Man, did I used to get the Sunday Blues bad. Do you know the
Sunday Blues? That awful feeling that starts to descend Sunday, around five o’clock,
the sense that the weekend is gone and time is just going and
what am I doing and tomorrow will be back to the same sea of email and
torture of meetings and on and on and on and on and on. I used to put my phone
into airplane mode on Sundays and had to ask my parents not to make it our
weekly check-in night—I needed all my energy to hunker down and pretend to be
nowhere so as not to have to acknowledge where I was or where, in just a few
short hours, I was going to have to be. I read a lot of books on Sunday nights.
The Sunday Blues are pretty much a thing of the past for me,
and boy howdy is that nice. I don’t think I had the SBs because I hated my job—I
have had the SBs pretty much every Sunday I can remember—but rather because
Sunday evenings were a marker: they marked the end of one week and the
beginning of the next and I am pretty sure that crossing that line was what got
me down. One week gone, another week coming, and everything exactly the same. Or
rather, it wasn’t that each week was exactly the same, it was more like I was
staring down a barrel of the same kind of weeks over and over again and
I just—I just didn’t want to do that.
Now, I have a long history of taking entirely too much time
to realize the glaringly obvious, so apologies in advance for any
eye-rolling-related headaches I induce here, as, yes, I’m 42 and finally
figuring out that if I don’t want to do something…as long as I can, maybe I
shouldn’t do it. The NY Times has recently been full of articles about how to
avoid burn out, and as much as I enjoy hate-reading them (the privilege they
assume!), the underlying message is usually the same, something along the lines
of listen to yourself.
I happen to live in a place where it is very easy to get a
reminder of how privileged a person must be to be able to take this advice,
which I’d argue is one reason I’ve had trouble doing so. Today, on my way to
get my eyebrows threaded, I walked by a new addition to the street people in my
neighborhood. I’ve seen her around for past couple of weeks, and frankly I’m
surprised she’s still here, as her m.o. is to sit in the middle of the
sidewalk, dressed in filthy sweatpants, a t-shirt, and socks, and rock back and
forth shouting gibberish while crying and holding her hands up in supplication.
Lest you think that description sounds awful, it is even worse in real life,
especially when you factor in all the people stepping around her—couples
holding hands, people jogging or on their way to the gym, groups in matching
t-shirts on their way to see “Mean Girls” around the corner, all pretending to
be completely unaware of this dirty, ragged woman, crying and yelling, sitting
on the ground in the middle of the sidewalk on 8th Avenue, usually
right in front of the Taco Bell.
My uncle and I recently had an email exchange about how difficult
it is to reconcile that some of us are born into enormous privilege and others
are simply not. I know there are many, many shades of gray here, but for the
most part I think it is safe to say that generally speaking, where and to whom
you are born—or “thrown,” as Heidegger would say—has a LOT to do with the kind
of choices you end up having. Heidegger’s thing was that you had to accept
responsibility for those circumstances as part of the process of becoming an “authentic”
human being, which sounds great as long as you don’t think too hard about the
people who simply cannot do so. It’s not always popular to say that not
everyone has the same opportunities, but I firmly believe that to be true, and
in some terrible ways I am glad to live in a place where I come in to contact
with such a wiiiiiiiiiiiide range of people, some of whom probably read the
anti-burn-out articles while nodding along, some of who probably can’t read,
and a bunch more on either side of those folks and in the middle.
“Prioritize self-care” is a favorite of the anti-burn-out
articles. Presumably that might include treating oneself to a manicure, but
that only works if you’re able to put your self-care ahead of the knowledge you
might/should have of the women working in that salon—where they come from, what
their lives are like, the options they have to choose from. “Learn to delegate”
is another, though of course that implies having people to delegate to, or, at
home, a support system of people to help out. It could also mean knowingly
asking a subordinate to stay late to finish a project that might technically be
his job, but how do you feel about doing so when you know you make 5x his
salary and he’s facing a 90 minute commute back to somewhere in Queens while
you’re on your way to the theater? (Imagine, too, that you are secure in the
knowledge that this (imaginary!) person is highly unlikely to ever move up in
the organization—does that make your decision any better or any worse if you
can’t pretend the project will help his career?)
Spoiler: I don’t have any answers to these problems, but I
have long been aware of them and, she said with heavy irony, uncomfortable that
these great disparities exist. Many other people are, too, and many of them are
doing much more than I to try to address the issues, but from where I sit and on
the streets I walk, this just doesn’t seem at all like a solvable problem.
For the past eight months I’ve been living in a fantasy
world: a world in which I can do pretty much whatever I want, whenever I want
to (I mean, kind of). This fantasy came with a price tag, of course—for me, it
was more than 20 years of working and saving and the great good fortune to have
neither debts nor major financial obligations, and like any good fantasy this one
won’t last forever. But it’s a fantasy I’ve gotten to live, and as a result I’ve
traded in the Sunday Blues for something else: I haven’t been able to put a
name to it, but it manifests itself in a constant awareness. Awareness
that being alive is just a temporary situation, and that somehow I got really
fucking lucky and am in the particular situation I’m in. I can step out my door
or read the paper and learn about so so so many others who are not, but—and this
is the hard part—their lack of options doesn’t mean I have to curtail mine. In
fact, the opposite: they almost require me to do what I can to take advantage
of the advantages I have been given. As far as I know, we only get one shot at
this thing, and that suggests that every one of us who is able to should do
their very best to make the most out of it, whatever that looks like. I think
the Sunday Blues are gone because I’m choosing that path, and while I am
constantly reminded of the privilege so foundational to that choice, I’m also making
that choice. (I’m also—well, I’ve also just erased a whole bunch of words about
what I am or am trying to do to help some of the people who didn’t get the gift
I did at birth, but that’s a self-serving thing to do and while I’m
self-serving enough to leave a note about, I cannot bring myself to pretend the
details of it matter.)
