There are days in which nothing special happens; you go about your daily business quietly and unassumedly, doing pretty much everything you thought you would, and there are few surprises to knock you off your stride. It’s a pleasant, if understandably dull, experience. And then, there are days like Monday.
To be clear: nothing bad happened on Monday. No-one is hurt, no-one unhappy; nonetheless, the two unexpected things that happened on that day — neither of which I can go into detail about here for frustrating reasons of respecting others’ privacy and not doing something dumb with regards to something work-related, respectively — were enough when combined to remind me that, really, sometimes all it takes is the smallest thing(s) to unbalance your thinking.
This isn’t necessarily a bad experience. The work-related thing was a phone call that wasn’t what I’d anticipated, but looking back from the safety of a couple days later, I think it all went fine, maybe even well. I can even see moments I feel as if I could feel proud of, even if I can remember at the time being all too aware of how anxious I felt being blindsided the way I was: it was, I suspect, a victory of sorts despite that, but my head was spinning for hours afterwards, as if I’d been jumped from behind and was recovering slowly.
It was in that mindset where the second surprise — news from my ex — appeared, and that update just felt literally surreal; so at odds from my lived experience and what I thought was fact that it was at once maddening and funny, something that (not for the first time) recast our shared past in new light and made me doubt my memory somewhat.
Combined, the two events felt like a one-two punch that left me unsteady and spending all of Tuesday expecting a further shoe to drop. (It didn’t, thankfully, but there’s always more shoes out there.) That, I think, was the worst thing about Monday — just how anxious it left me about the possibility of the unexpected moving forward.