He asks if I’m around next week, and I want to see him, so that should be a nice thing to hear – but instead it stresses me out. I’m going to the cinema on Tuesday with my brother and getting Vietnamese food on Wednesday with Maisie, and I can’t bail on her because I’ve done it a bunch of times recently. Sure, maybe I could see him on Thursday, but then I won’t have time to go to the gym, which should be fine, but I try to go twice a week, and if I don’t go on Thursday, there’s a big chance I won’t go at all, which will make me feel panicked and out of control of my body. But if I don’t see him on Thursday, I know he’s going away for a while on Friday, which means there might be too much of a gap between our first and second dates and things will fizzle out.
While I’m at the cinema with my brother, I keep going over and over all of this in my head. We’re watching that new Dev Patel film Monkey Man, and I should be right into it because it’s so violent (at one point, he bites a guy’s nose off), but I’m not actually paying attention. I’m thinking that maybe I should just work a half day on Thursday so that I can go to the gym and see the guy and then I’ll finish the essay I have due over the weekend. Then I’m stressing that I place too much emphasis on exercise, wasting my life away inside the badly lit rooms of PureGym, moving the same muscle back and forth until it burns.
I’m trying to organise my week in such a way that I manage to maintain the perfect balance, accomplish everything I need to do, but sometimes that means I don’t take anything in, orange oil sitting on the surface of my soup, my friend’s funny story about the person she hates at work. Instead, my mind is elsewhere, wondering if I could do a lunchtime yoga class instead of one of my gym sessions, or if I’ll actually do any writing over the weekend. I’m not enjoying the things I plan; they become tasks on a to-do list, the week just something to get through. And what’s even the end goal? A boyfriend? The perfect body? To write a really good book? Would I even enjoy those things once I had them?
I used to live in London with one of my best mates from school. She’d been through a lot and had quite a lot of problems with her mental health. There would be times when it was difficult for her to do things, for her to leave the house, get out of bed. It seemed like she wasn’t living much, that she was spending so much time inside in her pyjamas watching YouTube. When she did go out – to dinner, for example – she’d go on and on about how good the food was, how chewy the noodles were, the sweet tea she had with them, and it used to annoy me. I’d make a joke like “Do they pay you for publicity?” and slowly it would morph into a dig at her. Did she not know how much else there was out there? What else she could do? But when I think back, I realise that she enjoyed those few things so much more than I enjoyed all the different things I was doing at the time. She squeezed everything out of that moment until it dribbled through the gaps in her fingers.
In the end it turns out he can’t meet up because of work, which means I can go to the gym on Thursday after all. I don’t end up drinking when I see my brother or Maisie, which means I probably would have felt fresh enough for a date anyway. And even if I had been hungover and my social battery was sapped, I could have just had a quiet weekend to make up for it. I didn’t need to worry at all. I could have just let life happen instead of trying to push and pull it into the perfect shape. Happiness, I’m realising, is less dependent on what you do, and more dependent on what you let yourself enjoy.