Since this is my fantasy world, in which I can do what I
choose instead of what others want or expect or require, I’m writing my own anti-burn-out
essay, one specific just to me (how should I presume to know what advice you
need?). In my fantasy world, I think about how I can do nice things for other
people, as long as those nice things are things I want to do, which is a nice
little way of squishing in self-care. Would you like poorly sewn embroidered sachets? You’ve
got my number!
May I come over and cook dinner in your kitchen, ideally while
you show me where things are and we drink wine? As long as you’re cool with
vegetarian fare that is probably heavy on cheese, dial me up! Do you want to tell
me about what’s going on at work and then get a little tough-love feedback
and/or practical advice and encouragement? If I know anything about your
job/your industry/you, then I am yours for the asking.
“Learn to delegate”—this one, for me, is taking the form of not
trying to be responsible for everything in the world. A wise man once gave me
instruction as to the difference between my sphere of influence and my sphere
of concern: at the time, my sphere of concern was much greater than my sphere
of influence and in terms of a work situation that just makes a person (me) an
obnoxious jerk who is paying attention to and angry about everyone else’s job
performance, perhaps even to the neglect of her own. As far as the world goes,
I think it’s still worthwhile to have the biggest sphere of concern one can,
but I’m trying to spend most of my time focused on what I can do in my sphere
of influence: it might not be much, in the grand scheme of things, but it’s
what I can. There are others who are doing what they can, too, and maybe there’s
another fantasy world in which all those efforts come together and everything
changes (for the better!), but even if that won’t ever happen it doesn’t
mean I should stop doing the things I can.
Another favorite of these well-intentioned articles is “listen
to your body,” so those of us with time and the means to do so can take up
meditation or go gluten-free or decide we need to scale down our time on email
or at the office, you know, for the sake of our health. The other day, I took a
long motorcycle ride with my best riding pal and we were screaming through one
of those perfect horseshoe curves along the Pepacton Reservoir, at a rate of
speed I will not disclose because of the Fifth Amendment, when I had one of those
moments: time slowed down completely and I was completely aware of floating,
literally, in space—I was poised in a nanosecond between laying the bike down and
keeping it up and I had the time to feel myself deliberately push harder
on the outside peg and feel myself will my throttle hand down just a
little, all that it would take to keep the bike up, but still exactly what my
brain was shrieking at me not to do because it felt like I was going too fast,
leaned over too much, and in the immeasurable time I spent there electricity
was running through my entire body, white cold hot, and I didn’t have any
emotions at all, just a complete and total awareness of being right between two
places, two choices, two decisions. In a moment like that, slowing down feels
like the safe thing to do, but if you can’t pick the bike up to straighten out,
you can’t slow down or the bike will go down. The way to get through is to do
the thing that you know intellectually you have to do, but which is also
terrifying: you have to stay leaned over, adjust your weight as best you can,
and keep the speed on so that you live the laws of physics instead of
trying to defy them.
My fantasy world is a place where the laws of physics still
apply and the living is in my body experiencing them. I thought about this in a
different context the other day: I was on my way to Brooklyn about 9:30 in the
morning, and the B train was pretty much empty as we left Grand Street and
headed over the Manhattan Bridge. A pleasant-looking man had sat down adjacent
to me so I had a front-row seat, where I was drinking an iced coffee and
reading The New Yorker, to watch him first sit like a normal person and then
slowly, gradually drawing his feet up, then suddenly all at once, fall over and
pass out. I don’t presume to know what caused him to succumb to the laws of
physics that Wednesday morning, and I did make sure his chest was rising and
falling until I had to get off at DeKalb, thought if you know the NYC subway
system that meant I watched a man keel over right in front of me and made sure
he was still alive for about 4 minutes before I left that train, walked away,
and went on with my day.
If I believe Heidegger, who I studied so intensely at 19, we’re
all responsible for ourselves and we’re alone in making choices about our
lives. When I look around, at the medium age of almost-43, I’m not so sure I
agree. What I’ve been trying to learn in the interim is how to balance these
views with compassion, with kindness, and listening to my brain as much as my
body: you can’t, it says, you must, it says, and somewhere in
between is I will. I wish that all of us could get to decide the words
that follow.
As for the woman in front of the Taco Bell? I don’t know
what to do or say about her. This is where I surrender her to the universe and hope
that how I vote and the causes I support will mean somehow she can get to a
place where she feels safe and stops crying and someone helps her with clean
clothes. Failing that—and I am all too aware that wish will likely not come
true—I hope that all of us walking around her, metaphorically and literally,
see her there and remember her and the shared humanity that pulses the life through
all our veins. What we do with that life’s blood is up to each of us and it’s
fair to say that prioritizing self-care and learning to delegate and listening
to our bodies isn’t necessarily bad advice, it’s just best taken with a wide interpretation
of what’s possible and a drop or more of the salty tears of compassion.
Finally, I’ve read and re-read this and I know it has blind
spots I don't see and flaws I can’t find: I hope you will let me know where and
how you see holes or disagree: I’m still looking, I’m still learning, and I know I can't do that all on my own.
x
♥️🙏🏻❤️
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