When Monday Feels Like Drowning
I woke up at 6:52 AM. Two minutes before the alarm. I lay there and stared at the ceiling like it owed me an explanation.
The worst part? I already knew what was coming. Sunday night I’d felt it start in my chest — that slow tightening, like someone’s hand gradually closing around my lungs while I was watching some dating show I’d already forgotten the name of. I told myself sleep would reset everything. I told myself I’d feel different in the morning.
Sleep didn’t reset anything.
Monday drowning isn’t a metaphor. I keep saying this to people and they laugh like I’m being dramatic. But I mean it kind of literally — there are Mondays where I feel like I’m trying to breathe through a wet towel that’s been sitting in my face for six hours. My heart’s doing its thing. My brain’s doing its thing. But somehow my body has decided we’re underwater, and nobody sent the memo to the rest of me.
It’s 7:15 AM and I’m standing at the bus stop on Jianguomenwai, watching the third 113 pass me without stopping. The driver’s not even looking. I’m wearing my good coat because I have a client presentation at 10 AM. I’m shivering. The cold is going through me but my face feels hot. My palms are sweating through my gloves. I don’t understand how those two things can happen at the same time but here I am, a human contradiction, freezing and burning.
My phone buzzes. It’s my mom.
“You okay?” “Yes.” “Take the subway then.” “There’s no subway that gets me there by 8.” “Then leave earlier.” “Mom.” “What.” “I’m freezing.” “Get a thicker coat.” “Mom, I’m wearing my good coat. I’m going to be late. I have to look like a person who has her life together in forty-five minutes.” “Then hang up and go catch your bus.”
I hung up. I didn’t catch the bus.
I don’t think people who haven’t had this understand what I’m trying to say. They hear “I hate Mondays” and they think it’s the same as not liking salad. Like it’s a preference thing. Like I can just choose to feel different on Tuesday.
But that’s not it. There’s this thing where you wake up on Sunday night and the dread is already there. You can feel it sitting on your chest like a cat. A heavy cat that refuses to move. You tell yourself you’ll be fine in the morning. You go to bed. You lie there. You think about how you used to love weekends when you were a kid because they meant freedom. Now they mean the countdown. Now they mean Sunday. Now they mean that 11 PM moment when you realize the weekend is officially over and tomorrow the alarm goes off and everything starts again.
I called in sick once. Last March. Told my boss I had food poisoning. He said “feel better.” I lay on my bathroom floor for two hours staring at the tiles. Then I felt guilty. Then I went in anyway, late, with mascara under my eyes that I tried to cover with the concealer I keep in my bag for exactly these situations. Nobody noticed. Or if they noticed, they didn’t say.
I think that’s the worst part. The invisibility of drowning. You can be going under right in front of people and they’re just checking their phones.
The subway car was so packed I couldn’t move my arms. I had my bag pressed against my ribs and the strap was digging into my shoulder and some guy’s elbow was in my back and I just stood there thinking: this is what being an adult feels like. Being crushed by strangers and pretending it’s fine. Smelling someone’s lunch through the glass partition. Watching a teenager look at me with pity because I’m clearly more miserable than she is, and she’s on a Monday morning too.
I transferred at Guomao. Climbed three flights of stairs that my body was definitely not equipped for at 8:10 AM. Stood on the platform watching the train doors close in my face because I was fifteen seconds too slow.
Fifteen seconds.
That’s how close I was to making it on time. And I just stood there, watching the train leave, and I thought — what’s the point? What’s the actual point of trying?
I know that sounds dramatic. I know. I’m not going to do anything. I’m not in danger. I’m just… tired. I’m so tired that my bones feel like they’ve been replaced with sand. I’m tired of trying to be a person who has it together. I’m tired of the small talk in the elevator. I’m tired of pretending I care about Q3 projections. I’m tired of nodding when someone explains their weekend to me while I pretend I didn’t spend mine on the bathroom floor again.
I made it to the office at 8:47. Thirteen minutes late. The receptionist looked at me like I owed her money. I smiled. She didn’t smile back. I walked to my desk and my computer was already on because I’d never logged out properly Friday and now the screen was just staring at me like “welcome back to the place that owns your weekdays.”
I sat down. I didn’t take off my coat. I just sat there for ninety seconds, breathing through my nose because my mouth tasted like subway air and regret. Then I opened my email. Forty-seven unread messages. None of them were from anyone I wanted to hear from. Most of them had words like “urgent” or “ASAP” or “need your input.”
