A Softer Monday

The third Monday of January has a name. Blue Monday, supposedly the most depressing day of the year.

It was invented in 2005 by a travel company trying to sell summer holidays in the middle of winter. There was never a study.

A psychologist was paid to attach his name to a formula that mixed things like debt and weather and motivation as though they were numbers that could be added together. They can't.

He's spent years since trying to take it back. I think about that formula whenever Sunday evening starts pressing down before Monday has even arrived, the blank page on the clipboard still empty, the pen still capped.

Nobody invented that feeling for me specifically, but plenty has been built to profit from it since, entire industries selling the cure for a dread that was manufactured in the first place. Monday didn't do anything to earn its reputation.

It just happened to be standing there when the story needed a villain. What would it look like to hand Monday back its ordinariness.

Not a reset, not a battle, not a day that needs surviving. Just the next page on the clipboard, waiting to be written on the same as any other.

The word itself never asked to carry any of this. It's just a day of the week, same as any other, until a marketing formula decided it needed a mood attached.

I filled mine in slowly this week. No urgency borrowed from a formula that was never real to begin with.