Sundays are the worst. Maybe not all Sundays, but enough of them. And maybe not all of Sunday, but parts of it. I know, I know – for someone who is trying to be more mindful and practice things like gratitude, I’m doing a pretty shitty job of it with statements like Sundays are the worst. A mindful person would realize that every day is a gift. A mindful person would see the beauty in the clouds or the sun or the gentle breeze. A mindful person would do a better job of being in the moment and keeping tomorrow’s worries at bay. A mindful person wouldn’t criticize their lack of mindfulness…. Clearly, I am not that person – at least not always. In fact, I’m going to double down on my cantankerous attitude and say Mondays can be pretty shitty too. The only thing that makes them slightly better is that they have a get up and go momentum to them. Sundays are full of these small battles against anxiety and dread. By Monday you embrace the suck.
I started writing this on a Sunday night having just poured a glass of wine and in the midst of reheating some Bolognese that I froze whenever I last made Bolognese. Aside from two brief dog walks, I hadn’t left the house for a day and half. I also hadn’t physically spoken a word to another human being since thanking the cashier at the grocery store on Saturday afternoon. I spent a lot of that Sunday reading and writing (drafted three new poems)… which was great. But every once in a while, I noticed the Sunday scaries (those thoughts about the work week and my various obligations as an adult) creeping in. On this particular Sunday, this feeling, whatever it was, reminded me a lot of how I felt in a past relationship when we would spend the weekends together and on Sunday, face this mutual feeling of dread. It’s a pit in the stomach feeling. We thought it meant that we really liked spending time with each other and didn’t want it to end. That’s when we started kinda living together between two houses. Maybe it had nothing to do with us and we just didn’t want to go back to work.
Sundays cause me heartburn. I probably need to eat lighter meals – the Bolognese was primarily to blame, but I think it’s a little bit of all of it: stress, being sedentary, pasta. On this Sunday, I was up for at least two hours in the middle of the night. Not a half-dozing type of awake, but fully awake, lights on, reading or walking around or shifting my position hoping I might want to fall back asleep. This made Monday morning miserable. It was freezing out, I was exhausted, and all l I wanted to do was go back to bed and pull the blanket over my head. That’s when I realized I’ve turned into Garfield: eating pasta and hating Mondays.
For most of that Sunday – the day and I got along. Quite a bit of it was pleasant. The dog was a little antsy because we skipped the morning walk (ice), but we played a lot to get his energy out. When we weren’t doing that, I sat on the sofa, under a blanket with him curled at my hip. I read, looked at the icicles, and wrote. As day stretched into evening, I began to feel a little different. I was tired of reading. I was starting to think about the things I need to do for work and fighting those thoughts off. I was looking for distractions and finding none. It was right around dinner time (when I started to write this) that everything felt a little empty, the house, the kitchen, the hours ahead. The night was looking long and I started to think I should have saved some of my metal energy for later. The pit-in-gut anxiousness reminded me of those earlier weekends and how there was a comfort in our mutual suffering. This time, while the physical feeling was the same, the reasons were different (I think) and solace would be found in the keyboard.
I hate Sundays (sometimes and only sorta).