I closed the laptop. I walked to the kitchen. I made myself a cup of coffee even though I already had two at home. I stood at the counter and watched the machine drip. I thought about how my grandmother used to make coffee with this weird metal thing on the stove and how she’d let me have a sip even though I was only six. The coffee was always too bitter and she’d put this much sugar in it. She’d ask me if I wanted more and I’d always say yes because I wanted her to be proud of me for liking grown-up things.
I miss being six.
My manager came in at 9:30 and asked if I’d finished the deck. I said yes even though I’d finished maybe sixty percent of it. He said “great, send it over, oh also we need to add three more slides about the new vendor pricing.” I said “no problem.” I went back to my desk. I stared at the deck. I thought about how this was going to be my life until I retired. Forty more years of decks. Forty more years of “no problem” and “sounds good” and “I’ll get that to you by end of day.”
The thing about monday drowning is that you can see everyone else doing the same thing. You can see them treading water right next to you. And nobody says anything. We just all keep our heads above the surface and pretend we’re swimming.
At 10 AM I presented the deck. It wasn’t good. I knew it wasn’t good. The client knew it wasn’t good. My manager gave me this look afterward that said “we’ll talk later” which means “we’re talking now, in your head, while you try to make a coffee.”
I made another coffee.
Lunchtime came and I ate at my desk because going outside felt like a commitment. I had a sandwich I’d brought from home and a bag of chips and I ate them both while answering Slack messages with one hand. Someone asked me how my weekend was.
“Quiet,” I said.
Because what was I going to say? “I spent Saturday crying in my car in a parking lot because I couldn’t remember the last time I did something just for fun”? “Sunday I reorganized my entire closet because I needed something to control and I can’t control anything else in my life”? “I called my mom and pretended I was fine and she knew I wasn’t and we both pretended she didn’t know”?
Yeah. Quiet.
By 2 PM my chest was tight again. That same feeling from the morning but worse because now it had company — a headache that started behind my left eye, a stomach that felt like I’d swallowed a brick, and this weird buzzing in my fingers like they wanted to do something but didn’t know what.
I had a meeting at 3. I had another meeting at 4. I had a deadline at 5. I sat in those meetings and nodded and took notes that I’d never look at again and laughed at a joke my colleague told that wasn’t funny and typed “great point” into a chat three times in a single hour.
This is what people mean when they say “burnout,” I think. Not the dramatic version. Not the “I’m so overwhelmed I’m going to quit and move to a farm” version. The slow version. The kind where you don’t even realize you’ve stopped caring. The kind where your body has already quit but your brain hasn’t gotten the memo yet.
I left at 6:47 PM. Walked out the door and stood on the sidewalk for a full minute before I remembered how to use my legs. The air was cold and I breathed it in and it tasted like Beijing traffic and freedom, in that order.
I got home. I dropped my bag by the door. I didn’t take off my shoes for ten minutes. I just stood in my hallway in my good coat and my work shoes and stared at my apartment like I was a stranger who had broken in.
Then I cried. Not the kind where you sob. Just the kind where your eyes leak and you don’t really notice until your cheeks are wet. I cried standing up. I cried for maybe three minutes. Then I wiped my face with my sleeve and made myself instant noodles because I didn’t have the energy to cook anything real.
I sat on my couch eating noodles out of the pot and watched something on my laptop that I don’t remember. I think someone was on a journey. I think there was a montage. I didn’t care. I just needed something to look at that wasn’t my own thoughts.
My phone buzzed around 9. It was a friend asking if I wanted to come out. I said “I can’t tonight.” She said “another time?” I said “yeah, another time.” I put the phone face down on the cushion next to me and finished my noodles.
I don’t think she believed me. I don’t think anyone does anymore. I think people have started to understand that “another time” means “I’m lying in my apartment trying to remember what I used to enjoy doing.”
I washed the pot. I brushed my teeth. I got into bed at 10:42 PM. I set my alarm for 7. I lay there and stared at the ceiling again. And the dread came back. Slower this time. Like it knew I was tired. Like it was being polite about it.
Sunday night. The countdown had started again. Three more days until the weekend. Three more days of decks and meetings and pretending I care about vendor pricing. Three more days of the wet towel.
I closed my eyes. I thought about being six again. About the coffee. About how my grandmother used to ruffle my hair and tell me I was going to do big things someday.
I don’t know what the big things were supposed to be. But they weren’t this. They weren’t 7:15 AM bus stops and 8:47 AM arrivals and 6:47 PM escapes.
I rolled over. I told myself to sleep.
Sleep didn’t reset anything.