Mondays
Retuning from vacation to mayhem
I can’t tell you how many years this has been going on. Ten for me maybe? How many for you?
You had a nice vacation. Two weeks, maybe three, possibly longer. It was a staycation. It was a road trip. You flew to an entirely new destination. You relaxed, you met up with family, you spent time alone. I was in the hammock. Maybe you were, too?
And then we’re all suddenly at that Sunday afternoon moment where we realize (or our wife reminds us) we need to turn on the alarm for Monday morning.
Ick.
I once had a coworker who hated coming back to work so much that he would use sick leave at the end of a vacation to avoid the inevitable return. In his own words, “I hate that coming back to work ruins the end of my vacation.” And so he would extend by a few days to ‘recover’ from the mental assault of that doom-filled Monday morning.
Realistically, I’m just jealous that I didn’t think of that first.
Day one, 400 emails, an inbox so deep you could drown in it. I can’t even tell what’s crucial, what’s just an FYI, what I should focus on first. It’s laughably disorganized, and I’m constantly interrupted by coworkers who want to say hello and ask how my vacation went.
It was great.
I didn’t think about work (much). I didn’t have my computer on. The news wasn’t important, my phone took the backseat, and I remembered how to sleep in (a little). Halfway through this vacation I started planning time off for next year.
More notably, I enjoyed a reset. The important things made themselves obvious, and the other stuff? Well it faded into the background. And that’s the whole point of taking time off anyway. We all need to be reminded that life is short, that playtime is important, and that work should support our goals, not hinder them.
I’m not entirely unrealistic. I know how the world works, how we all need jobs to support the things we care about in life. I’m no exception to that. But I also know how hard it can be to take time for ourselves when we are in the midst of all that stress. Stepping away is hard, and sometimes we have to work harder just to buy some freedom for a week or two.
If you’re at work right now, you have my permission to step away from the desk (or service counter or vehicle or whatever), take a few deep breaths, walk somewhere, look at the outside world, play a game on your phone, close your eyes, do nothing, and take that reset right here and now.
For those of you going on vacation soon, don’t let that Monday back at work drag you down. It’s a reminder that you still know how to have fun, how to relax, how to move in ways that bring you joy. And all those emails in your inbox are just other people feeling envious that you took time off to soothe your soul. So let the campfire smell linger in your favorite shirt, leave the box of datders1 out on the counter for a s’mores snack, and drag your laptop out to the hammock on a sunny afternoon. If you haven’t had a vacation yet, get planning!
Your trans friend,
Robin
Growing up, I heard many stories about my big brother who (as a small child) could not pronounce ‘graham crackers,’ and renamed them ‘datders.’ The name has stuck. It’s efficient. Much easier to write on a grocery list.
Capitalism truly is the worst!
I learned the trick of booking an extra full day off post-returning from holiday when I lived in the UK. Because I lived in the UK, I also had an abundance of holiday days (28 a year not counting bank holidays) because the culture is so different to North America, so it wasn't difficult to take that extra day and to take at least two, if not three, breaks a year.