Today is my one day off all week. It is nearly noon. What have I managed to do? Almost nothing. I got home late last night after walking around the cute Brooklyn neighborhood where I work with Iya, one of my friends from college. I showered, hung up the pile of damp laundry I’d put on my arm chair before I left, and immediately fell asleep.

Somehow, I woke up naturally before 7:30am (when my alarm was set). When this happened, I should have immediately jumped out of bed and raced to get my to do list done. Instead, I laid around in bed for another half hour or so. Once I finally did get out of bed, I ended up flipping through the new vegan cookbooks I ordered on Amazon (I know, I’m a sellout) and crying because one of the chefs’ childhood cooking origin stories involved a dying family member.

In my defense, I woke up to a violent thunderstorm complete with lightning that wasn’t even a full ‘one one thousand’ apart from the thunder. When there’s a thunderstorm, it feels sacreligious to do anything other than sit and read or write or draw. That’s where the cookbooks came in.

As the thunderstorm ended, I entertained vivid fantasies of all the things I might accomplish today. I could go to H Mart and get all of the pantry staples the Korean cookbook told me I needed. I could go to a cute coffee shop (one I don’t work at) and get a lot of writing done, maybe finally file my taxes which are more than five months over due. I could call my doctor’s office and finally set up appointments to deal with the myriad of things that are wrong with me. I could actually apply for some fucking jobs.

I haven’t done any of those things yet (except the writing, because this is technically writing) and I find it unlikely that I will. When the thunderstorm ended, I took a break from reading and did all of the dishes in the sink regardless of if they belonged to me or my roommates. I even scooped out all of the disgusting slop left over at the bottom of the sink with my bare hands and put it in the compost bag I keep in the freezer. Pretty commendable stuff, I think.

I also made myself two sandwhiches. The process was interrupted by a brief trip to the store with my roommate, A, because she needed bananas and she convinced me it was better to go with her to buy some fake meat from the grocery store than to eat a sad sandwhich with only raw vegetables on it. It turned out to be a fortiuitous decison because the vegan lunch meat, vegan cream cheese, and vegan cheese slices were all on sale.

My sandwhiches were delicious. They each had three slices of black pepper chicken flavored fake lunchmeat folded in half, overripe sliced tomato, sliced avocado, and a handful of arugula squished down. The bread was seeded, whole grain bread from Trader Joe’s, and I slathered each slice with a thick coat of vegan mayonaise. Liss and I talked about the perils of trying to force yourself to date someone you’re not attracted to while she ate her oatmeal (with bananas, of course) and I ate my sandwhiches.

Now, I’m writing this and, although this does give me a bolstering feeling of accomplishment, it isn’t enough for me to feel productive. I wouldn’t trade Liss’s conversation or my sandwhich for an hour spent on job applications, but I still can’t shake the feeling of existential dread that creeps up on me every time I have a day off.

On a normal work day, I wake up at 4:30am or 5:00am depending on how motivated I am to have some semblance of a morning routine and I work until around 12:30pm. By this time every other day except Thursdays (today) I have already completed a full day’s work. Anything I do after is just a bonus. Pulling shots and pouring milky white hearts into lattes isn’t exactly my life’s passion, but at least I’m making money.

Sitting around at home doing nothing but letting waves of anxiety wash over me doesn’t pay the bills and it certainly doesn’t do anything to get rid of my crippling student loan debt.

There was a time that I had the energy and joie de vivre to keep a strict schedule. I used to wake up extra early to do yoga, meditate, make breakfast, and indulge in a multi-step skin care routine all before leaving for work at 5:30am. I used to write in my journal every single night and write out an extensive to do list for the next day. Now, it’s all I can do to drag myself to work when I need to and arrange just enough social outings to maintain my friendships.

Maybe this year has just been too much for me. Over the course of three wishy-washy months, my ex ‘best friend’ (I don’t really believe in labeling friendships, but she used to call herself that, so there it is)/roommate S, slowly decided to throw our friendship away and then move in with the shitty boyfriend who (I think) cheated on her. I was sexually assaulted by an asshole named Josh (yes, that’s his real name; he’s lucky I don’t include his last name as well). My good friend Ash is moving out of the city at the end of the summer. I am feeling crazier by the second. Maybe I’m just depressed.

The productivity cult would say I just need to buck up, take a cold shower in the morning, and stop masturbating. I’ve tried both of those things and the problem is that I really hate cold showers and I really love masturbating. None of those gimmicky self-help strategies ever stick anyways.

Honestly, I think the real solution is this blog. So much of life has trained me to think that the little things in life don’t matter. My mom’s inability to sit down and watch a movie without needing to work on her computer or crochet something or organize a cabinet. YouTube’s productivity gurus explaining how to optimize every single second of your life. No amount of multitasking and optimizing is going to save me from being miserable.

With this blog, I’m hoping that I can make all of the little things matter again. I can write about my sandwich and the nice conversation I had with my roommate and instead of just letting those things disappear after they happen, I can give them to the internet. There’s still something unhealthy in the idea that, in order for me to be at peace with the ‘non-productive’ things I do, I need to turn them into some kind of product. However, I think that, of all the ways that you can commodify your life (Instagram posts, TikToks, etc.), an anonymous blog post is the least of the evils. You can’t see me and you don’t know who I am, so there’s no point in faking anything. All I really want is to feel like the little things I do are important. If this is how I make that happen, so be it.

Of course, this blog isn’t going to magically give me a career and help me find the love of my life (enemies to lovers slow burn preferred), so I still have to work on some more practical strategies. I’m not going to stop masturbating anytime soon, but I am going to try a few other strategies that I think might help me not be such a depressed lump all the time.

Here are the strategies:

1. Stop bringing my phone to bed and looking at it right before I sleep. It’s honestly embarrassing that I still do this. I am not a teenager any more.
2. Read a book in bed before I go to sleep since I am no longer allowed to look at my phone.
3. Journal and make a to do list before I get in bed. Journaling helps me get all of the garbage out of my brain and I have a way, way higher chance of doing something the next day if I explicitly write down that I want to do it the night before. If I try to do this while I am in bed, I will just fall asleep.
4. Set a timer for tasks, especially the ones I don’t want to do. I think what usually makes me not do shit is my concept of how long it’s going to take me. Often, once I start a task (like applying for jobs) I’ll get sucked into it and end up going for like five hours. That makes me feel like spending that amount of time on it is inevitable. If I set a timer and promise myself I’ll stop when the timer goes off, I won’t feel like
5. Schedule specific times where I am just allowed to enjoy things regardless of how productive they are. Maybe I shouldn’t have to schedule in enjoyment, but scheduled enjoyment is better than no enjoyment.
6. Try to stop being so goddamn hard on myself all the time

So, there’s my list. I’ll do a part two at some point to let everyone know how it’s going. I’m actually writing this last paragraph on Friday morning because I got sidetracked last night by a phone call from Ash. She told me to basically chill the fuck out and think about going home for a little while. I’ll consider it.

Thanks for reading.

XX Scarlett