thrum
Bone tired is how I feel these days. I’ve been overzealous with work and now I’m paying the price: consecutive late nights, early mornings, my to-do lists writing themselves in my sleep. All those lost hours at night have finally morphed into literal fevered naps, a cycle of freezing and sweating and sniffling ebbing with a roster of medicinal relief. It sounds bad, but in truth, my temperature has barely spiked — I am just deeply, deeply tired.
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I triple dosed on medicine yesterday so I could make a shoot today, a last-minute one arranged on my day off, a last-minute one for an almost 10-year client that only I could manage anyway. When I got to the location 20 minutes ahead of everyone — 40 if you account for the latecomers — I realised how upset I was about this whole thing. It was not yet 10am and already I was seething: white hot angry on the inside, coated with an armour of professional pep timed to run out at 120 minutes.
It all sounds so juvenile. Because it is. It is! I could have rescheduled the shoot, pushed out the timeline, doubled down on boundaries. Instead, I spent all of yesterday dreading today, and all of today upset at my routinely bad choices. Just last week I told one of the girls: we teach others the respect we deserve. I conveniently forgot how easy it is to forget what we deserve in the first place.
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Amid fatigue, amid deadlines and general busyness, there has been joy. I must remember that. Two weekends ago, we sang and danced in a freezing karaoke room. I asked for S Club 7 and Stacy’s Mom (Fountains of Wayne) because apparently, underneath it all, I am a 13-year-old child who enjoys screeching about hot moms and true love. On National Day, we trundled out to ECP at the crack of dawn, joining hordes of other huffing, puffing, holiday-optimising folk. At the skate park, I realised how stupidly stubborn I am: my mind saying, yes, you can learn new tricks, here’s how — while my feet worked their old patterns over and over, disinterested in potential.
And then there’s been the World Cup: a bright spot in humdrum work days. Most games, my dad and I take turns to yell at the TV in the living room. In the final minutes of a recent game, he startled me by shouting, LEFT FLAAAANK, which is, I suppose, a proportionate response to me yelling CRRRRRROSS! every couple of minutes. He says his favourite part of watching women play sports is the crying, though I suspect this is patently untrue — he has only seen crying once, and when he’s not watching the games, he’s reading up on the teams.
Just a few years ago, this probably would have never been a thing: the both of us blocking out time to watch sports together. I’m glad that’s changed. I am glad for these moments.
