Why an Empty Week Feels Fast Instead of Free

I would like to report that on the first Monday of my new life I slept late, drifted downstairs, and let the day arrive.

What actually happened is that I opened my calendar and found it full.

Not full of anything. Full of me. At some point in the previous week, without informing myself of the decision, I had gone into Google Calendar and distributed my new freedom across a grid. Little coloured blocks, one after another, none of them important and all of them scheduled. Collect this. Look into that. Ring them. Sort out the other thing.

So I rushed. On my first Monday of not having a job, I rushed. I went from block to block with the low, familiar hum of being slightly behind, and at some point it was evening and I was tired in exactly the way I used to be tired.

That is the most embarrassing sentence in this essay and we are four paragraphs in. It is also the only genuinely useful thing I have learned since Friday, so I am going to stay with it.

Nobody made me do that.

There was no manager. There was no meeting. There was not one person on this earth who required anything of me by nine o’clock on Monday morning — and I still got up and manufactured a full working day out of nothing, on time, at pace.

For years I assumed, without ever once inspecting the assumption, that my days had their shape because the job put it there. Take the job away and the days would go loose. That was the frightening part. That is the thing I braced for, for a year.

The days did not go loose. The shape came out of me on the first morning like it had been waiting in the hall with its coat on.

The ship comes at nine forty

The correction, when it came, arrived by boat.

On Tuesday I made a second coffee at half past nine and took it out to the balcony, because there was nobody to be on a call with. This is not a large thing. It is a coffee. But that coffee always used to belong to somebody — drunk during, gone cold beside, carried from the kitchen while already talking. This one was attached to nothing at all.

And then, ten minutes later, the ship went past.

It comes at nine forty every morning. It has presumably been doing this for years, in the way that ships and postmen and the neighbour’s dog have been running an entire parallel morning while I was on mute. I have lived here for years. I have looked at this lake more or less constantly. I could not have told you the timetable.

The next day I went shopping at midday and the shops were full. I would like to know who all of those people are. It was a Wednesday, it was half past twelve, and there they were, choosing tomatoes, taking their time, having small unhurried conversations at the till like people with nothing whatsoever to prove. I did not need anything. I had gone out to have a look, which is not a purpose, and I stood in the middle of it feeling like someone who has wandered onto a film set and is technically in the shot.

So there is a shape out here, and there always was. The ship keeps it. The tomato people keep it. Nobody administers it and nobody is measured against it.

Mine was never like that. Mine was an instrument.

The desk

You can measure the whole thing on my desk.

I have always had a clean desk. Aggressively clean. Every evening cleared, every morning ready. A clean desk meant a clear head, and a clear head meant I could be relied upon, and being relied upon was the entire architecture.

My desk today has: unopened post. A bottle of water. A mug with yesterday’s coffee dried into the bottom of it. Something I put down on Monday and have walked past approximately forty times since. And the stand where the monitor used to sit, with its cable still running off the edge of the desk to nothing.

It is not a dumpster. I want that on the record. But it is not a desk that anybody is running anything from.

And here is the part I did not expect: I do not mind. I pass it many times a day — that room also has the couch and the balcony and the good light, so I am in there constantly — and every time I leave one more thing on it and feel absolutely nothing.

Which tells me the clean desk was never tidiness. It was an instrument. It was the thing I did in order to be a person who could be counted on to do the other thing. The moment nobody was counting, it went out of tune immediately, without ceremony, under a bottle of water.

The calendar is the same instrument. That is what Monday was.

I did not build that grid because I had things to do. I built it because I have spent my working life needing evidence that a day was spent well, and the evidence used to arrive on its own — a full inbox, a diary somebody else filled, a colleague saying thank you at four in the afternoon. It arrived so reliably for so long that I mistook it for weather.

Now none of it arrives. The instrument is still running, and it has nothing left to weigh.

So it weighs me.

That is why I have to look at my phone to find out what day it is. This started on Tuesday, or possibly Wednesday, which rather makes the point. And the odd thing is what the not-knowing actually does. You would think a week without edges would feel long. It does the opposite. It slides. I check the phone, it says Thursday, and something in me goes already — a small cold pinch, as though I am falling behind. There is nothing to fall behind on. That is the entire situation. The pinch does not care.

