The Cortisol Shot There is a specific kind of violence in waking up and realizing you are exactly where you shouldn’t be: in bed. No alarm, no backup, and honestly, I hadn’t even thought about setting one because I’d gotten used to not needing it. My body was still running on the drifting rhythm of a previous chapter where mornings didn’t matter — but today, they did. Instead of an alarm, it was bright daylight, a dead laptop, and a clock that had already blown past the moment I was supposed to be somewhere. In a split second, your body goes from zero to a thousand. Your heart isn’t just beating; it’s trying to punch its way through your ribs. Your brain turns into a cornered animal, and cornered animals don’t think about integrity; they think about survival. My phone started ringing before I could get my bearings. The connection was trash, my data signal was booty as hell, and I stumbled outside onto the sidewalk still half asleep, completely disoriented, running on pure panic...