When Monday Feels Like Drowning
7:15 AM. Subway entrance at the 14th Street station. I’m waiting for the third bus in a row — not any regular morning, Monday morning rush hour. The line behind me is getting longer. Someone’s sighing. Someone else is scrolling harder than I’ve ever seen a thumb scroll. And me? I’m just standing there with my iced coffee sweating through the paper cup, watching the bus pull away without me.
My phone buzzes. Slack notification: “Hey, can you jump on the 8:30 standup early? Boss wants to talk.” I looked at the time. 7:16. The next bus comes in 12 minutes. Then transfer. Then walk. I’d be at my desk by 8:42 at best. Which means I’d be sprinting from the elevator, headphones half-in, blazer half-buttoned, hoping nobody in the 8:30 zoom noticed I was late again.
That’s when the feeling kicked in. Not panic. Something heavier. Like the floor of the subway platform was tilting, just a little, and the air was thicker than it should be. I couldn’t name it. I still can’t name it half the time. But I know it now — the drowning thing. The one that hits before you even start the week.
I texted back “Sure, on the way.” Then I put my phone face-down in my coat pocket. My chest felt tight. My jaw felt tight. I could feel my pulse in my wrist, in my neck, behind my eyes. The subway entrance smelled like wet concrete and someone’s perfume and a bagel cart two blocks away. Everything was too loud and too bright at the same time.
Let me back up. Why was I already wrecked? I’d only been awake for 45 minutes. Where does this even come from?
My mom called me Sunday night. I missed it because I was doomscrolling about nothing. Then I called her back at 11 PM. She picked up sounding half-asleep. “You okay? You sound tired.” I said yeah, just chilling. She said “Chilling what? You have work tomorrow. Why can’t you just go to bed earlier?” And I told her mom I’m a timing artist. She didn’t laugh. She said “This is why you’re always tired on Mondays.”
She’s not wrong. That’s the worst part. I’m not some tragic figure. I’m just a 27-year-old with shit sleep hygiene, an inbox that never closes, a boss who schedules early calls like they’re a personality trait, and a body that doesn’t seem to recover anymore the way it did when I was 22.
But knowing all that? Doesn’t help. The drown still shows up.
The bus came. I got on. Stood the whole way because there were no seats, and the woman next to me had a backpack the size of a toddler taking up the spot next to her. I held the rail with one hand, coffee in the other, and tried to calculate if I’d make the 8:30. 8:42 - 8:30 = 12 minutes late. 12 minutes. That’s a lifetime in tech-time.
Some guy’s elbow went into my ribs getting off. Nobody said sorry. I didn’t say anything back. I just stood there, watching the tunnel lights pass like a freeform screensaver, and let my brain do that thing where it lists every bad thing from the last three months in order:
- Missed my friend’s birthday dinner because of a “quick sync”
- Ate cereal for dinner three times last week
- Haven’t called my sister back in 23 days
- Got a passive-aggressive email from someone whose name I can’t remember
- Forgot to take my vitamin D for so long I forgot I was supposed to take it
- Spent $80 on delivery sushi at 1 AM because nothing else was open and I was starving and tired
None of it is dramatic. None of it is a movie. But stacked up on a Monday morning, on a subway, holding a cold coffee, it becomes a wall. A wall of small slow leaks that turn into a flood on the day you’re already empty.
I got off the bus. Sprinted up the stairs. Made the transfer in 3 minutes flat. Walked fast to the office, headphones already in, my coworker Maya shouting “heyyyy” from across the lobby and me pretending not to hear because I didn’t have the voice yet.
The elevator was slow. I watched the number go from 4 to 5 to 6, and I wanted to throw my phone at the mirrored wall. I didn’t. I just stood there breathing through my nose like a dog trying to stay calm, like I’d learned from some random TikTok about vagus nerve stuff that probably doesn’t work but felt like doing anyway.
9th floor. 8:38 AM. I sat at my desk. Logged in. The standup had already started without me. I unmuted. “Hey, sorry, was on the bus.” My boss did that half-smile, half-frown thing he does, and said “All good, just jumped in. We can sync after.”
After. After means later. After means I’m going to be here later. After means lunch is going to be at my desk again. After means Tuesday is already half-ruined before Monday even ended.
I muted myself. Took off my headphones. Stared at my screen. Slack had 47 unread. Email had 19. Calendar had a gray block from 12 to 1 that said “focus time” that I’d put there on Friday as some hopeful version of me. The version of me before the subway. Before the third bus. Before my mom’s voice in my ear saying “always tired on Mondays.”
Does everyone feel this? Or just me?
I asked my coworker. Quietly, in the kitchen, 11:47 AM. “Hey, do Mondays… like, do they hit you weird?” She looked at me like I’d asked her if water is wet. “Yeah? I take melatonin Sunday night and I still feel wrecked. It’s not even the work, it’s the sense of starting over.”
She gets it. That’s the thing. Most of us get it. Doesn’t make it better, doesn’t make it smaller, but at least I’m not alone in the subway watching buses pass while my chest squeezes like someone stepped on it.
I went back to my desk. Ate a protein bar. Drank water. Did the actual work I’d been paid to do. Hit my afternoon 1:1 on time. Even cracked a joke in a meeting that someone laughed at. From the outside, the day was fine. Better than fine. Productive. Normal.
