Never Match Fit
If you regularly drink alcohol or take drugs, say every weekend, then you are never match fit. You are never even close to being match fit. Well, this has been me for my entire adult life.
You enjoy a relaxing drink every Friday or Saturday evening. Saturday and Sunday daytime you live in a bit a blur, sitting around watching sport or Netflix, ordering in a takeaway, looking through the dirty net curtains of your hangover. You feel like death warmed up in a Wetherspoon’s microwave. Ding indeed, but no dong. You text your mates. They’re hungover too. Love these guys, the camaraderie, the banter. On Sunday you start dreading work. It’s anxiety. Everyone is suffering from it these days, so why not you. This is your weekend, it’s your time. You shouldn’t be worrying about work. You’re not being paid to think about work on a Sunday. Maybe have one beer, two tops would be a good idea, just to extend the feeling of weekend a little bit.
There are some weekends when you think about not drinking. The problem is you will then have to wait another whole week until you can drink. It feels like a missed opportunity. So you park that thought.
Monday starts slow. You wake up dreading work. Nothing is where you expect it to be. You are certainly not focussed on work. Your main aim for today is to get through it. If you can get through it, get back to your nice warm bed this evening then that is success. The thought of getting back to your bed is the only thing that’s enabled you to get up out of bed. You hide at work. You’re quiet in meetings. You shuffle documents around your two wide monitors all day. You hide behind those monitors. The early morning coffees (four of them, consumed in a strangely boastful way, the same way you consumed your beers at the weekend) sort of helped. The lunchtime Tesco meal deal provided some sort of comfort. Fuck! You just want to get out of this job, find something better, more pay. You just want to get off this fucking hamster wheel. You throw some mental shade at the few in the office who seem to thrive on this hamster wheel.
You feel good on Tuesday, not because you feel good, but because you don’t feel like you did yesterday. The anxiety is still there but much more tempered. This anxiety is the you anxiety. It’s your personality. It’s the stuff you’ve carried with you since childhood. It’s low-level, it’s normal. Most of those around you have greater levels of anxiety than you. More and more of them casually drop it into conversation. Oh yeah I suffer from anxiety you know. With some it’s obvious. With others you never would have known. You mentally raise your eyebrows when they tell you.
Wednesday and Thursday you are flying. Well not exactly flying because you didn’t build up enough speed to get this thing off the ground. You’re not in pain. You’re getting some work done. You’re not being super-productive because you’ve been suffering from that brain-fog that afflicts everyone as they get older. It’s as though as you zoom in on the detail the image goes out of focus. Damn this ageing. But you’ve got some work done. You look around the office and think that you’ve probably done as much as most. More than some of them. You wonder how the organisation actually survives. You’ve long suspected that organisations such as these are paid by the government just to keep us off the streets.
These are your best days and you’re still far from match fit. You’re the player that’s just come back from injury and has been cleared to do some light training.
Friday. You felt that little bit of buzz when you woke up this morning because the goal of the day is simply to get through to lunchtime and you know you can do that. You’ve got this. The office thins out after lunchtime. The pubs are a-buzz. You made it! You fucking made it!