Yesterday, My Brain Clocked In As a Full‑Time Pinball

Yesterday, I felt like a pinball — bouncing from one thing to the next, ricocheting off every thought, task, and distraction that flashed in front of me.

I’d start one thing, notice another, jump to that, remember something else, and before I knew it… I had touched a hundred things and completed none.

Have you read the If You Give a Mouse a Cookie series? Yep. That was me. Except without the fun, the whimsy, or the mouse. Just the chaos.

Start the dishes.
See the load of clean sheets on the couch.
Take the sheets to the spare bed to make.
Notice the floors need sweeping.
Start moving things to sweep the floors.
Decide that shelf would look better on the other side of the room.
Suddenly I’m rearranging the entire space… until I carry a few unwanted items to the kitchen and spot a drawer that desperately needs reorganizing.

And so the pinball continues.

My brain wasn’t just busy. It was everywhere. A true picture of chaos. I couldn’t find any internal calm, I did what so many of us do: I tried to create it externally.

So I deep‑cleaned random corners of the house that absolutely did not belong on the priority list. A drawer here. A cabinet there. A shelf I haven’t thought about since we moved in. Anything to feel a little control somewhere, since I couldn’t find it in my mind.

But, did you know there are actual psychological terms for this?! That made me feel at least a little less alone. If you ever want to nerd out, look up things like Task Switching Overload, Cognitive Flooding, Displacement Cleaning, and Executive Function Fatigue.
It’s not just “being scattered.” It’s your brain trying to cope.

If you’ve ever had a day where your brain felt like a pinball machine and your house became the unwilling arcade… you’re not alone. You’re not failing. You’re not “bad at adulting.”

You’re human.

Sometimes our minds get loud, messy, overstimulated, or overwhelmed — and our hands try to create order anywhere they can. Even if that means reorganizing a drawer that hasn’t mattered since you moved in.

If yesterday was chaos, today can be a little more calm. If your brain is bouncing, you can still land softly. And if you ever find yourself deep‑cleaning something wildly irrelevant… just know you’ve got company in this {beautiful} chaotic life.

We’re all just doing our best — one ricochet at a time.