You Weren't Meant To Live Life On Repeat

There’s a kind of day I keep having, and I only notice it after it’s gone.

I wake up. I do the things. The things are fine. And then it’s night.

And I can’t tell that day apart from the one before it. They blur. Not because anything went wrong. Because nothing did.

I thought, for a long time, that the blur was the problem. That if I could just shake things up, throw something new in, I’d start feeling the days again instead of sleeping through them awake. And maybe that’s true some of the time.

But I’ve started to wonder if I had it backwards, at least for me.

What is amusing me is the fact that repeating itself isn’t the enemy. I repeat brushing my teeth and I don’t mourn it. I make the same coffee the same way most mornings and it’s one of the few things that still feels like mine. Repetition is just the floor. It’s the thing that holds still so something else can move. Take it away and you don’t get freedom. It gets kind of exhausting weather where every small choice has to be made fresh.

So if it’s not the repeating, what is it.

I think it’s repeating without ever turning the thing over. Doing the loop with the lights off. There’s a version of the same Tuesday that I sleep through, and there’s a version where I’m actually inside it, noticing the light come across the floor a little differently than yesterday, catching that my partner said something they’ve never said before in the middle of a conversation I’ve had a thousand times.

Same shape.

Completely different to be in.

I caught myself once driving a road I drive constantly, and I realized I had no memory of the last four turns. My hands had done it. I wasn’t there. And the scary part wasn’t the driving, it was the suspicion that I’d been doing whole years that way.

Present for the parts that surprised me. Absent for everything that recurred.

And recurrence is most of a life.

Allow me to tell this. The big events take care of themselves. You show up for the wedding, the funeral, the move. It’s the ordinary repeating middle that you have to actually choose to attend. Those never announce themselves. Never grabs you by the collar. It just quietly offers itself every morning and waits to see if you’ll come.

I don’t have a fix for this.

I’m not even sure it’s a problem to be fixed so much as a thing to keep noticing.

Some weeks I’m there and some weeks I drive the road asleep, and I’ve stopped beating myself up about the asleep weeks because the beating-up is just another loop I’d be running with the lights off.

What I keep landing on, and I might land somewhere else by next month, is that the title gets it slightly wrong. It’s not that I wasn’t meant to live on repeat. Repeat is most of it. It’s that the repeat was supposed to be the place I lived. Not the place I waited out. The not-looking is the cage.

And the strange part is how small the turn is. I can’t change much about my Tuesday. But I can be in it. That’s almost nothing.

And it’s most of what I’ve got.