Sometimes I feel like I mess up too often. Maybe in the moment I don’t want to realise it and push it to the back of my mind but whenever it comes up again it eats me up inside. I am normally a busy person, or I guess I try to keep myself that way in order not to think too much. If you haven’t guessed by now, I think too much. I can’t explain why, but this feeling especially intensifies on Sundays. The common idea is for Sunday to be the relaxing day of the week, you know “Sunday Funday”. Well, Sundays are far from fun for me. Cue the Sunday Scaries.
On Sundays I get to sleep in. This means I’ll roll around in bed from the hours of 9 to 11am where I wake up and fall back asleep re-living any mistakes I have made during the week. I proceed to snooze these thoughts along with my alarms. When I finally decide to exit my groggy status, I go on my phone and scroll on social media for at least an hour. Ah yes, social media will never fail me. It bathes me in bottomless, tasteless content that scrubs my focus of all pressing worries. However, I can’t be on my phone forever, can I? It is sadly only a temporary escape.
I get up and make my bed, wash the dishes, have breakfast and clean up my room: a list of minimal tasks that provide me with the feeling that I was productive enough to deserve a break in the form of… going on my phone again. But this time it is different, this time I am conscious enough that not even tiktok can beat the speed of my underlying stress. My mind is so unbelievably against me that any thought about my week or my workload will only lead to another tangent. Even if I try to fight it, the overarching feeling that ties all these thoughts together is the fact that it is Sunday and I should be “turning my life around”. Involuntarily but inevitably, my mind engages in a spiral of thoughts that contain no space in between, no mental pause, no break, no breath, no peace. As the anxiety begins to metastasize inside of me, I decide it is time to take a nap. Do I think this is a solution to my problems? No. Do I let this stop me from taking said nap in order to delay my pain? Also no. Will this ultimately make matters worse once I wake up? Perhaps, but that is for Sunday-Evening me to deal with.
One nap later, I finally decide it is time to do some work, but before I start, I need a coffee. Suddenly making a coffee doesn’t seem like an act of self-care or a beverage I enjoy but only enlarges the disappointment I hold towards myself, simply because it saddens me how incapable I am of focusing if it weren’t for caffeine. I gather myself and open both my laptop and ipad…whilst sitting on my bed. There is no bone in my body that wants to sit at my desk even though deep down I know that it is the only way I would get anything done.
For some reason, every week I convince myself that I will complete a list of unrealistic tasks during the weekend. In 48h, I will be able to: do five days worth of work, plus anything else I need to catch up on, prepare for anything that is coming up, also rest – because after all I don’t have to wake up early – and obviously go out with my friends because I deserve it after a long week of doing nothing. However, none of this is true, it reaches midnight and I am so mentally exhausted that I can’t concentrate any longer, not that I did at all during the day. I convince myself I can push everything until tomorrow and I promise myself that I’ll definitely be more productive next week. “It will all be ok, right? Afterall, tomorrow is Monday and I will be so busy with classes that I’ll end up forgetting any of this ever happened. In fact, I’ll probably start re-adding tasks to my list that will only contribute to my preexisting burnout. A burnout that isn’t scheduled to explode again until next Sunday.”
You can laugh, it’s funny. It’s funny how I manage to lie to myself every week without fail; it’s funny how Sunday’s are so insufferable and I accomplish nothing; it’s funny how I would rather it be Saturday; it’s funny how I wish Sundays didn’t exist.
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