Monday mornings feel like waking up in the aftermath of something unspeakable. The alarm goes off—not like a gentle chime, but more like a siren dragging you out of some place deeper than sleep. You don’t wake up so much as surface, disoriented, the bed a kind of shipwreck you were clinging to all night. The sheets are twisted like torn sails. Your body, waterlogged with dreams and dread, doesn't move. Not yet.
It’s not just fatigue. There’s a kind of existential drag, as if the very structure of the week is built to resist your being. You stare at the ceiling like it might offer a reason to rise. None comes. The world beyond the blanket is already demanding something from you—your time, your answers, your alignment with a schedule you didn’t invent but are somehow bound to. The idea that Monday is a “fresh start” feels like a corporate myth. Nothing about it is fresh. What you feel is continuity—the heavy kind. Everything you didn’t finish last week is still there, waiting, as if time only paused long enough to mock you.
You check your phone. Notifications stack like unopened letters from a life you barely recognize. Meetings, headlines, reminders. The world has resumed its spin and you’re expected to catch up. It’s strange—how the moment you open your eyes, the game begins again, and all your private questions are buried under the urgency of participation. No one really asks if you’re ready. They just expect you to be.
There’s something absurd about the way we treat time—as if weeks are neat boxes you can fill, tick off, and call progress. But Monday doesn’t feel like movement. It feels like rerun. You’re not starting anything. You’re looping. The same calendar. The same existential commute. It’s like being caught in a maze where every path leads back to inbox zero.
And yet you get up. Not because you're motivated, but because inertia has a shape. It becomes habit. Muscle memory. You brush your teeth while staring into a mirror that refuses to answer the deeper questions. You pour coffee as a ritual, not a choice. The body performs its role while the mind trails behind, asking whether any of this has meaning. You wonder how much of what you do is voluntary, how much is performance.
There’s a moment—brief, almost silent—when you sit at the edge of the bed, and everything pauses. The room is quiet but loaded. Not with inspiration, but with the realization that this might be it. This repetition. This maintenance of self. You don’t hate it exactly. But you can’t pretend it’s fulfilling either.
Getting out of bed is less about readiness and more about surrender. You’re not conquering the day. You’re conceding to it. And in that concession, something honest lives. The understanding that certainty is a myth, and control is borrowed. The moment you stand up, you agree to participate in a world built on forward motion—even if you’re not sure where it’s going.
That’s the strange dignity of Monday. It strips you down to the raw essentials: breath, weight, movement, doubt. It doesn’t ask for joy or enthusiasm. Just presence. Just enough motion to say you haven’t given up. Not yet.
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