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I knew every supplement in our cabinet. I didn't know about the ones in his desk drawer. I'm the one who did the grocery shopping. I'm the one who read the labels, tracked the macros for a while when we were both trying to eat better, organized the cabinet above the fridge by category. I knew what we had. I thought I knew what we took. Ryan worked in growth strategy at a startup. Which meant, in practice, that he worked all the time. Not complained-about all the time — actually all the time. Evenings, Saturdays, the occasional Sunday where he'd disappear into the office at 9am and surface at 6pm looking like he'd run a marathon he'd also won. I didn't question it for a long time. That was just who he was. That was the person I married — driven, focused, the kind of man who finished things. I found it attractive, honestly, at the beginning. He made me feel like we were building toward something. The first thing I noticed was that he stopped getting tired. Not in a good way. In a way that felt like a setting had been disabled. He'd come home at 9pm and want to talk through his day, process everything out loud, make plans for the weekend. I'd be falling asleep sitting up and he'd be at full volume, fully there, eyes bright. I thought he was just good at the job. I thought some people ran hotter than others. The second thing I noticed was the drawer. His desk was in the second bedroom we used as an office. I wasn't in there often — it was his space, his setup, three monitors and a mechanical keyboard and a cable management system he'd spent a weekend on. I went in one afternoon to use the printer and pulled the wrong drawer looking for paper. A small orange pill bottle. No pharmacy label. Just a handwritten letter on a piece of tape. I put it back. I didn't say anything. I told myself it was supplements — he was always researching something, always optimizing. Magnesium. Lion's mane. Things I didn't track because he did. I told myself that for four months. What changed wasn't a confrontation. It was a Saturday morning in April when he came downstairs and sat at the kitchen table and just — stopped. Stared at his coffee. Didn't open his laptop. Didn't check his phone. I asked if he was okay. He said, I forgot what this felt like. I said, what? "Just sitting here," he said. "Not doing anything." We talked for two hours that morning. The longest unscheduled conversation we'd had in over a year. He told me about the bottle. About a colleague who'd offered something to get through a crunch period eighteen months ago. About how the crunch period never ended so neither did the something. He wasn't dramatic about it. That's what I remember. He was just tired. Underneath all of it, past the bright eyes and the full-volume evenings, he was very tired. "I don't know what I feel like anymore without it," he said. "I don't know if there's still a baseline or if I just erased it." I'd been reading — I do that, when something's wrong, I research it before I talk about it. I'd come across something about the nervous system and chronic performance pressure. How the body gets locked into a kind of permanent output mode. How it stops knowing how to downshift on its own. I showed him an article. At the bottom it mentioned an app called Liven. Something about retraining the nervous system to find its own regulation again. He read it twice. He took the quiz that evening. He read the questions out loud to me from the couch — whether his body braced before his morning alarm, whether he felt a kind of low hum even in quiet moments, whether rest felt like something he had to earn. Yes. Yes. Every time, yes. It's been about ten weeks. I'm not going to say everything is fixed — that's not what happened, and that's not what I'm watching. What I'm watching is smaller than that. He slept past 7am for the first time in two years last month. He came to my sister's birthday dinner and was actually there — not half-present, not mentally elsewhere, actually there, laughing at the right moments, remembering what people said. Last week he left his laptop in the office on a Sunday. He didn't mention it. I don't think he noticed. The bottle is gone from the drawer. I didn't ask what he did with it. The cabinet above the fridge still has his supplements. I still know what's in it. These days, I think that's actually true. Liven starts with a quiz about the body — not mood scores or stress levels, but the physical texture of how you're running. Jaw tension. The low hum. Whether your nervous system knows how to be still. If you recognize something in what I described — in him, or in yourself — it's worth a few minutes. Link is below. 💙