight attached to sending it.

That's a different problem entirely.

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Nobody has ever congratulated me for successfully finding a PE kit.

Nobody has handed me an award for locating yet another missing water bottle.

And that's probably fair.

But perhaps we're measuring success incorrectly.

Maybe success isn't looking calm all the time.

Maybe success is keeping the operation running.

The PE kit got found.

Dinner got served.

Homework got completed.

Everyone arrived where they needed to be.

The operating system held.

Not perfectly.

Not elegantly.

But it held.

And sometimes that's more than enough.

If you're brilliant at work but occasionally defeated by your own hallway...

If you can manage stakeholders but can't locate a school jumper...

If you've ever searched for something while holding it...

You're not failing.

You're carrying an extraordinary number of moving parts that most people never see. [

Maybe the goal isn't becoming better at holding everything.

Maybe the goal is finding safe places to put some of it down.