It's the weekend!

I woke up yesterday morning and gradually realised what day it was. Saturday. ‘Yay, it’s the weekend!’ I thought. Which may not seem so unusual except for the fact that I’m off work with a chronic illness and thus every day of the week could potentially be the weekend for me. But I work hard to have a structure and routine in my life despite this. As a teenager I hated the word ‘routine’ – it was too close to words like ‘duty’ and ‘curriculum’ that suggested a whole lot of things I ought to be doing and didn’t want to. It suggested a world of adult responsibility that I wasn’t overly keen to be part of. But coping with my first episode of major depression in my twenties I found that ‘routine’ and ‘schedule’ were words I could grow to love. In fact they might even prove the saving of me.

It started with an activity schedule – an hour by hour list of what I intended to do each day. That helped me get through each day and get better. Then in my thirties I realised that if I incorporated all the techniques I’d learned to reduce depression and build happiness into a daily and weekly routine I was much more likely to use them. Let’s face it – however effective a technique is, it’s not going to be much help if it’s not used. Building things into my routine meant that after a few weeks I started to do them automatically and they became habits. That was the start of happiness becoming my default position.

So these days I try to keep to my normal routine – four work days, Wednesdays off so I never have more than two work days in a row, and weekends to socialise. This week I’ve been working hard to do two hours of writing each morning, then two hours of admin each afternoon, on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. If I can do this it means I can go back to my normal working week of 16 hours. Some days ‘morning’ has ended at 2pm and ‘afternoon’ at 7pm, but most days I achieved my goal. Hence my joy that the weekend is here – I was exhausted. Yesterday I could do what I wanted without a nagging little voice reminding me of things I should do that I’d rather forget. Bliss!