Happy last all-my-mornings-are-Mondays-stuck-in-an-endless-February Monday to all who celebrate 🤍📇
For those who do not celebrate and consequently have no idea what I am talking about, I am referencing a lyric from Fortnight, the lead single from Taylor Swift’s eleventh studio album THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT. TTPD’s primary topic is heartbreak, expressed via themes such as anger, betrayal, death, delusion, escapism, grief, longing and mourning. While promoting TTPD, Taylor had this to say about its lead single, Fortnight, in her Amazon Music commentary on the album:
Fortnight is a song that exhibits a lot of the common themes that run throughout this album. One of which being fatalism — longing, pining away, lost dreams. I think that it’s a very fatalistic album in that there are lots of very dramatic lines about life or death. ‘I love you, it’s ruining my life.’ These are very hyperbolic, dramatic things to say. It’s that kind of album.
For my first Mental Health Monday post of the year, which happens to fall on the last Monday in February, it is only fitting to write about how it feels to live life like all your mornings are Mondays stuck in an endless February.
Mondays are widely considered the most dreaded day of the week, symbolising the end of a reprieve and the start of a tedious, exhausting or unhappy routine. My distaste for Mondays runs so fucking deep I even included it in the About section of the blog I wrote in 2018:
February may be one of the hottest and driest months in Kenya, but in America February is one of the coldest months of the year. Using a month associated with cold, dark, gloomy weather to describe a never-ending period signifies a long, monotonous, bleak period of emotional hardship, and highlights the feeling of being trapped in a depressed state where time feels stagnant. A feeling not unique to Taylor because grief – the emotional response to any significant, perceived, or anticipated loss – is a universal and unavoidable experience of being human.
‘All my mornings are Mondays stuck in an endless February’ is an example of why Taylor’s writing is often described as “specific to her but universal to all.” Her songwriting is widely recognised for its diaristic, highly specific nature, yet it resonates globally because she anchors these personal narratives in fundamental, universal human emotions like love, heartbreak, jealousy and nostalgia. And when it comes to Fortnight, I resonated not just with the lyric in today’s feature image, but with the entire song because the narrator is, to put it bluntly, not well. I mean, just look at the lyrics to the first verse:
I was supposed to be sent away
But they forgot to come and get me
I was a functioning alcoholic
‘Til nobody noticed my new aesthetic
All of this to say I hope you’re okay
But you’re the reason
And no one here’s to blame
But what about your quiet treason?
Those lyrics showcase emotional volatility, intense loneliness, and a “new aesthetic” of unhealthy, chaotic behaviour that went largely unnoticed, even though the narrator’s substance use was a cry for help and an attempt to be truly seen.
Fortnight was my most played song of 2024, partly because TTPD was my most played album that year and I tend to play albums from top to bottom, in the order the artist intended me to hear it.
But it was also my most played song because 2024 was the year I became a functioning alcoholic ’til nobody noticed my new aesthetic. I resonated with Fortnight so fucking hard that I made it my alarm tone, and it was my alarm tone for almost two years until it was replaced last December by Opalite.
Changing my alarm tone from Fortnight to Opalite mirrors Taylor’s positive shift in mental and emotional health between TTPD and her next album, The Life of a Showgirl. While TTPD was described as a raw, honest look at miserable times, anxiety and heartbreak, TLOAS represents a shift toward contentment, joy and gratitude. This significant shift from emotional, high-anxiety vulnerability to a more confident, mature and content state of mind marks a pivot towards reclaiming her narrative after a period of intense, often chaotic, public scrutiny and personal heartbreak. It signals a conscious decision to stop dwelling on past, tumultuous relationships and instead focus on the present, with Showgirl allowing Taylor to reframe her past traumas, transforming them into a source of power rather than victimisation.
When I started the blog, I only hated Mondays (though I sometimes thought Tuesday was Monday’s ugly cousin), but as my mental health declined that feeling deteriorated from a simple distaste for Mondays, to a distaste for mornings in general, to a distaste for life itself.
Wednesday was originally my favourite day of the week, because:
Lol. Jk. Because:
But the less I enjoyed my life, the faster it seemed to barrel toward Sunday and the inevitable Sunday scaries. For anyone unfamiliar with the term, Sunday scaries is that spike of anxiety that creeps in as the weekend winds down and Monday looms. It is the dread of alarms, inboxes, responsibilities, expectations… all of it.
And let me tell you, I would get the absolute worst case of the Sunday scaries! Initially that feeling of dread over the upcoming week would rise with the shadows as night fell, but as my mental health declined the Scaries stopped waiting for nightfall to rear its fugly head. Once a thing of the night, the Scaries began to appear earlier and earlier. First it was 6 p.m., then 5, then 4… a monster in my home, advancing relentlessly and swallowing Sunday whole.
The Scaries were the reason I would be in bed by 9 or 10 p.m. on Sunday night, only to lie there for hours because my mind refused to shut the fuck up. The thought of another Monday, another week, kept me from falling asleep until 2 or 3 a.m., and when I woke I was hella anxious, often without knowing why.
According to Dr. Gabor Maté, the way that fear shows up in most people’s lives is in the form of anxiety where it is no longer fear of a specific thing, it is just fear of the world. That fear of the world is the reason I would often wake up in a body sounding the alarm without cause. Nights would haunt the mornings and I would trudge through Monday exhausted and hollow. I would get home after work and get into bed early for a proper night of sleep, and some days it worked. But most days, no matter how early I got into bed, my mind refused to let me sleep before midnight. My body demanded rest but my mind insisted on its own cruel timetable. I lived like this for years, my mental health worsening with every year after the pandemic, until I hit rock bottom in 2025.
But I have been working on getting my shit together, one day at a time, ever since turning 38 on 3.8 and, by every meaningful measure, I have moved from identifying as a person in crisis to one in recovery.
Now I no longer get the Sunday scaries and I rarely wake up anxious for no reason. I still wake up anxious on occasion, but it is no longer without reason. My body does not wake up braced for impact anymore and I cannot overstate how life-changing that is. For the first time in my life, I actually enjoy Mondays, seeing them as a chance to Begin Again with each new week that life gifts me.
After years of dancing through the lightning strikes, sleepless in the onyx night, now the sky is Opalite and I just love that for me 💁♀️💅❤️🔥
Lwile the Leo 