“How’s your week been?” the message asked, entirely innocuously and genuinely; I was chatting to a friend on the work Slack and we’d been commiserating about something that had utterly failed to come together for reasons outside everyone’s control, and they asked the question. My first thought was to say, similarly genuinely, that I had no idea.
It’s become a running joke with friends to talk about how the way in which everything feels low key overwhelming at any given point these days; Jeff and I will check up on each other weekly and our calls are variations on, “Man, this week was a lot,” only for the other one to say something along the lines of, “Yeah, and wait until you hear about my week.” It’s not that we’re trying to outdo each other, as much as it feels as if things are just constantly, perpetually in flux and complicated. As the Scott Pilgrim blurb almost said, almost 20 years ago, “things just keep happening.”
How has the week been? It’s been full, no matter what week you’re aksing about. It’s had questions I’ve struggled to answer (increasingly so, since getting the new job), and it’s left me unable to take care of everything I needed to take care of — I now have a notebook where I made lists of all of these things that need to get done the next day and there’s at least one thing left off by the end of the week because who has the time — and it’s likely left me dizzy and dazed at the end of each workday while I struggle to get my head around everything… and, the strangest thing is, I think I might like it?
I know that’s counterintuitive and makes no sense. There’s something about the pace of it that feels curiously right, though, and almost enjoyable. Like something I’m learning, slowly but surely, to get on top of and master. There’s something about these weeks lately that I feel as if they’re teaching me some kind of skill that I can’t name, but want to understand and take advantage of. I can’t really explain what that means beyond that just yet, but that also feels part of the learning curve.
I get to the end of the week and feel exhausted. But it also feels like I’m getting closer to something in the process, whatever that may be. So it’ll do for now, no matter how tiring it is.