It’s Sunday night, about 8:40 pm, and I am facing a 4 am alarm. It’s a familiar dread – leaving the unscheduled time behind, returning to the early morning rising and a workload that never really feels done. Dread mixes with guilt, knowing I didn’t do most of the things I had hoped to accomplish during the short weekend/holiday break.
And yet, rather than prepare for bed (and meet my “get 7.5 hours of sleep” goal), I’m sitting down to write a blog post.
Perhaps writing is my way of procrastinating further rather than going to bed when I know I should. Perhaps writing is just checking something off my list, since I’d made writing and posting a blog entry one task due today. Or perhaps writing this entry is getting off my ass and moving toward something really important to me – and perhaps important to you, too.
When I was in the classroom, I would feel enormous guilt and dread both – guilt that I didn’t finish all the grading and cleaning and organizing and planning and self-care and exercise and socializing I wanted. I dreaded going back knowing I hadn’t finished my work, that I wasn’t going to get the sleep I needed, that more work was coming, and that perhaps I didn’t actually know what I was doing anyway. Some kids weren’t thriving in my classes. Some were, but some weren’t. I just couldn’t figure out how to engage and raise them all.
For 14 years I experienced this Sunday blues (except for summers, I know) – and in many ways it propelled me to learn and improve as an educator. No longer in the classroom, I don’t feel it nearly as strongly, although I do still feel it. But I wonder: why have the dread and guilt at all? What could possibly be the point of feeling this way? And don’t we have the power to change it?
I admit, I spent much of the past 4 days thinking about writing a blog entry and arguing about the what and why. Who would want to read it? What do I have to share that others aren’t already sharing? This is an old argument. I was creating my own form of dread – at either sharing (and not being read) or sharing and sounding stupid (and hoping no one would read it).
Yet I also spent the past 4 days consuming other people’s writing from many different fronts – writing I was glad they’d written. So here I am.
One bit of media I consumed was a Headspace video posted on Instagram – the “Sunday Scaries”. In it, Andy Puddycomb recommends looking back at the week behind us and considering what was good. We tend to think of the negative (our natural negativity bias), and he reminds us to think of the positive that has been instead. We select something really good that happened in the past week, savor it, and feel how we can carry that emotion and intention forward.
I did do some things this past week – I cleaned out my freezer, spent an amazing evening with friends on NYE, watched Little Women with my 9-year-old daughter (who promptly came home to start writing her own series of novels!), among other bright moments. I also learned more about self-compassion and finished a whole magazine from cover to cover (Mindful’s Self-Compassion issue). I started a reset menu of superfood smoothies and plant-based salads for the week – all prepped and ready to go. Sounds like a pretty good week to me.
Taking time to count our abundance, our blessings, seeing the good in our life – this will help us deal with the Sunday blues. In the meantime, I intend to write what I’m learning about thinking, about intentions and compassion and parenting, maybe helping someone else thinking about these topics too.
I have 2 “one-words” for 2020: “clarity” and “evolve.” More to come!
