I miss routine. It’s familiarity, it’s structure is something I crave now that my days blur into nights, work blurs into downtime, and the hours blur… together.
I want to press rewind and go back to the times when my days and weeks had a definite, or close to definite framework. I woke up at 7, went to school, came home to do homework, took a break and then did homework again, went to work, showered, went to sleep by probably 12 the latest. I had three meals a day, all around the same time. My internal clock ticked to this schedule that I kept almost daily during the school year. I had even almost gotten used to my 9th period lunch when school had abruptly ended.
That’s not to say that sometimes, along the way, I felt trapped in this cycle. Some days, I dreaded having to get up and go to school, finding it tedious to attend classes with four minutes in the hallway in between bells day after day after day. Looking back, those late bells told me where I had to be and when, helpful reminders guiding my day along.
My bed, once a spot where I would retreat to at the end of a long day to rest and sleep in, is now a spot where I attend class, play video games, do work, and, of course, sleep. The lack of a physical boundary between the different aspects of my life not only prevents me from being the productive person I once was, but also the one who knew when and where everything started and ended, with somewhat of a structure to my days.
My heart dropped when I learned that we would not be going back to school. Besides the obvious other drawbacks (not being able to see my friends and teachers being one of the biggest ones), the elimination of the possibility of a return to how things once were, no matter how much I thought I hated then my alarm clock dictating my awakening every morning, or the long hours spent at school, or the callings of time constraints forcing me to work faster, more efficiently, was devastating.
It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve gone to school, and I know I won’t be going back for a couple of weeks more, but I’m looking for ways to get back some of the structure I used to have. I try to wake up around the same time in the morning- not as early as I used to, but early enough to be productive. I try not to skip meals and eat too many snacks in between them. I try to get all my classes and schoolwork done by the afternoon so I have room to do other things at night. I try to mark dates on my calendar to resemble some sort of a schedule. This way, at least I can give myself back some of the structure that I felt was missing in my life for the first couple of weeks after school ended. It's not much, but it’s definitely keeping me sane.
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