I Told My Doctor I Was Exhausted. He Told Me I Was Fifty-Four.

I want to be precise about this, because tired is the wrong word and it is the reason nobody takes it seriously.

Tired is what you are after a long day. Tired is fixed by sleeping.

This was different.

This was standing in the doorway of my own kitchen at 7am knowing there was a reason I walked in there.

This was my daughter telling me a story about her job and me nodding along and realizing halfway through that I had not heard a single word, and then having to decide whether to admit it or fake it.

I faked it. I want to be honest about that. I faked it a lot that year.

This was the 3pm wall. Every single day, between three and four o'clock, something in me would just go out. Like a breaker tripping.

This was turning down my friend Cheryl three Saturdays in a row because the thought of getting dressed and being pleasant for four hours felt like being asked to run a marathon.

And underneath all of it, the part I did not say out loud to anybody:

I thought I was watching the beginning of myself disappear.

That is what it actually felt like. Not tired. Early. Like something had come for me twenty years ahead of schedule and everyone was going to be very polite about it.

So I did what everybody does.

I drank more coffee. Then I drank so much coffee that I was tired and jittery, which is genuinely the worst of both.

I bought the B12. The little bottle with the eyedropper. Took it for six weeks.

I bought a multivitamin that cost forty-one dollars and had a picture of a woman doing yoga on a cliff.

I tried going to bed at nine. I tried going to bed at eleven. I tried cutting out sugar for a month and I want you to know I was unbearable to be around and it changed nothing.

I bought sea moss gel from a woman at the Flatbush market because my cousin swore by it.

Took a spoonful most mornings for about three weeks. Nothing happened.

The jar sat in the back of my fridge for four more months until it grew something and I threw it out and felt stupid about the forty dollars.

And that is where I stopped. I decided the sea moss thing was a trend, my cousin was suggestible, and I was fifty-four.

I was wrong about one of those three, and it took my aunt to tell me why.

My grandmother came from Portland Parish, Jamaica. She raised six children and then a good number of grandchildren, including me, most summers.

There was a jar on the second shelf. There was a jar on the second shelf in every house on that road.

Irish moss. She would soak it overnight, and in the morning she would blend it with water until it set thick.

And here is the part I did not think about for thirty-one years.

She gave us two heaping spoonfuls. Every morning. Not a little one. Two.

We drank it in punch. We drank it in porridge. Nobody in that house called it a supplement, because it was not one. It was food, the way soup is food.

When I told my Aunt Marva about the jar I had thrown out, she asked me one question.

How much were you taking?

I said a spoonful. Most mornings. Maybe not every morning.

And she laughed at me. Not unkindly. She said, Yvette. Mummy gave you two before you were nine years old. And you were nine.

I went and looked this up properly, because I wanted to know if my aunt was just being my aunt.

She was not.

Here is the whole thing, and it is not complicated.

Sea moss gel is mostly water. That is what makes it a gel. You soak dried seaweed until it swells up and holds water, then you blend it. The actual plant in there is a small fraction of what is in the jar.

So the spoonful was never the point. The spoonful was the delivery vehicle. Volume was how my grandmother got a real amount of plant into a child who did not want to drink it.

Two spoonfuls, every morning, for years.

Now count what I was doing. One spoonful. Some mornings. For three weeks.

I was not testing sea moss. I was testing a rounding error and then blaming the seaweed.

And then it got worse, because I found out what the industry did next.

Nobody wants to keep a jar of grey gel in their fridge. It separates. It goes off. It tastes like the ocean. So the market solved that by putting sea moss into capsules.

A capsule holds a few hundred milligrams of dried powder. That is a physical fact about the size of a capsule. There is no clever way around it.

There is no arrangement of that powder that equals two heaping spoonfuls of gel. Not two capsules. Not four.

So millions of us bought the convenient version, felt nothing, and concluded the ingredient was a scam.

We did not discover that sea moss does not work. We quietly changed the dose and never noticed.

This is the part I wish somebody had explained to me in the Flatbush market.

An extract is not a different ingredient. It is the same plant with the water taken out and the plant matter concentrated down at a stated ratio.

30:1 means thirty parts of raw dried seaweed reduced into one part of extract, before it ever reaches the bottle.

So the amount you swallow gets small enough to fit in a dropper.

The amount of plant does not shrink with it.

That is the entire argument. Not that this is a miracle. Just that if you are going to find out whether a plant does anything for you, you should probably know how much of it you are taking, which is something neither I nor the woman who sold me that jar could have told you.

I am going to be careful here, because the reason I trusted this brand is that they were careful with me.

Nothing happened on day one. I want to say that plainly. I took it, it tasted mildly of the sea for about four seconds, and I went to work.

The first thing I noticed was maybe five or six days in, and it was not dramatic. It was that I got to about four in the afternoon and realized the wall had not come.

Not that I had fought through it. That it had not shown up.

I noticed it because I was still working at 4:30 and I had forgotten to be exhausted.

By the third or fourth week the thing that changed was harder to describe and it mattered more. My daughter told me a story about her job and I heard all of it. I asked her a follow-up question about the woman in the story. Small thing. Enormous thing.

I stopped writing myself notes about things I used to just know.

I said yes to Cheryl.

That is it. That is the whole testimonial. Nobody handed me my twenties back. I did not wake up transformed.

I got myself back, at the volume I was supposed to be running at, and it turned out the difference between those two things was the difference between a spoonful and an actual dose.

I have since talked to enough people to know my story is not unusual. There are three exits and I have now heard all of them.

• I felt nothing. Almost always a jar used a handful of times, or capsules. An unmeasurable amount of a diluted format is not a fair test.
• I could not keep it up. The gel is a genuine daily chore. Soaking, blending, refrigerating, and it goes off. Most jars get used twice. Mine got used maybe nine times.
• It upset my stomach. This is what happens when the dose is a guess. Some mornings the guess is high. You cannot have a consistent experience with an inconsistent amount.

Every one of those is a complaint about the format. Not one of them is a complaint about the plant.

If you are going to try this, here is what I would tell a friend to expect, because nobody told me.

• Days 1 to 4. Nothing. Genuinely nothing. Mild sea taste for a few seconds. If you quit here you have learned nothing, which is exactly what I did the first time.
• Week 1. Where some people first notice something, usually the afternoon. Plenty of people notice nothing yet. That is normal and it is not a verdict.
• Week 4. Long enough to actually judge it. And this time, if the answer is no, it is a real answer, because you know precisely what you took.
• Month 3. Where it stopped being a thing I was trying and started being a thing I take. My grandmother did it every morning for sixty years. She was not running a four-week trial.

One bottle is thirty days. If you take one bottle and stop, you are finding out how you feel at the very beginning. That is why I buy three at a time now.