But inside, the whole time, there was this undertow. Just pulling. Not dramatically. Not like a movie scene with the camera spinning. More like that feeling when you’re swimming in the ocean and the waves keep knocking you back a step every time you try to walk up the sand. You make it five feet. Wave. Three more feet. Wave. You’re tired before you’ve even crossed the beach.
Here’s what I don’t understand. Friday me is fun. Friday me makes plans. Friday me says “let’s go to that new ramen place.” Sunday-night me even feels hopeful sometimes, lying in bed, telling myself tomorrow I’ll wake up early, drink water, do yoga, journal, eat an egg, take a walk before the laptop opens. I picture a whole cinematic reel of a calm Monday morning. Herbal tea. Birds. Wholesome.
But Monday-me? Monday-me is the person I’m hiding from all weekend.
It’s like I’m two people. The one who sets five alarms on Sunday because she’s optimistic. And the one who hits snooze on all five because she’s not. Same body. Different person. And the gap between them is where all the drowning happens.
I called my sister on the walk home. Didn’t plan to. She picked up, and before I could ask how she was, she said “you sound tired.” Everyone keeps telling me I sound tired. I’m starting to believe them. I told her nothing, just normal. She said “normal for you is not normal.” I sat down on a bench outside the bodega and let her talk. She told me about her dog, her new gym, her friend’s wedding. I half-listened. Mostly I just needed someone to talk at me who wasn’t going to ask me to do anything.
Three blocks from home, my phone buzzed. Slack. “Hey, can you jump on a quick 15 tomorrow morning? Want to align on the Q3 deck.”
Tomorrow. Which is also Monday in some weird stretched-out way. The week just keeps beginning. There’s no break. There’s just the next Monday creeping in.
I typed “sure, see you at 9.” I didn’t want to type it. But I typed it anyway. Because what else do you do.
Let me describe what the feeling actually does in my body because I think this is the part nobody talks about.
My stomach tightens. Not pain, not nausea, just this hard little fist behind my belly button that doesn’t let go until like, Wednesday maybe. My shoulders sit an inch higher than they should, like I’m bracing for a hit that doesn’t come. My jaw clenches. I grind my teeth at night, I know this because my dentist told me, $400 night guard I’m supposed to wear but I keep forgetting. My chest feels like someone put a binder clip on it. Not enough to stop breathing. Just enough to make breathing an effort.
And the worst part? My brain stops working. Not in a sleepy way. In a fog way. I’ll be typing an email and forget what I was saying mid-sentence. I’ll be in a meeting and lose the thread because someone said “let me circle back” and my brain just went “oh we’re circling back, okay, bye.” I made a typo in a Slack message to the CEO last week and didn’t notice for three hours. Three hours! It said “kindly find the doc attache” and he never said anything. Either he’s polite or he also doesn’t care. Either way, that’s not the point. The point is, my brain was gone.
So yeah. The drown. It’s not in my head. It’s in my jaw, my shoulders, my stomach, my focus, my ability to be a normal human.
I wrote this at 10:14 PM on a Monday. The first Monday after I started thinking about writing this down. I’m sitting on my couch with the lights low, my laptop on my knees, a heating pad on my back because I tweaked something in spin class last week and haven’t been to a chiro because I haven’t had time. The heating pad smells like lavender. The dog across the hall is barking. My phone has 22 unread Slack messages I’m going to ignore until tomorrow.
I’m tired. Not sleepy-tired. Tired-tired. The kind of tired where closing your eyes doesn’t fix anything because the tired isn’t in your eyes. It’s in your nervous system. It’s in the way your hands twitch when you try to relax. It’s in the fact that you can’t remember the last time you felt bored. Not busy. Bored. The absence of stimulation. I don’t think I’ve been bored in eight months. I don’t know what that says about my life but it says something.
I don’t have a plan for this. I don’t have a takeaway. No five steps. No “here’s what I did to fix it.” I haven’t fixed it. I’ve just gotten better at noticing when it’s happening. That’s it. That’s the whole article.
I wrote this because I googled “monday drowning” on the train today and got nothing useful back. Just productivity tips and morning routine lists and people telling me to “make Sunday a recovery day” like that costs zero dollars and zero energy. So I’m writing the version I wanted to find. The one where someone else goes “yeah, me too.” The one where the feeling has a name instead of just being the thing in my chest I can’t explain at dinner.
So. Hi. If you’re reading this and it’s Sunday night and you’re already dreading tomorrow — I see you. If you’re reading this and it’s 7 AM and you’re at the bus stop and the third bus just passed you by — I see you. If you’re reading this and you’re at your desk and you just realized you’ve been reading the same Slack message for four minutes — I see you too.
The drown is real. It’s not dramatic. It’s not a movie. It’s just the slow leak of being a person in a system that runs Monday through Friday with no off switch. And the only thing I can offer you is this: it’s not just you. Your chest isn’t broken. Your week isn’t cursed. You’re just tired in a way that doesn’t fit into a productivity graph.
I’m going to go to bed now. Tomorrow is Tuesday. Tuesday is better. I think. I’m not sure. We’ll see.
Actually no. I won’t tell you tomorrow is better. I’ll just say this — the drown comes. And then it goes. And then it comes back. That’s just how it is right now. I’m not going to wrap it up neat for you. It’s not neat.
Okay. Going to bed now. The heating pad is still warm. The dog is still barking. The Slack notifications can wait.
[“Emotional”, “Monday Drowning”, “Work Burnout”, “Subway Commute”, “Mental Health”