I’ve started to dread Mondays.
After a quiet weekend, everyone wakes up Monday morning with one thing on their minds – fill Scott’s email box with inquiries, problems, announcements, and enough spam to make a Monty Python film.
Add to that the unremitting dull, grinding sameness of life under lockdown – sleep, eat, rinse, repeat. And we do a LOT of rinsing, emptying the dishwasher seven times a day and wash enough clothes to string a line from here to Rome every week. Thank heaven I have a husband who does as much – and probably more – around the house as I do.
I’ve tried spreading Monday’s work through the week, with some success, but you can’t make an email come in later. And I’ve tried getting up earlier and earlier to free up more time, but there’s a limit to how much you can beat the sun to the day and still remain a functioning human being – or as functional as I’m able to be these days with my chronic lack of sleep.
Sleep? Who needs it? I’ll sleep when I’m dead.
And so… writing.
I have basically no time for it. Certainly not as much as I’d like.
All y’all out there who get to do it full time, I’m so… happy for you. Not jealous at all. Not even a bit. Nope. Not one bit.
But when I do get to write…
For a few moments, there’s no more laundry. No more covid or politics or dishes waiting to be put away. No more bills to pay or trash cans to be emptied or emails to reply to.
For an hour a day, I’m in another world, and when I come back to this manic lockdown rat race, I can breathe again.
For me, writing = sanity, and I just wish I could be a little more sane, a little more often.
But it is what it is. So I take what I can get, and hope that one day soon, the world itself will be sane again.
To my writer friends – what does writing do for your mental health?