I have been counting since I was twenty-three. I count how many times I have spoken in the meeting versus how many times the men have. I count how many seconds of silence I am allowed before the silence becomes a thing I have to fill. I count the number of times in a single workday that I have said the word ‘sorry’ and the number of times I have meant it.

I am thirty-seven now. The count never stops. It runs in a band underneath whatever else I am doing, a strip of arithmetic across the bottom of the screen. When I am asleep it pauses. When I wake up it resumes.

I did not know other women were doing this until I read it described, almost in passing, in a therapist’s newsletter. ‘Continuous social tabulation,’ she called it. I read the phrase three times. I put down the phone. I cried for forty minutes in a parked car on a Tuesday. I had thought it was just me. I had spent fourteen years thinking the math was a private compulsion and not a feature of the operating system most of us are running.

The math has two costs I want to name. The first is bandwidth. There is a finite amount of attention available to a person in a given hour, and a substantial portion of mine is allocated to a calculus that the men in the same hour are not running. They are using that attention on something else. I have stopped guessing what. The second cost is the harder one to describe. It is the loss of access to my own first response. By the time I have decided whether to say the thing I think, the moment has moved. I am responding to the version of the room that existed seven seconds ago. The seven seconds are the math.

I have tried, in the way most women I know have tried, to stop. I have read the books. I have done the specific exercise about preempting the ‘you seem upset’ move in meetings. I have practiced not apologizing for the apologizing. None of this has stopped the count. It has, at best, made me a person who counts faster.

What has actually helped, the only thing that has helped, is naming it to another woman. I had lunch last spring with a senior colleague — she is sixty-one — and somewhere between the salads and the check I said, almost as a joke, ‘I am tired of counting how many times I have spoken.’ She did not laugh. She said, ‘Oh, that one.’ She had been doing it for forty years. She told me she had not stopped, but she had moved the count to a different track of her attention, the way you put a ticker tape onto a smaller screen in the corner. ‘It still runs,’ she said. ‘It just runs at a volume I can hear over.’

I have been trying to move my own count to that smaller screen for six months. Some days it works. Most days it does not. The days it does not, I come home and I cannot speak to my husband for an hour, because the language part of me is exhausted from having spent the day in language as a tactical surface. He has learned not to ask. He brings me tea. He sits on the other end of the couch. The half-step in our marriage is that he has learned to leave me a room I do not have to perform in. I do not know how to thank him for that. I have not thanked him for it. The accounting on this kind of household work is not in any dashboard. It is in the tea.

What I would tell another woman who is starting to notice the count: it is real. You are not making it up. It is also not your job to fix it alone. The count moves to the smaller screen when there is another woman in the room who knows the count is running. That is most of what I have learned. The math does not stop. The audience for the math is what changes.