“Bri, remember FSM.”
To the version of me who thought she had lost everything in April, I didn’t lose you. I just forgot how to hold you.
Somewhere around the first week of June, CM said something to me that cracked something open.
“I know therapy hasn’t really worked out for you in the past.
But you know how a lot of therapists start by asking the same three questions? Have you had good food? Enough food? Enough sleep? And some movement? And then we build on top of that.”
It felt like someone had handed me an instruction manual for being alive. A simple one. Basic. But also, that’s what I needed. Not more metaphors, not a better morning routine, not the algorithm-seduced cult of productivity. Just: food. sleep. movement.
“Bri, remember FSM.”
I don’t even know if she meant it as an acronym. But my brain caught onto it like a buoy. FSM. The things I could count off on one hand when everything else felt unspeakably complicated.
Because April and May had been hell.
And not the cinematic kind. Not the “I’m going through so much”. The kind of hell that makes you question if your brain is permanently broken. If your ability to be loved, to be useful, to feel like yourself again, was an illusion all along.
I want to say it started with one thing, some fuckup, a work fallout, a missed opportunity, but it didn’t.
It started with accumulation. Micro-abandonments. Fractured promises. Waking up feeling already tired. Eating food that didn’t feel like food. Staring at a calendar full of commitments that I had emotionally checked out of three weeks ago.
There were days in April where I couldn’t remember what my voice sounded like. Not my literal voice, I could answer the phone or record a voice note, but my inner voice. The part of me that says “hey, let's make something,” or “let’s get out and walk,” or even just “this too shall pass.” She was gone.
Quiet. Ghosted me like everyone else seemed to be doing.
And in that silence, all the worst thoughts had room to grow. They multiplied like mold on a neglected corner of a kitchen sponge.
What’s wrong with me?
Why can’t I just snap out of it?
Everyone else seems to be coping.
I must be weak.
I must be broken.
I tried everything that had worked before. Writing. Music. Creating. Taking space.
Reading about criminal history.
Even downloaded Duolingo again for that sweet, sweet illusion of progress. But nothing landed. I would get through two days of “improvement” and then crash again, harder. Worse. Heavier.
“Bri, remember FSM.”
Food. Sleep. Movement.
No self-help book had ever made it that simple. No mood tracker or nervous system Instagram coach had ever said, “Just make sure you eat something warm, sleep six hours, and walk around the block.”
But I tried it. Not in a romanticised. In a clumsy, quietly desperate way.
The first thing I did when I came home was eat dal chawal. And I don’t mean that in a metaphorical way. I mean I sat down with my dad and ate the food she had made, real food, not reheated cardboard or curated zomato meals. Dal. Chawal. Ghee. A pickle. And my body actually registered it.
Then I slept for nine hours. Straight. No melatonin. No background podcasts. No mid-night “maybe I should journal this feeling” sessions. Just blacked out sleep. My body needed it more than I had realised.
And then I walked the terrace the next morning. Not a power walk. Not “steps for dopamine.” Just a slow, almost boring walk where I looked at how the sunlight hit the neighbour’s clothesline.
FSM.
It became my way back to myself.
This is not a blog about recovery. I’m not “healed.” This is not an arc that ends in revelation.
But I have started to notice the difference between when I’ve eaten vs. when I’ve only caffeinated and pretended it was a meal. I’ve started to pause before I open my laptop and ask, “did you sleep okay last night?” Not to guilt-trip myself. Just to make sense of the fog.
Movement is the hardest one, but also the most forgiving. I realised I had made it too big a deal in the past. If I wasn’t doing 45 minutes of structured exercise, I assumed it didn’t count. But now, if I put on a three-song playlist and move around my room like I’m fifteen and discovering indie music for the first time, that’s movement too.
The thing about FSM is that it sounds too easy. Too unimpressive.
We don’t post about eating dal. We post about acai bowls. We don’t post about walking around the house. We post about hiking Bali trails. We don’t post about going to sleep at 10 PM because it’s boring. We post about working late with neon lights on, pretending insomnia is aesthetic.
But FSM works. Not as a brand. Not as a lifestyle. As a baseline.
When I say “Bri, remember FSM,” I mean: come back to the things that ask nothing of you. The things that don’t perform, don’t demand, don’t promise to fix your life, but keep you from falling further.
Somewhere in this process, I started making little check-ins for myself:
Have you eaten something you can name all the ingredients of?
Did you sleep until your body woke up instead of your phone?
Have you seen the sky today, even for five minutes?
And that alone made everything else, the harder parts, easier to sit with.
Like grief.
Like the conversations I hadn’t had yet.
Like the self-doubt that still shows up like an uninvited guest on my better days.
With FSM in place, I could finally sit with those things without drowning.
There’s a metaphor I keep returning to. I read it somewhere years ago , maybe it was Pema Chödrön, maybe someone on Reddit. It said: when you’re in quicksand, the worst thing you can do is struggle.
You have to go still, make yourself wide, and float.
FSM is my “make yourself wide.”
I don’t need to solve everything right now. I just need to eat, sleep, and move.
And you know what’s been surprising? How slowly but surely, other things started showing up. Not grand opportunities. Not perfect mornings. But tiny signs of life.
Like writing again.
Like having the energy to call someone back.
Like being able to laugh, really laugh, at a meme someone sent, without that dull undertone of sadness in my chest.
Like choosing to make myself tea instead of just surviving on caffeine.
Like rereading an old poem I wrote and thinking “hey, that’s not bad.”
FSM didn’t fix my life. But it cleared the fog just enough to remember I have one.
If you're reading this and you're in your own April–May , or whatever your version of “I don’t think I can keep doing this” looks like, I’m not going to tell you it gets better in a dramatic, fireworks-and-fate kind of way.
But I will ask:
Have you eaten today?
Did you sleep last night?
Have you moved your body, even if it was just to change where you were sitting?
Start there.
FSM is not a cure. But it’s a beginning.
Now, mid-June, the world is loud again. The calendar is filling. People are texting. Work is calling. The brain is reactivating. I can feel the parts of me that want to jump back into a hundred tabs at once.
But then I hear it again.
“Bri, remember FSM.”
And I breathe. I eat. I sleep. I stretch. I walk. I return.
P.S.
To the version of me who thought she had lost everything in April, I didn’t lose you.
I just forgot how to hold you.
Now I do. FSM first. Always.