Some weeks, life doesn’t throw a crisis at you.
No disasters.
No catastrophes.
No major problems.
Just… a stream of small, stupid, unrelated annoyances that somehow team up like they’re trying to break you emotionally.

That was my week.

I woke up the other morning in a terrible mood for absolutely no reason.
Before anything even happened.
Before the kids said a word.
Before work.
Before coffee.
Just pure internal storm cloud energy.

I got into the car and caught myself thinking, “What the fuck is wrong with you today?”
And the answer was: nothing.
Nothing was wrong.
Which almost made it worse.

Because when something bad actually happens, you can at least point to it.
But when there’s no cause…
just a vague heaviness, irritability, and the mental equivalent of “don’t touch me”…
that’s when you know you’re cooked.

Then the day started.

It was like the universe said, “Ah, he’s fragile today. Release the nonsense.”

Every small thing hit harder than it should’ve.
Traffic annoyed me.
A slow driver annoyed me (and I am a slow driver!)
My phone annoyed me.
My shirt annoyed me.
The sun annoyed me.
At one point I swear the wind blew in a slightly wrong direction and I considered fighting it.

By the time I got to work, someone was in my carpark.

Not the end of the world. Normally I wouldn’t care.

This week?
This week it felt like a personal attack.
I had to turn around, hunt for street parking in the Gold Coast CBD, which is never an easy task!

That walk was all it took for my brain to form the sentence,
“Everything is shit,” which is always a clear indication that absolutely nothing is shit — I’m just overwhelmed, tired, and preloaded with emotional dynamite.

That’s the thing I forget most:
Tiny annoyances don’t pile up unless you’re already running on fumes.

And I’ve been running on fumes for a while.

This time of year is chaos.

A million end-of-year requests.
Everyone suddenly needing everything done “before Christmas,” as though January 2nd is some mythical void where emails don’t exist.
Kids' concerts that take five hours, where your child is the shortest in the class and stuck behind 87 other kids so you don’t actually see them on stage.
Home stuff.
Business stuff.
Life stuff.

It all adds up, quietly, invisibly, until you’re reacting to life like a shaken can of Coke.

And because that wasn’t enough, I snapped at Elise this week.
She bought a second Elf on the Shelf for the kids — a completely normal, sweet mum decision — and I reacted like she’d personally sabotaged the family Christmas.

She did nothing wrong.
Nothing.
It was all me.
My exhaustion.
My mood.
My brain desperately trying to outsource blame.

I called her back twenty minutes later to apologise.
That’s the part I’m proud of.
Not the snapping — the catching it.
The coming back to myself.
She accepted the apology with a laugh.
She always does.
She knows I’m not perfect.
I think she low-key finds it funny that I break before I bend.

But still — I hate when I’m like that.
I hate when the noise in my head spills out onto the people I love.

That’s the thing no one tells you about being a parent, a partner, a business owner, a leader, or even just a functioning adult.

Most days aren’t hard because of what happens.
They’re hard because of everything else you’re carrying when it happens.

A tiny problem feels huge when you’re already stretched thin.
A small comment hits harder when you’re tired.
A trivial inconvenience feels like a personal attack when you’re overwhelmed.

Stoicism gets a bad wrap for being emotionless, but that’s not actually the point of it.
The point is recognising when your emotional state is lying to you.

When my kids fight in the backseat and I’m in a good mood, I don’t care.
When they do the exact same thing and I’m drained, I feel like driving the car into the ocean.

The event didn’t change.
I did.

The Stoics would say, “You are disturbed not by the thing, but by the view you take of the thing.”

I’d say, “Sometimes I’m just cooked.”

Same idea. Different millennium.

But I shook it off.
Eventually.
Because the good thing about a shit mood with no cause… is that it also has no roots.
It burns out.
It fades.
It dissolves once you stop feeding it.

By the afternoon, I was okay again.
Not perfect.
Not glowing with enlightenment.
Just okay.

And that’s enough.

We spend so much time trying to optimise our lives — food, sleep, mindset, calendar, productivity — that we forget something brutally simple:

You’re still a human being.
You’re still affected by exhaustion.
By pressure.
By expectations.
By December.
By dumb little things like carparks and kids’ concerts and having to email someone for the fourth time.

You don’t need a crisis to feel overwhelmed.
Sometimes you just need a week.

And the people around us don’t need us to be perfect.
They just need us to come back after we break.
To apologise when we get it wrong.
To laugh at ourselves.
To reset.
To keep going.

I didn’t have a crisis this week.
I just had… life.
Messy, annoying, unglamorous, relentlessly human life.

And weirdly, I’m grateful for it.

There’s something grounding about a bad mood with no cause.
It reminds you you’re not a machine.
It reminds you emotions aren’t problems to fix — they’re weather systems.
They pass.

And if you can get through a week where everything annoys you, even though nothing is actually wrong…
you’re probably doing alright.

If this gave you a laugh or a little perspective, feel free to forward it to someone who needs it.
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Until next week,
Broden Johnson