I last did a week in the life back in… 2021. Someone on Patreon suggested doing another, and I have chosen this week to record because a) I have a deadline, and if I’m talking about it here then I will meet the deadline, b) I’ve had a horrible few weeks of chronic fatigue and some new joint pain, and I sometimes forget I am a person who exists outside of planning my day around how much I think I can walk before I need to sit down for half an hour. Before you ask, I’m seeing a lot of doctors. If I thought I was wracking up NHS loyalty card points back in my connective tissue disorder diagnosis days, this is like Premium Membership of the Waiting Room. Strap in for a week of GLAMOUR and EXCITEMENT. Just kidding, I went to Lidl and my building ran out of water. Let’s gooo!
Monday 22nd January
7am
Getting out of bed when it’s this cold is like taking a kitten from a basket and placing them in a freezer. I am the kitten. The freezer is life. After coffee, some extremely inefficient meditation and a Duolingo lesson, I start some essay work in my pyjamas, because the only way to do work you are dreading is to do it. My essay is technically a research project: three thousand words on a topic of my choosing. My topic is [redacted in case I get a low grade] and I am really enjoying learning about it, but the research question I set myself could probably fill a PhD thesis, so I will have to kill some darlings and ignore some cool research avenues.
10am
My final class of the semester! It is a plenary and only three of us show up in person, but that is okay because we all have Thoughts on how much we enjoyed the module and how we needed more seminar time. I am hobbling a bit, because I seem to have pulled a muscle in my foot. It wouldn’t be embarrassing except all I can think that I’ve done to pull the muscle is wriggle my toes.
11:30am
Essay editing, check that today’s chapter of Rotting Trees went live on Patreon when it was supposed to. Check that the advanced reader copy giveaway I have scheduled on Tumblr will go live when it is supposed to.
12:30pm
Do laundry and more essay edits. Pros of living with a horrible communal laundry system: it forces me to take breaks as I work. Cons: finishing a laundry load feels like completing one of the labours of Hercules, not least because it is crucial that I separate what can be machine dried from what can’t, because the dryers show no mercy.
2pm
Do some emails and generalised admin. Brain fog has descended, probably because editing takes all my energy. Faff about on the Casual UK Reddit thread, living vicariously through a discussion about the best hotel breakfasts. Purchase new laundry bags on the internet, because all of mine have broken zips or holes in, and I’m fed up with hauling random socks out of the machine and wondering if its sibling is lost to the machine gods forever.
3pm
Realise I have more brain fog, and not the sort that clears with brisk exercise and fresh air, although I will be getting both this evening. This is the sort where I shouldn’t boil water in a saucepan in case I forget to turn off the hob, or drop the pan over myself. Time to do NOTHING. I am figuring out that when I am too tired to do anything useful, there is no point staring at an email inbox or a Word document willing words to form. Instead of feeling bad about myself that I can’t do the ‘useful’ thing I was aiming for, it is more helpful to set aside half an hour or an hour for very deliberate ‘nothing’ things. The sort of things that Dude Boss Influencers on LinkedIn would consider a waste of time: reading a book, or watching some YouTube, or a nap. Giving myself permission to firstly not do the supposedly useful thing and to do something supposedly unproductive stops me from trying to do the original task and hating everything when I can’t.
3pm is usually too late for a nap if I do not wish to be plagued by insomnia at bedtime, but today I am too tired to care. A spanner in the works of my plan: there is dry laundry on my bed. In the time it takes me to put the laundry away and drink some water, I remember that a) if you need a wee you can’t sleep, so I could drink more to pull through until I go out, and b) there are some very easy baby admin things I can take care of without using more than half a braincell. Again, permission to just do the baby admin things while I have a podcast on – things like deleting old emails, stuff I’ve not usually got time for – makes for a much nicer experience than sitting at the desk saying WHY CAN’T I MAKE THESE THREE THOUSAND WORDS BETTER WHY.
4:30pm
Schlup through rush hour traffic to my Pilates class. I haven’t made it to this class since before Christmas and I’m pleasantly surprised both that it is not totally dark out as I arrive, and that I’m not in agony when at the end of the class… although the 15 minute walk between class and my bus stop does rather suggest my leg muscles will have Opinions tomorrow. The fresh air and exercise helps lift the brain fog too. Damn these health professionals with their good advice.
