Dear This Week: You're So Fired. in Always Recovering, Never Recovered.

Dear This Week,

Seriously mate, I have had it up to my bloodshot sleep-deprived little eyeballs with you. You appear to have been roughly a billion years long and your company has been tedious at best and downright demoralising in places, so perhaps you could do the decent thing and just Piss Off?

You have been entirely too full of un-fun appointments with talky-talky Medical Professionals who all seem almost sadistically keen to stab the living shit out of my mind with those pointy little pitchforks they like to call Intrusive Questions. Doing textbook finger-steepling and head-tilting, they observe with blinding insight, “talking about this seems to make you quite anxious”, and then wait for an answer as though they’ve actually asked a question. Well, no shit Sherlock; if the fact my ENTIRE BODY is shaking like an electric-chair victim didn’t give you a clue, YES talking makes me anxious and YES I hate it and NO, I am not any good at it.
Sorry man, but I’m afraid excessive encounters with the Captain Obviouses of the therapy world place you well below the required standard for an acceptable week.

Also, This Week, I’d like to know exactly what nasty prickly little things you’ve been rubbing in my eyes; because apparently I want to cry all the damn time. A rather unnerving proportion of you has been hopelessly devoted to fantasising (yes, literally fantasising, as in staring into space and virtually whimpering at the thought) about doing ridiculously out-of-character things. Such as, burying my face in a friendly lap and crying my insides out all over the place. Gentle hands rubbing soothing circles over my sob-shaking spine and smoothly stroking my hair, and a calm voice murmuring all those useless platitudes. Like hey, it’s okay to cry, it’s okay to feel bad, I know today is hard but it will get better, you can do this… Yeah, all that crap that I hate.

What the actual fuck have you done to me, Week? This isn’t me. Can you please leave my ability to contain my emotions on the kitchen table when you go, because I kinda need that. I can’t imagine opening up to anyone, ever, to the extent that I can cry self-loathing tears all over their lap without death-by-embarrassment becoming an immediate requirement afterwards, so I’d like to stop dreaming about it, please.

During the course of you, I have (according to my admittedly, occasionally, somewhat-unreliable eyes) put on roughly three hundred stone and guess what? I hate it! Every day of you, This Week, I have fallen out of bed on the grotesquely-fat-and-fucking-furious-about-it side, because overnight I have become the Michelin Man’s slightly flabbier and less attractive sister, and it’s pretty safe to say I have not enjoyed the transition.

How this is even possible is something of a nutritional mystery, as my body in all its fucked-up glory has decided not to be grateful for proper food and do a little happy-dance the way it is supposed to; but to actively reject my attempts to put actual fuel into it. I find this perma-sickness offensive, firstly because the point of this bloody exercise was to try feeling better, not worse; and secondly because I am TRYING to hold down a job here, and feeling likely to hurl my latest dietician-approved, nutritionally-balanced meal across the shop floor every time I move is not conducive to good job performance. So, if you could just take that with you when you finally leave, Week, it would be much appreciated.

That gloomy doom-soup that passes for my brain firmly took up residence in Pessimism Street, and as such spent pretty much every waking minute of you (of which there were altogether far too many for my liking) conveniently forgetting that it is supposed to be thirty years old and act accordingly; consequently it whiled away an intensely irritating amount of time hurling playground insults at me. If I want to be told I’m fat-ugly-disgusting and just ought to die, I’ll just go on one of those internet chat sites where strangers can tell me so; I really don’t need it coming from my own head. Yeah, so, um, you can take all those thoughts with you too, if you like?

Overall, This Week, I’m afraid your performance really has been somewhat less than stellar. It’s just not working out between us, it’s not you it’s me, blah blah blah.... just go. I’ve got a date with your more attractive and hopefully entirely less awful younger brother, Next Week. I hope he is massively less crap than you.

Last updated March 08, 2015