There is a quiet theft that happens before the world even knows you’re awake. It’s not dramatic. There’s no sharp spike of pain that announces itself with a siren. There’s no obvious reason your brain doesn’t fire the way it used to, or why answering an email feels like carrying a weight. Some mornings, you wake up and the day has already deducted from the account that was supposed to be yours.

I call it baseline theft—the gradual, invisible siphoning of energy, clarity, and capacity that happens without permission, without announcement, and without any obvious trigger. If you’re living with endometriosis, you know this quiet subtraction intimately. You don’t have to be in the middle of a full-blown flare to feel it. In fact, most days it’s the thing that wears you down slowly, the erosion under the surface that makes everything else harder.

What it looks like in real life

You open your eyes. It’s not that you didn’t sleep; you did—but the kind of sleep that leaves you harboring fog instead of rest. Your body didn’t scream at you; nothing hurt in a way you can point to and say, “That’s it.” But the decisions are heavy. You’re already negotiating whether to reply to that text, whether to get out of bed, whether to commit to something that feels like it might break you before lunch.

You’ve been a human being long enough to know your patterns, so you try to mask it. You schedule meetings, you say yes to calls, you put the mask of “I’m fine” on because you’ve learned that explaining baseline theft is exhausting in itself. The problem isn’t that you can’t do things. The problem is that every small thing demands a piece of energy that’s already been taken, and the sum of those pieces is the version of you that feels frayed by mid-afternoon.

Here’s a concrete moment: an email from someone asking for feedback on something minor. You see it, open it, and your brain stalls. You know the answer. You’ve written this kind of thing a thousand times. But the internal voice starts weighing: Do I have enough bandwidth to engage? If I respond now, will I lose momentum for the rest of the day? Do I sound like I’m dragging if I delay? You close the tab. The reply sits there, undone. That small failure compounds into self-judgment, and you tuck it away—because no one saw the energy loss, so you assume you’re just “slacking.” It wasn’t slacking. It was baseline theft taking what it wanted, quietly.

Or the conversation you’d prepared for: you rehearse what you’ll say, and halfway through your opening sentence your brain veers off. The word vanishes. You stall. You feel the sharp internal shame spike because you swore you would be on point today. You’re not unprepared. You’re not lazy. The day started with your reservoir already half empty.

Why it’s so easily dismissed

Because you don’t collapse. There’s no ambulance. There isn’t always a breakdown that’s obvious from the outside. To observers, you look okay. To systems—work, healthcare, relationships—the expectation becomes “you’re functioning, so you must be fine.” That’s the trap. Fine becomes a default you’ve been taught to perform, while your internal account continues to bleed out in micro-withdrawals: a drained decision here, a stalled task there, a canceled plan that you preemptively apologize for.

You’ve probably heard, “But you got sleep, right?” or “You just need to push through.” Those comments aren’t cruelty; they’re ignorance shaped into the only framework people have when they can’t see the theft. The problem is that you’ve internalized some of that language too. You catch yourself asking: Am I really this tired, or am I just mentally weak today? That question is the second theft—the one that steals your self-trust.

What surviving baseline theft looks like without heroics

You don’t “fix” it. There’s no single hack that turns the tap off. But you adapt in ways that feel like survival strategies because the system doesn’t give you permission to name what’s happening. The adaptation is what keeps you afloat and also what teaches you to shrink.

You learn to ration: picking which things are worth spending your hidden energy on and which things get postponed, not because you want to, but because you have to. You create internal scripts to explain yourself so you don’t have to string together a convoluted justification under pressure. You become a strategist for your own life, quietly accounting for the theft in every calendar entry, every commitment.

The one thing that changes the dynamic

Naming it out loud. Not in a long explanation—just a phrase that shifts the frame before anything else is asked of you.

“Today is heavy baseline—my energy is already taxed, so I might be slower or need to pause.”

That small sentence does three things:

• It gives context before people decide you’re “off.”
• It removes the burden of performing “fine.”
• It gives you permission to protect what’s left without guilt built into the frame.

You don’t have to explain it. You just say it. And the people who are paying attention adjust, even slightly. The ones who don’t aren’t worth the energy of frustration that follows.

If you’re reading this and it hit

Keep that line where you’ll see it. Write it someplace—sticky note, pinned note, phone draft—so when baseline theft shows up again, you don’t argue with it. You speak to it: “Today is heavy baseline.” Then rearrange the day around that truth instead of pretending you can outrun it.

Share this with someone who assumes you’re “fine” because you showed up. Give them the language to see it too. You don’t need their permission to protect your reserve. You just need to be honest with the one person who matters most: you.

Next week, we’ll take one visible consequence of this—the appointment where the fog makes you sound uncertain, the “I’ll just say nothing and hope they get it” moment—and give you a tool that makes that interaction fairer. No more feeling like you have to perform clarity while your system is already running on borrowed threads.

— Elyn