7:30pm
Gratifyingly, my ARC giveaway has some traction. Faff about online for a bit then spend five minutes checking a reference for my essay before I turn in early because my legs are already really sore. I used to have relatively good muscles, because the best way to manage my joint problems is to keep moving and go to things like Pilates classes. The less I move, the more likely I am to pull a muscle doing something minor, like wriggling my toes. But when I got Extra Tired In New and Worrying Ways, I cut back on classes in case I was overdoing it. No point committing to an hour’s work out when walking for twenty minutes on flat ground leaves me unable to form a sentence. It’s a bit of a vicious circle, because the less I do the less I can do. It’s nice to know I still have leg muscles, and I missed going to the class. And those pesky endorphins really do improve my mood after a day of navigating the new and shitty normal of being Extra Tired in New and Worrying Ways. DAMN those health professionals and their data-based encouragement to keep moving!
10pm
Stop editing. That was a long five minutes. In my defence, every reference has excellent links to other references, all of which I would like to discuss in great detail. It will never not be a great irony that while I usually despise beginning an essay, I can usually get into the swing of it within a working day and then wish I had a higher word count. Also, if I am awake and cognisant enough to edit, I am not going to complain about what time of day it is. Those endorphins really kicked in, huh.
Tuesday 23rd January
7am
Owwwwww. Getting up today feels even more like placing a kitten in a freezer because I can feel every muscle from my abs to my ankles. I assumed my abs had gone to the same place as those random socks. My sore foot is still sore, but I guess the rest of me must be working. Ish.
8am
Work on my essay before external noise – literal noise and also just exposure to the rest of the world – makes my brain fuzzy. To feel better about being out of bed I am wearing a dressing gown over a hoodie plus a beanie hat, and have a blanket on my knees. It isn’t that cold, I just want to be asleep. My building’s water supply may or may not have been impacted by a burst main and I’ve run out of toilet paper, but at least I’m cosy.
9:30am
Get dressed and head to Lidl for toilet paper. Heroically avoid the pastry section.
10:30am
Have a sit down and check emails. There are suspiciously few. Look into a few freelancing options for the summer break, as I am unlikely to be up to working a 40 hour retail role when my university jobs are finished for the year. Do I want to go back to copywriting for a penny per word? No. Do I wish to pay bills? Yes.
11:15am
There is enough water for a cup of tea. More essay edits. I think the end is in sight, because this draft feels tighter and more polished than it did a couple of days ago. If my grades are up to scratch, I can definitely charge more than a penny per word for new clients, but I also miss logging into a main database and selecting a job from the online copywriting gods. Possibly I should offer sensitivity reading for people writing about chronic pain and brain fog. Get distracted from my essay and Google a copywriting company I wrote for (for a penny per word) nine years ago. They still exist and, I suspect, are still paying that rate.
12:15pm
The water in my building is still iffy, so I experiment with a no-boil-no-chopping-minimal-effort crockpot macaroni cheese recipe. I found it on BBC Good Food and when I first tried it a few weeks ago, I realised partway through adding all the ingredients that my crockpot is too small for the recommended quantities. So it became mostly cheese with some added pasta. DELICIOUS. Today I think there’s scope to add frozen vegetables so it’s a bit less rich and a bit more varied than just pasta and cheese, which was so incredibly excellent but also gave me a stomach ache. Kitchen science commences!
12:30pm
The water is off for the foreseeable. Do I wish to go into town to poke around on my essay there? Not really. I can collect bottled water from maintenance , I enjoy having the excuse to put off doing the washing up and I was planning a quiet day apart from the toilet paper trip anyway, because tomorrow will be extremely long. Continue editing down my essay, which has gotten a little bit long because there is more to say than I had anticipated (and I anticipated quite a bit).
1:30pm
Compare essay experiences and water shortage nonsense with my friend A on WhatsApp, and check on the macaroni cheese. It smells delicious and looks like it’s cooking although now I think about it, I am not using macaroni. What do you call not-macaroni macaroni cheese? Pasta Cheese. Penne Cheese. The essay is actually solid, but I am suspicious of how well it is going and will return to it with fresh eyes on Thursday. I have been listening to a lot of classical music and doing a version of the Pomodoro technique as I work, so possibly I have hit Peak Study Skills. Better late in first semester of the final year of undergraduate studies, aged 28, than never.
2pm
The Penne Cheese is delicious but devastatingly not quite cheesy enough. I WILL RETURN TO THE RECIPE. Look into more freelancing opportunities and check in with one of my marketing clients. The essay definitely needs to go to sleep for a while. Essays – and books – are like bread, you need to leave them to rise for a bit.
