Monday 7 March 2011

Monday morning guilt

This new higgledy-piggledy lifestyle is giving me all kinds of psychological issues. This morning I woke up to a beautiful sunny day with that familiar Monday morning feeling:

'Oh God, it's Monday morning, why world?! Why?! Why taunt us with this sunshine on a day when all I will see is the same dastardly four walls?!'

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth I realised that I wasn't in fact going to work and to the same four walls. My first meeting was not until well into the afternoon and then the next one wasn't until later in the evening (I'll come on to the weirdness of this later..) By all sensible standards that should mean that Monday morning was in fact my time off for the day. Hmm.

The problem is that this just feels wrong. Monday morning is a time for working, for sighing with your colleagues about how far away the next weekend feels and making copious amounts of tea to 'get you through'. And oddly, though Monday morning is truly rubbish, it's a least familiar. You can chart your emotions fairly accurately by the progression of the week and you have the camaraderie of your office mates that you are all in it together on your quest for the wonder that is the weekend. Working evenings is also the epitome of wrongness but I am slightly more familiar with this. It's not so much the having to work at different times that is the problem but rather the not working at what I consider to be 'work times' that is doing me in.

So, this morning I decided that there was no option but to embrace the weirdness of a Monday morning off. I took myself out for a walk and a cup of tea in town but was still unable to shake the innate wrongness of the whole situation. I really don't want to become one of those mentalists who works every hour in the day and ends up with ulcers and frown lines and a general air of anxiety about me. That is NO fun. So I suppose I am going to have to shake my sense of duty around time and instead work when I need to work and not when I don't. Hmm. I'm not sure exactly how this is going to work out, sooo blog readers I need you - tips anyone?!

5 comments:

  1. Ahh, a familiar thing I had to get over.

    How I deal? I have marked in my diary my timetable for work each week, and keep aside my 'time off' I ALWAYS have at least one day completely free of work & church commitments each week. usually a wednesday.

    When it is written down - I see I am doing work, and then remind myself that I can therefore go have a coffee with a friend on a wednesday afternoon!

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  2. That sounds like a really good way of doing it. I'm going to try that next week and see how I go!

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  3. Sorry I don't have any tips - but I've always had a sneaking suspicion that Monday is just a 'bad' day, independent of what is actually in it. In the same way, Saturdays and Fridays are just lovely.

    Looking forward to hearing how you redeem it and then trying it out for myself - do it for the sisterhood of Monday blues!

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  4. Thanks Emma! I've not been much better for the rest of the week but next week is brand new - try, try again!

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  5. When i was a curate I was always advised to think in terms of work sessions (morning, afternoon or evening) and try only to work two of these in any one day. It isn't always possible, but you do get used to thinking of a morning as your free time, when you know that you'll be busy in the afternoon and evening.

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