Today is Friday. For those working the daily 8 – 5 office grind, Friday is the best day of the week. And, as a culture, we’ve apparently come to value Fridays more than Sundays, a bona fide day off. The proof of this emotional ranking lies in this notion: the Sunday scaries.
My first brush with this particular turn of phrase occurred, of all places, on a dating app. Among my demographic, Hinge is one of the more popular options for the roller coaster ride of online dating. And in its current incarnation, Hinge includes premade captions for user’s painfully critiqued photos. And one of the captions reads something like this: “Me fighting the Sunday scaries.”
I’d never heard the phrase before, but I immediately knew what it meant. I’d been experiencing it since elementary school. Back then, the Sunday scaries weren’t so much a sense of dread. It was a sense of loss, a loss for the potentiality of the weekend, of the power to explore the world’s expansiveness.
It wasn’t until high school that the scaries became menacing. By then I had concrete things to dread: clique status, failing grades, detentions, and mindless bullying. But I was never fully in throes on Sunday evenings. I was anxious about the week’s upcoming problems for sure, but I could still breathe. I could still get up and make my way to school.
Fast forward many years, and I’m a flabby middle aged knowledge worker comfortably pressing the keys from home on a flex schedule. The Sunday scaries are nearly nonexistent these days. The core of my comfort, I imagine, comes from the fact that I work from home. I’m alone at home with my cats, jamming to noise rap as I solve obtuse logic problems. I couldn’t be nearer to my comfort zone.
So, the Sunday scaries are now the Sunday chill. Nothing to worry about on Sunday evenings—just more time to chillax with my furry friends and while away the time.
Perhaps I’ve simply outgrown the scaries. Or better yet, perhaps I just got lucky: fate just happened to deliver my optimal work environment to my doorstep. And from there the scaries naturally faded away.
But one thing hasn’t changed since childhood and that’s the feeling of Friday evenings. Hope is full of potential joy on Friday evenings. There’s a whole world to explore, a whole freedom to be known.
So for now let’s forget about the Sunday scaries and relish in Friday freedom.
Happy Friday!