Treacle Days

This article first appeared on Medium on April 24th, 2019

Today’s a Treacle Day.

As was yesterday. And the day before that.

Today’s a day when the simplest of tasks seems insurmountable, when I must, apparently, drag my limbs through some oozing, viscous mass each time I rise from a chair, or lift the coffee pot to the tap. The hours of the morning have slipped past me as I sit, lumpen, heavy, a rock squatting stolid in a stream. My laptop glows impotent beside me.

I have my list, at least, that’s something: it ladders down the page of my notebook, stark and uninviting. I have many things to do. Work that needs to be finished, some editing: a piece I promised by the end of the week. Yesterday I tried to generate ideas for the latter, but the prompt merely rolled around my empty head like a marble, and my page yawns open still, accusingly.

I have tried to formulate plans for Treacle Days. I am, after all, accustomed to them by now.

I should do something, I tell myself, because something is better than nothing.

I give myself small tasks, short time frames: I will spend half an hour editing, I say, and then I will spend half an hour on the new piece. I know that small, manageable targets are more likely to be achieved, but invariably, it is the starting which trips me up, and so I sit, and fret that I am not, in fact, beginning, and the minutes, the hours, whisper by hollow and unused.

Tough love is what I ought give myself, I think. I should simply buck my ideas up. Now, wouldn’t that be nice? If I could merely coax- or threaten- myself into renewed activity, productivity?

You know what I’m about to say: it doesn’t quite work out like that. Of course I know this, know my brain, know how anxiety can pool around me until I’m quite paralysed, quite captured within the turgid stickiness of a particular day, an insect caught in amber.

Perhaps tomorrow will be better. Or, perhaps-it shan’t.

I test my limbs: still heavy. I glance at the laptop.

I decide to write something. A few words, at least. Mere minutes. A brief fluttering over the keys, better than none at all.

Something, after all, I remind myself- something is better than nothing.