On the freedom to be free on a ‘free’ day

Today was the first Sunday that I found myself at home for a whole day in over 45 days, and as soon as I woke up in the morning, anxiety took over me. The concept of a ‘free day’ has been alien to me as long as I have understood my place in the world. Sundays, or free days, are supposedly meant for you to catch up with your loved ones, to catch up with what you love, or perhaps, if you care about self-care, to catch up with yourself. But for me, these free days, as rare as they are, have only been about catching a breath.. to plan what the rest of my days are going to look like.
For as long as I can remember, I have struggled to not ‘waste time’. I have always felt the need to cram up every possible free minute of my life with daily, weekly, monthly, life-ly things from one, two or many to-do lists, or as I ended up doing today, making a new and improved to-do list that purged the old and sundry little to-do lists of the long forgotten past into one gorgeous, miraculous, infinite and possibly impossible to achieve list of all the things for me to do… once I get back to my life after finishing the to-do list. Yes, I am, as they say, ‘extra’.
Between Uber rides and traffic and those opportune moments when your cellphone’s battery dies, I have often tried making sense of why I am so lost, existentially as it may be, whenever confronted with time to spend. Why is it so difficult for me to just be ‘free’ on a ‘free day’, to not have a plan, a goal, a mission, a to-do list or a destiny to achieve, to be without responsibility, accountability, obligation or even authority, to not be confined to making decisions or choices or commitments to TV shows that must be seen, screens that must be scrolled, stories that must be swiped and work that must be determined important enough to be gotten over with immediately, so that I can go from being the jack of all the pending tasks of my life, to finally, at some point, being the master of none.
I have come to realise that this may simply be because, as a product of a middle class upbringing, you are not afforded freedom. Freedom has always been for those with so much money so that it is luxury, or for those with so little so that it is possibility. But middle class male aspiration has never been concerned with freedom, the aspiration, in fact, has been to be free from it: to always be busy, to always have something to do, to always be hustling, to always be working, so as to always be earning.
The aspiration then, comes both from attaining the fantasy that is freedom, and from not falling to the fear of being free, and lies somewhere firmly in between: in bridging that divide between possibility and luxury, no matter how many Sundays it takes.
It’s a divide ingrained so deeply in us that bridging it seems to be both a duty and a burden, so much so that disregarding it is not strength, but guilt. Or in my case, anxiety. The anxiety that comes from not doing enough, being enough, having enough or trying enough to reach that place where being free is neither fear nor fantasy, just a matter-of-fact fact. Where an off-day doesn’t come with an existential crisis and where a Sunday is just a Sunday, and not so much an essay.
Some day, I hope to have the luxury of overcoming this divide, but this Sunday, I have succumbed to its possibilities again.