Walking and chewing gum.
A short note on Sunday Sabotage, the potential of Mondays and tomorrow's meetup reminder!
This may come as a surprise from someone who boasts their card-carrying membership to the Multi-Passionate Club, but I have a very hard time doing two things at once. And perhaps you’re thinking, “Well duh, haven’t you learned from that study/read that book/listened to that podcast?” I would answer with an enthusiastic, “Yes. I have.” And yet I still sit down on Sunday evening with a pen and paper planner and proceed to list my intentions to pick up all the threads left dangling from the week before, and all of the varying and disparate creative jobs I do get their rightful bullet entry on the same day. God bless Mondays. I even think through strategies on how I can pull this off: Bring journal out to sewing studio so that I can write when the urge hits; keep stitching project in lap when editing photos; keep Canva open while writing to work on marketing material when I get stuck in a sentence; for God’s sake, don’t scroll.
I am a terrible multi-passionate. I wish I had better news. I wish I was the kind of creative who had a spreadsheet with each day blocked and color-coded for one and only one area of focus, like Monday’s for writing, Tuesday and Wednesday for sewing, Thursday and Friday for photography and marketing. Just typing that out gave me prickles of satisfaction. I promise I’ve tried this. The last spreadsheet I created is dated 2022, now languishing somewhere in my Google drive, and has a week’s worth of engagement which is as far as I ever get before eventually defaulting back to my old ways.
I also don’t seamlessly move from thing to thing, like my Monday list would suggest. In reality, I get consumed by one of the jobs in my creative dossier and I have to pry myself away when another one needs my attention. For instance, when I started writing for this Substack, I wouldn’t walk into my sewing studio for weeks at a time. Currently, as I’m working towards Spring markets and a fashion show, aside from jotting a few things down in my journal for future writing, I’ve hardly been writing. I’m certain this quandary of “what will I neglect today?” isn’t foreign to anyone who wears multiple creative hats but knowing this doesn’t keep me from trying to make it all happen in a day. It’s Monday’s potential that makes me love Mondays.
I’ve always loved Mondays but before I quit drinking, it wasn’t for Monday’s potential but for the lack of it. Monday was a direct response to Sunday Funday, which was the day in which I’d earned the right to entirely check out. This pattern I’d carried over from the decades I worked in restaurants, where I’d pull back-to-back shifts starting Thursday, ending with Sunday brunch and to reward myself for all of my hard work, I was drunk by 3pm. Long after my last bar shift, I indulged the same practice but now, I was rewarding myself for having Mommed so hard Saturday, not to mention all of the other days that ended in Y and even though I was often still in physical proximity of my family, don’t ask me to be THERE there. I would start early and drink all day and that’s what everyone got for having expectations of me.
What I really needed, even before parenting, was support. Instead, I’d work and martyr myself into a brick wall so that I could justify a full day in bed. Having never had a typical corporate 9-5, I’ve never related to the “Sunday Scaries”, a term used for when anxiety starts to rev up in anticipation of the work week. Mine was more of a “Sunday Sabotage”, but I could never call it out for what it was while I was in it. I was leaning into my subversiveness. Instead of folding into the herd, I was special. But really, I was someone who never had healthy parenting or real self-care modeled for me.
Despite the tension between expectations and reality, I still love Mondays. That I eagerly get to choose where I’ll creatively spend my juicy Monday energy instead of the non-choice of adherence to a couch by the soppy glue of a hangover is not lost on me. I can reframe any negative patterns into a story that I can live with so perhaps there is a better way to do Mondays, but at least I’m no longer polishing that other turd.
For this month’s meetup, I’ve decided to keep following my curiosity. So far, meetups have been an exclusive perk for paid subscribers, but I wanted to see what it would be like to open the door to everyone!
March’s meetup is happening on Tuesday, Mar. 26th at 10am CST. It is open to all subscribers. And while we’re at it, let me know if you have a topic you would like to cover. Comments are also open. So far, we’ve talked about the Enneagram and recovery. Is there something related to that you’d like to go deeper on? I’d love to hear. We’ll be back to regular programming in April, so consider an upgrade to one of the paid options if you’d like to have more IRL community.
Let me know if you can make it!
Didn’t love today’s essay? Try this one!