3:30pm
Go for a walk and bump into a mate. We spend a good ten minutes complaining about people vaping indoors. No one who vapes inside is old enough to remember how rank it was when people smoked cigarettes indoors, we decide, and the kiddies need a cultural reset. I’d forgotten that I used to wash my hair before an evening out, and immediately wash it afterwards too, because an hour in a closed room with smokers made me feel like an ashtray. Oh ye olden times of, er, pre-2007. And, er, today in Europe. My favourite Cultural Moment whenever I get to go to the Mediterranean is that I spend the first two days thinking, ‘Christ but everyone smokes everywhere here. Disgusting. I should have brought more shampoo.’ And then I spend my first two days back in England thinking, ‘Why are people going outside to smoke that’s – oh that’s what they do here. Apart from that little fucker in the corner pretending he isn’t puffing on what looks like a mechanised highlighter EITHER GO OUTSIDE, YOU WEE GOBSHITE, OR OWN YOUR BUBBLEGUM-SCENTED ADDICTION WITH A SENSE OF PRIDE.’
It is possible I am turning into my late grandmother. I am fine with this.
4:15pm
Water is soon to return! Tell myself that after doing more admin (it. never. ends) I can stop for the day, because I really do have a ridiculously early start tomorrow. Spend a few happy hours catching up with Silent Witness and wondering how I would be as a pathologist. Clumsy, I expect. Bad with bereaved relatives.
9pm
Water has not returned. I am too tired to mind.
Wednesday 24th January
5:30am
It is too early to be out of bed. But the shower works and the toilet flushes, so we will focus on that.
6:45am
It is too early to chat to a chatty cabbie.
7:00am
I had forgotten that commuting into London before the rest of the world has finished breakfast is a thing people do, which is weird because I am from a city that, pre-pandemic at least, was almost entirely made up of either commuters or people working out of industrial estates.
9:00am
I had forgotten that I stopped commuting into London before I was a student because it is only fun when the underground runs smoothly and even then… it is not that fun.
10am
I am in a nice hotel enjoying free coffee and I am learning! About higher education! I’m not telling you specifics, because I will not state my university or anything I do within it until I have graduated. Don’t look at me like that, thinking ‘you aren’t a well known creator, why would anyone engage in inappropriate behaviour with you?’ That’s true, I am an author with a teeny tiny audience. A micro-audience. A person would firstly have to find me to form a parasocial relationship with me, and secondly would have to be particularly mentally unwell to fixate to the point that I might be in danger; I barely post selfies and very carefully avoid going into detail about most aspects of my life. But I’ve seen too many creators think along similar lines and then have horrible things happen, so relative anonymity it is.
1pm
I am! Still learning! The free coffee is good. So is the free lunch and chatting to people who are essentially my colleagues. I was a freelancer for so long before my degree that I still sometimes forget people leave school or uni and then get regular jobs with contracts and paid time off. It is nice to remember this. I’ll probably do a combination of freelance and contracted work throughout my career, especially if I’m never up to a 40 hour week and need flexibility around my health, so it’s nice to be reminded that I can still have colleagues, even if I won’t see them as often as I would in an office situation.
4pm
You know what I have missed while living in Uni City instead of Southend? It is easier to get to London from Southend than it is from most places. I miss hopping on the C2C line and stepping into the British Museum two hours later, and then bitching internally about most of what’s inside the British Museum until I hop back on the Central Line to go home.
Buy a meal deal in Sainsbury’s before my train. Big hula hoops: excellent. Sad sandwich: so, so sad.
7:30pm
Back indoors and still grateful for a working shower. Faff about online while my brain quietens down. Tip trail mix all over the floor and try to think of it as fortuitous, because my first job after my assignments are done this semester is to deep clean and properly tidy up my stuff, which has gotten a bit chaotic as I focus my energy on assignments. So I was going to vacuum in a day or two anyway!
But mostly I am just sad about the trail mix.
9:30pm
Pass out.
Thursday 25th January
7:30am
Today I have three items in my planner. One meeting, one essay, one trip to the shops to pick up my new laundry bags. Bonus: use up the carrots in my fridge and do laundry. Today we will play a fun game of How Many Things Can Happen Before Yesterday Catches Up With Us and Instead We Read a Book?
11am
Essay is pretty much done, and I should do laundry. Pop to the shops to pick up my laundry bags. Quite excited to try them out. Truly I have ascended to grownup land.
1pm
Meeting. It is for one of the work roles I have at uni. It stretches on a bit because everyone involved cares about the student experience and is frustrated that ten years ago students weren’t working twenty to thirty hours a week just to cover rent. I still think I’m glad I waited to go until I genuinely wanted to, though.
