November is the start of the year breaking down, in the best ways possible. Sure, there are drawbacks to this time of year — think about how cold it is at all times seemingly, how sluggish it can feel to get up when everything is so dark first thing in the morning, or that nagging feeling in the back of your head that there’s only so much time left before the holidays and/or the end of the year and you’ve got shit you need to do — but at its best, November is when things start to slip and fall apart and the structure of the year begins to unravel just enough to let us breathe a little easier.
Occasionally, I admit, I get exhausted by the fact everything just keeps going: the work week is what it is, and then the weekend happens and that’s just enough time to catch up on everything and prepare for… the work week again. More than once, I’ve told people on Sunday night that I’m lowkey mad that I’ve finally got my head straight after the last week only to have to face up to doing it all over again the very next day; there’s a Sisyphian feel to the whole thing for 10 months out of the year… and then November arrives.
Part of it is because the holidays are around the corner, and that means that we get some time off for Thanksgiving here in the US, and then the Christmas and New Year breaks (or, if you’re me, one long extended break between the two) come along and it’s a glorious chance to step off the roundabout for a period. It’s a chance to decompress a little before the whole thing starts again in the New Year.
For the past couple years, however, I’ve had an additional boost to the system collapsing just a little bit: I’ve been so bad at taking PTO at work that, somewhere around the middle of October, someone has to take me to one side and politely remind me that I need to take a lot of time off in the next two months or else I’ll lose the hours I’ve accrued… and so, this year like last year, I get two solid months of three-day-weekends at the shortest. It feels decadent and indulgent and something I feel no small amount of guilt over, but I can’t deny that it also helps me relax and feel human in a way that I truly appreciate.
Sure, I could always use my PTO during the rest of the year so that I don’t feel so stressed and oppressed in the first place, but if I did that, I wouldn’t have any ability to take so much time off as the year ends and everything gently, wonderfully, unravels and gets slower and easier.
