I have a lot of thoughts and feelings. What sort of personal site would this be if I didn't write them out for your reading pleasure?
No, Sunday Scaries isn't the title of some cool new horror series, where I write a horrible, gnarly spine-chiller once a week for the benefit of the two or three people who read this site. (Actually, that isn't such a bad idea...) Rather, it's the idea that, on a Sunday - particularly in the evening - one is filled with trepidation for the week ahead. The weekend is over, motherfucker. Gone are your two blessed days of freedom, of drinking in a beer garden or sitting curled up under a blanket, watching the most recent true crime slop on Netflix. Back to work. Back to reality. Back to your wanker boss and irritating colleagues. Back to getting up at five a.m. to RISE AND GRIND and back to drinking PURE PROTEIN and RUNNING FOR TEN MILES, ALL BEFORE WORK. (Damn, I've been absorbing way too much Ideal Morning Routine Content).
Sunday Scaries is sort of taken as a given for most people, but to be honest, I don't experience it very much at all. A big part of this is because I actually really like my job, for the most part (though there are things I don't like dealing with so much, and one of these days I'm sure I'll come home from work in a fit of rage and slam out a post about it). In this respect, I'm pretty lucky. I work full time, but my hours are less standard than the Mon-Fri 9-5. For one, I work on Saturdays, which means my weekend automatically shrinks. By the time I've done everything that I need to do on the weekend - laundry, grocery shopping, housework, ironing, getting my studies organised for the week ahead - I have maybe half a day to do fun weekend stuff - which amazingly, sometimes, does include going out of the house. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that by the time I've reached, say, ten p.m. on a Sunday, I'm usually tucked up in bed with a novel or my laptop, and the Sunday Scaries could be about to set in, but then I fall asleep and time resets.
Another point to make is that my job is pretty easily and - usually - low stress. I'm one of only two full-time colleagues at my workplace, save for the manager; the rest of my colleagues are all part-time, which means by virtue of the fact that they're missing entire days in any given week, there's stuff they don't know, or fail to pick up on. Some colleagues are worse at this than others. I feel like I'm the one picking up the slack quite a lot, probably because I'm something of a perfectionist in many regards. Another reason is that one of the mottoes for my life is 'If You Want Something Done Properly, Do It Yourself', which probably causes more trouble than it ought to. People seem to expect a lot of me because I do quite a lot at my job, but it's a problem entirely of my own making. You might say that I've made a rod for my own back, but at least being busy keeps me out of trouble. Besides, something that gets me through tough times is thinking about what will happen when I eventually get another job (ha! Like the job market isn't completely broken right now), and these LAZY colleagues of mine will have to pull their collective fingers out and start cracking on. It's a bit like in an American high school film, where the nerd - who's had his head flushed down the toilet by the jocks for the last time - starts thinking up a great new plan to run a business that will, in the future, have the loser jocks begging for a job. At least, it's about as pathetic as that.
That's not to say that I dislike my colleagues. Generally, I get on with all of them, although some better than others. Three of them I hang out with outside work occasionally. Getting on with your colleagues is important to the performance of the team as a whole, as well as the morale, and makes you less likely to want to jam sharp pencils into your eyes when your idiot colleague asks your manager a question in a meeting that they'd know the answer to if they ever read their fucking emails.
Anyway, another thing that prevents me from suffering too badly with Sunday Scaries is the fact that I live, constantly, in Lalaland. What I mean by this is that I have a constant running fiction in my head. When customers at work yell at me, it's okay, because I can dip into the staff room after and make myself a cup of coffee whilst imagining myself as some sort of cool assassin who is just refueling before she goes out to plant a bullet between the eyes of an international criminal and general Bad Guy, who also yells at customer service workers. I don't, like, talk to myself or anything. I'm good at keeping it inside. I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that, since I am barely tethered to reality as it is - since gravity's grip on me is astonishingly weak - it doesn't matter if work is hard, or if there's too much to do. There's always tomorrow. And there's always a place to retreat to.
Perhaps that's a little cowardly? Maybe I ought to work on my mental fortitude, you say. And perhaps you'd be right. But the thing is, I'm actually happy with things as they are. A lot of people today can't say that. Of course, there are things in my life that I'd like to be changed, but rather than ruminate, surely it's better to work on it, even if that work is slow? That's what I think, anyway.
Well, there's only a few hours of Sunday left, and the sun is shining. I think I'll sit in the garden and have a vodka lemonade.
Until next time!