2:30pm
Final essay read through. My friend A, to whom I sent the draft the other day because they’re interested in the subject matter, is very nice about it. I always have a crisis just before submission that I haven’t written in English, or that what I think is inclusion of theory is actually just me having invented the twenty books and journal articles I waded through as I planned my argument. Part of me thinks you are a professional author, you can bash out three thousand coherent words with some references and a clear argument with relative ease. Part of me thinks you are a professional author, if this is shit then you have literally no excuse.
3:30pm
ESSAY SUBMITTED. Semester, completed. I have no energy left to be excited. Time to invest in the traditional final-deadline-complete afternoon of fucking about on social media and, if I can summon up the will, reading a book. The laundry and cooking is not happening.
8pm
In peak post-deadline fashion, I have almost no energy left whatsoever despite an evening of nothing more strenuous than some WhatsApp messages. I have been in bed since about 5pm. You know what society doesn’t appreciate enough? Pyjamas.
Friday 26th January
7am
Is there such a thing as a deadline hangover? I think so.
8am
Muddle through some admin that I’ve been ignoring and see that there are still spaces on Maggie Stiefvater’s editing workshop in a few weeks. I have some fun money set aside that I will not under any circumstances spend on rent, and the time difference is reasonable (the last workshop I did began at 10pm UK time and finished at 3am). And I do so love the editing process. That wasn’t sarcasm, it’s my favourite bit. I would also like to be a more efficient editor, so I don’t get quite as tired from doing it. I WILL MULL IT OVER TODAY.
9am
Run some errands and make a list of everything I’ve deprioritised during deadlines and now have time to do. I should probably start with using up those carrots before they go mushy. And emails. So. Many. Emails.
11am
Accidentally make coffee so strong even I think I could have put milk in it. Submit some module feedback (I liked them!) and start to figure out a routine for the upcoming three weeks of no classes and a dozen things to do.
1pm
Holocaust Memorial Day event at uni. I have nothing original to say as to why this event is getting more important by the year but, for the record, it is getting more important by the year.
2pm
Cup of tea and play about with some reward ideas for the No. 1 Readers’ Club. Finally dig those carrots out of the fridge and they are crunchier than anticipated, but I’m out all day tomorrow and Sunday I will likely go to yoga then want to read a book and do nothing else, so into the crock pot they go…
4pm
One of my semester break jobs is to do a deep clean and a proper tidy up – I don’t own enough stuff for my things to ever become too chaotic, which is precisely why I don’t want to own any more items than I currently do before I know I’m living somewhere for a good couple of years (this is also why I have to do laundry quite often: I have an extremely small wardrobe). But I have let my bookshelves go a bit mad, and my tote bag full of tote bags looks like it has bred more tote bags. Lack the energy to address either thing and clear out some emails instead. They, too, breed. Book Maggie’s course, because a) I can afford it, b) it will be useful for work and uni and be huge fun and c) I handed both this semester’s assignments in several days before their deadline, so WHY NOT.
4:30pm
Schedule some more chapters of Rotting Trees on Patreon and take care of come loose ends on my marketing client work for the week. Make a start on some of the accumulated clutter on my work surfaces and there wasn’t as many random receipts, stray coins or used up biros as I thought there were. Minimalism! Helpful for people who naturally create clutter but don’t have the energy to deal with it! (I am like a pound shop Marie Kondo.)
7pm
Crockpot, cooked. Working week, complete. See that Our Flag Means Death is coming back to the BBC soon. There are small mercies, I think, then remember it’s been cancelled.
Saturday 25th January
6am
Up for work. The sunrise is stunning.
12:30pm
Rush home (okay, hurry, my foot still hurts) and get ready for my first get-dressed-nicely-and-meet-a-friend event since my birthday back in September, with my friend T.
2pm
T and I started a little end-of-January afternoon tea tradition last year when we were discussing how January just doesn’t end. We’re usually too busy with work or academics to hang out over Christmas anyway, and it works out better for budgeting to do something at the end of January. Plus it tends to be quieter. We inhale an afternoon tea (the best cake is carrot cake) in a nice hotel and catch up. More of our conversation revolves around pay tiers and moving for work than I’d have anticipated back in our A Level days.
4pm
We head to a bar and settle in for an afternoon of putting the world to rights as we investigate the extremely varied two-for-one cocktail menu. Why do most of these beverages look like they came from a Disney film about magic potions? Instagram, probably.