If you have ever taken a proper week off and found yourself reorganising the kitchen cupboards on day two, you have met this instrument. You have probably filed it under being a tidy person. It is not that. It is the machinery that used to run on other people’s requirements, still running, hunting for something to weigh.

Three o’clock

Which brings me to the best hour of my week, and to what it costs to sit in it.

At around three in the afternoon my partner and I get on the paddleboard and go out on the lake for an hour or two.

That is the whole event. We paddle, we talk, we stop talking, the water does what water does. It is thirty-five degrees and the lake is the only reasonable place in the country to be. And every single time, somewhere in the first ten minutes, the same small alarm goes off in me: it is Tuesday.

Not guilt exactly. More the sensation of having got away with something — of being out on the water on a working afternoon while the responsible world is inside, on a call, being sharp at three o’clock in the way I was sharp at three o’clock for most of my adult life.

I have not yet worked out whether that alarm is a problem, or simply the last piece of equipment they forgot to collect.

I have also seen nobody. Not one person outside this house has asked me what I am doing now, and I have quietly arranged it that way.

Some of that is wanting an answer ready. I would very much like to be able to say I am building this in one clean sentence before anybody asks, because the alternative is saying I do not know yet to a kind person who will then look at me kindly, which is worse.

But most of it is simpler and less flattering. I was frightened for a long time. I did not sleep properly for months. The fear was about money and identity and whether I had made an enormous mistake, and it did not switch off when the contract did — it simply ran out of things to attach itself to. This is the week it has nowhere to go. That takes up more room than it sounds like, and it does not want an audience.

Meanwhile, the state would like me to apply for jobs.

This is entirely correct and I do not resent it. It is just arriving at the exact moment when I have finally, for the first time in about fifteen years, begun letting myself dream a little — sitting on the balcony with the second coffee thinking what if it were this, and could it be that, and what would I have to become to try it.

So my week contains both. Applications and dreaming, sharing one calendar. Only one of them is compulsory, and it is not the one that is going to decide anything.

My list has the same split. Register with the unemployment office. Chase the reference letter from the job I no longer have. And then the honest item: cut back the garden I have been letting slide for a while now, while being extremely responsible about other people’s deadlines. Half of that list has a deadline attached and it is not the half I care about. Nobody is going to write to me sternly about the rosemary.

The wrong impression

And from the outside, all of this looks like a holiday.

I have worn nothing but loungewear and swimsuits since Saturday. Barefoot from morning to night. No makeup, no attempt at my hair, which is wet more often than it is dry because I go into the lake several times a day and can see no reason to stop. The whole house smells of sun cream. There are towels drying in the garden in permanent rotation, like laundry at a small and badly run hotel. I have eaten roughly a field of salad. The cats have given up entirely and lie flat indoors, deeply unimpressed by all of it.

It smells exactly like being nine years old in the summer holidays.

I know how that reads, and I want to be truthful: I am having a lovely time. It also gives completely the wrong impression, because a holiday has a return date printed on it and this does not. What I have is not six weeks off. It is the first stretch of my adult life with no external shape at all, and the sun cream is doing an excellent job of disguising that from everybody, including me.

If you are coming up to your own first week — after the job, or the diagnosis, or the last child leaving, or whatever it is that ends your version of the schedule — this is the part I would want you to have.

The looseness you are dreading will not arrive. You will fill the week yourself, probably by Monday lunchtime, and you will be tired by eight in the evening, and you will not have done anything. That is not a failure of discipline. It is the machinery running with nothing to weigh.

You will feel behind. There will be nothing to be behind on. The feeling never needed a reason; it only ever needed a habit.

And the thing you find yourself reaching for when nobody is asking — the garden, the water, the second coffee at half past nine — is worth writing down. Not because it is your purpose. Because it is the only information about you that was ever collected without supervision.

I had braced for free fall for a year. What actually turned up was a full calendar of nothing, a ship at nine forty, a desk quietly collecting post, and a woman in a swimsuit who is mildly concerned that she is not being productive enough at being unproductive.

The shape is coming back either way. The office will supply one, September will supply one, the garden certainly will. What I would like — and I do not believe I have ever been in a position to ask for this before — is to be the one who decides what it is.

So, before yours fills back in: if next week emptied out completely, and nobody needed anything from you by nine in the morning, what would you put in it? And how quickly would you put it there?

Ilka 🫶🏻