Reset or Sink: To Wash Your Face or Not
I stood in front of the mirror for ten minutes yesterday weighing the worth of washing my face before going on my somewhat-daily mental health walk. Eight hours later, I would be attending a Sunday evening office hour meeting with one of my professors, a faculty member who prides himself on being at least a little bit frightening to those students unknowingly enrolled in his cataloging class for the Master’s in Library and Information Sciences (MLIS) program at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU). While I was a bit bitter about this — my partner works most evenings at a busy restaurant in New Haven, CT, and with my work schedule the way it is, Sundays are really the only day we have to spend together — I knew it would be central to my success to attend the office hours meeting. My hand hovered over the Burt’s Bees Lavender Oil face wash, then over the Shea Butter stress relief lotion, then the dirty faucet, splattered with careless toothpaste flecks and still a little damp from the haphazard midnight tooth brushing I’d done the night before. Every moment glued in front of the mirror, contemplating this meaningless task — wash your face before your walk, or after your walk, or not at all — was another moment weighing down the ever-present anxiety in my chest, the anxiety that pushed me to finally give Lexapro a try in the early spring, the anxiety that keeps my humility high and the stakes higher.
Then, the words crossed my mind: reset, or sink.
The answer became clear: wash your fucking face, Abbey, then go on your walk because you have time. Don’t let anxiety make you its fool. There are 12 good hours in a day (18 if you’re sleepless like I am) and five, ten, thirty, or sixty minutes of self-care in those hours will only aid in your work. I wash my face, I go on my walk, I pick up ice-cream for my partner and I. Later, after my professor’s office hours, I sink my spoon into the bottom of a pint of S’mores ice cream from the local creamery while the third thoughtless, bad 2000s movie of the day streams on the television.
In my early twenties, I wrote a blog series with no real trajectory. I was enamored by the self-publishing autonomy of Medium. That coupled with my pursuits in publishing, working on the English degree I wasn’t able to finish my first go around in undergraduate coursework, and my internship with The Daily Fandom, a pop culture journal from the West Coast aimed at giving digital publishing experience to young writers, left me overzealous with the “publish” button. About a year after posting a surplus of random topics — personal posts about my health journey, the experiences I was having in the ER flatlining on a nearly regular basis, my love of horror movies and nature — I shamefully unpublished all but two of my articles. One of the articles is about being a bad friend; a piece I wrote to process the grief of a falling out I had with an old close friend. The second article is about Ari Aster’s horror imprint.
And so my autonomous blog legacy becomes my inability to hold a long-term, close friendship and my obsession with violent, unsavory films. Go figure.
Yesterday, when these words crossed my mind (reset or sink), I thought, you’re right Abbey, reset or sink. There is no in between. Sundays will not be the relaxed, lackadaisical kind of day you had all summer — at least, not during the semester. Instead, they are the day to reset the week now, to be on top of not just your educational and professional pursuits, but your personal pursuits too — which means wash your fucking face, Abbey.
My goal now is to blog every Sunday, reset or sink, wash my face at least once a week (kidding…maybe). I work in commercial photography for a large, medical education institution. I am pursuing my MLIS at SCSU. I am trying to remain sane while devoting hours a week to improving my mental health. I am processing the turning of our grieving world.
Reset or sink, reset or sink, reset or sink.