7pm
Just as we’re thinking of ordering food, our waiter tells us he needs to bring us the bill because our table is booked for 7:30pm. We look around as we clutch the multiple drinks he just delivered and conclude that it probably would have been more professional of him to offer to move us to one of the many, many empty tables available because then we would quite probably have kept drinking… and ordered a lot of food. Instead we hoover up the remaining drinks at a speed that can only be described as ’18 year olds on their first ever night out’ and navigate our way across town to Smash Burger.
7:30pm
We conclude that Smash Burger chips are excellent and we would probably have spent twice as much in the original bar, so sucks for them that they hurried us out. Sober up ridiculously quickly for two people who recently inhaled half a litre of magical potions.
9pm
See T onto a train and make my way home. Is 9pm when most students go out for the evening? I think it might be. Am I content to curl up with a cup of tea and the radio at this time because the fatigue set in over chips? Absolutely.
Sunday 28th January
8am
Awake after about ten hours of sleep. Don’t have a hangover, although that might be because I spend quite a lot of my waking hours in a fugue state anyway so I can’t tell the difference.
9:30am
Head out to breakfast and yin yoga. Very pleased to have remembered my wallet, key, water bottle and – wait, my yoga mat is indoors. Go back for it and risk missing the bus and waiting an hour, or go on knowing I’ll definitely have time for breakfast if I leave it? My desire for pastry wins.
10am
Bump into an old flatmate in town, and stop in a café for what might be the world’s largest pan aux raisin. Mull through Call Down the Hawk and journal a bit. I try to take Sundays off so I can spend some time resetting my brain before the week starts, but I’ve ended up covering at work for all three Sundays in January so far, so this is my first full day off since New Year’s Day. I don’t mind working Sundays, because the work is extremely pleasant and very well paid for a student job. But I do enjoy my Sunday morning coffee-and-journal ritual.
11:15am
Yoga class. My stamina is definitely down the toilet, but yin yoga is two thirds resting and deep breathing so I don’t feel as bad about myself as I would if I’d tried to go for a hike and had to stop partway through. I come to yoga to stretch a bit and build some muscles, sure, but mostly I come to meditate. It feels more like brain rest than it does body exercise, although I do have to be really careful not to do anything that will flair my back pain. No one needs a yoga class interrupted by some idiot overdoing it and having their lower back go into spasm.
1pm
Mentally I feel calmer, but also I am now very much in a fugue state. This would probably have happened without the yoga class or the afternoon out, because it always takes a couple of days for post-deadline exhaustion to really catch up with me. Fix lunch and try to figure out if I’m too tired to do anything, or if there’s enough left in the tank to do a bit of cleaning. Those trail mix crumbs are haunting me.
4pm
The bathroom is clean, my bed is remade, my desk is clean, random detritus has been discarded. It’s not even dark yet. Whack some laundry on so I won’t have to bother tomorrow. I need to work up to lifting the hoover, but basically I am Mary Poppins.
(I did not clean for three hours. I cleaned for one hour total, with many breaks to catch up with my favourite YouTubers and poke about online. During this time I remember that a lot of media outlets leave me feeling icky so I log out or block a couple of sites, so next time I try to access them I’ll remember that I’d be happier picking up a long form newspaper, or a book.)
5pm
Rewatch a bit of Our Flag Means Death and microwave dinner. I may have to return to Lidl this coming week. Why does the food… disappear.
7pm
Snuggle down with Call Down the Hawk. I think the Dreamer Trilogy might be my favourite of the Raven Cycle-Dreamer Trilogy world, but next time I read The Raven Cycle that will be my favourite.
10pm
Pass out with the smug knowledge that I can face Monday.
This was a typical deadline season week in terms of not having very much in the planner except for meeting the deadline. I tend to go into semi-hibernation as I edit, whether it’s for a book or an essay, and then schedule in something fun, like meeting a friend, so a week or a fortnight will be ninety percent Hermit Mode, followed by ten percent Eyeliner On Point Shall We Get Another Drink Mode. Light at the end of the tunnel and all that. I wouldn’t normally trot to London at 7am, especially these days given how tired I’ve been, but it was nice to dip a toe back into commuter life. Earlier in the semester I have more classes and spend more time picking my way through required readings. Not fun to read about, because I am extremely slow. I sometimes have busier weeks in terms of working on book promotion or checking in with my marketing clients, but again that went on the back burner while I had a deadline. This wasn’t an exciting week, but it was quite a realistic one. Maybe I will do another Week in the Life before February of 2027…
Look after yourselves!
Francesca
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Francesca's Thoughts 