Sunday Scaries

By Chelyse Prevost
Web Content Contributor 

It’s 3:53 a.m. on Monday morning. You’ve haven’t fallen asleep yet and you’ve tried just about everything. You’ve scrolled through social media to no end, watched a boring movie, even meditated, yet still… nothing. You can’t fathom why you have so much on your mind.

You might’ve even had an easy day — did some laundry, checked your emails, cooked an honest meal – and still, something’s keeping you up. Because why else would you be so alert at 4 a.m. when you’ve been relaxed all day?

Are you forgetting something? You must be forgetting something. There’s always something. Don’t you have a thing tomorrow? You definitely have a thing tomorrow. If not, why else would it feel like anxiety is swallowing you whole?

It’s all because of the Sunday Scaries, that’s why. We’ve been hard-wired since we were kids, weekends are weekends and Monday is like leaving your favorite amusement park on the last day of summer.

Only now, we’re adults and weekends aren’t even weekends anymore. Weekends behave much more like week-beginnings, especially as a college student. Even if you’re lucky enough to not have to work on the weekends, adulthood comes with the incessant urge to be productive and proactive.  

So much so, that sometimes not pacing yourself backfires, and if you’re anything like me, it causes you to stall because you’re overwhelmed. Naturally, we can overload and it’s no wonder why we are all running away from our crap. We put the nation in procrastination.

It was exactly 3:53 a.m. when I realized why I couldn’t sleep. I tried to soak in the weekend and feed into the serenity that Sundays used to give me to the point of doing the bare minimum with the bare-minimum tasks I decided to commit to.

 I never folded my laundry, ignored many of my emails and never finished cleaning up from dinner. But what was at the very top of this to-maybe-do list, salient and untouched, was writing this very article.

In fact, on Friday, fairies told me I had time to think of something to write, so I figured I didn’t have much to worry about. Then when Saturday came, I looked at my planner to see next week’s damage.

 At the peak of the weekend, I didn’t feel like I should give in to the stress yet, so I gave into Saturday “staries” instead. I woke up Sunday, cooked, cleaned, and managed to do just about anything to deflect the one thing I actually needed to do.

Who knew distracting yourself with low-priority tasks would only reinforce procrastination? Who knew my Sunday scaries would manifest itself into more meta-thinking about Sunday scaries?

If you came here for answers, I truly apologize because I just have questions. How can we be so aware of procrastination and still fall into its scheme? Are Sunday scaries a symptom of being hypersensitive to our obligations (financial, social, moral, etc.)? Do they stop?

More importantly, will procrastination always be a thing? Something has to give, right?

If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that time is and always will be of the essence. No one can blame, shame, or validify how you conceptualize your time. Meaning that if you treat everything in life like a chore, it will absolutely be one.

Because we have the agency to be up to par with our expectations, self-inflicted or not, we have to authorize our own leisure and feel-goods accordingly. If the novelty of youth — supposedly — lies in the amount of time we have, perhaps we have time to figure this out after all.

Featured image by Amanda McDowell.