Weekends Shouldn't Suck

Thank God for weekends, right? You don’t have to worry about work. You can chill out if you want. You can stay up late and sleep in even later. You’ve got two solid days to yourself to do whatever the heck you please. How can that not be unbelievably awesome? It can’t be, right?

I used to always think so, and still do most of the time, but I’ve also found that the weekends are the times at which I find myself feeling most alone. During the week everything I do is structured and I know I’ve always got things to do and stuff to try and accomplish. Every hour of the day I feel like I’m working towards something or that at least I should be doing something towards a purpose.

Monday through Friday I have work for eight hours a day. Monday nights I have my softball league. At least one of the nights I usually end up going out with friends. Every afternoon I go for a run and exercise. At night I have my “relax time” that I use to unwind from the day by watching tv, a movie, or doing some reading. Then I get up and do it the next day. I don’t have time to feel lonely.

Weekends are a different story altogether. I don’t have work. I exercise quick in the morning or early afternoon. I try to do any chores I have to Saturday morning to get them out of the way. Sometimes I’ll get together with friends or my family or Kristin, but when I don’t I really feel aimless.

When left to my own devices I have such a hard time trying to figure out what to do with my day. I’ll sometimes try to amuse myself with video games, but usually I feel like I’m wasting my time. It’s different when I have someone to play games with, but when it’s just me sitting in the basement by myself I feel like I should be doing something more substantial with my time.

So then I try something else. I’ll read or send emails to people or tidy up my room or do other little tasks, but I still have that empty feeling. Compounding that, I hate being alone and I think that’s part of the reason I feel so listless when I’m trying to entertain myself—I crave someone else’s company.

Which makes weekends that I spend with Kristin or weekends where I have something planned, such as the camping trip I went on a couple of weeks back, feel worthwhile. That and I just enjoy being with Kristin and being in the company of friends.

I’ve noticed, though, that as I grow older it’s so much harder to get friends together. So many of them are getting married or already are. Others move away. Others have become secluded or are simply content to doing nothing. It’s not like college where there were a ton of people around to do stuff with at any hour of the day. I HAVE to entertain myself at times simply because everyone I know is doing something else, and it really, really sucks. I hate being alone and doing things on my own. I had enough of that throughout elementary, middle, and high school.

What really drove this home is the fact that I was happy to have to come in to work today, a Saturday, to get some work done. It made my day, or at least part of it, feel worthwhile. I’ll be heading to the Twin Cities later to visit with Kristin and then to go to Warped Tour tomorrow, so it really shouldn’t have been too bad of a morning for me since it was just a part of a day that I had to try to entertain myself, but before I came into the office, it was terrible.

I’m trying to figure out what this has to say about me and my personality. Some might call it a dependency problem. Others might call it a dumb fixation that I manufacture myself in order to force myself to do something. Another way of looking at it is that I might be searching for something “more” in my life right now. I’m not sure. I really don’t think it’s any of those things. I just want to spend time with friends and loved ones whenever I can. I don’t want to do things alone. Life, for me, is something to be shared and I want to share mine.