1. Commit to taking a full shower. Standing over a sink of lukewarm water and scrubbing here (your crotch) and there (your armpits) with a crusty, old hand towel may be good enough to get you through the day, but face it, you’ve been festering since Friday. Despair is a stinky cologne.

Turn on the water. Let it warm up a bit. Wait until it’s as warm as you’re hoping to feel. Undress yourself away from the mirror. If eyes are windows into the soul, it’s best to avoid them for now; even your own can willfully betray you. Odds are if you’ve been neglecting basic hygiene, you’ve probably been avoiding anything that might lift your spirit or positively alter your mood. You’ve chosen darkness and that’s fine, but you also deserve to be clean.

Once you’re in the shower, you have the option to get right down to cleaning up, or you can choose to sit in the tub and cry for a bit. Crying in the shower can be as satisfying as it is economical because if you’re not using tissues to mop up your tears, you’re not only saving money, you’re reducing your carbon footprint and that’s a good thing. Counting up good things can help you find your emotional footing. So go ahead, mark that as one even if you don’t give a shit about the environment. It’s a start.

Now that you’re back on your feet, don’t let the soap passively run down your body. It’s time to take matters into your own hands and scrub yourself back to life. Inside and outside. Get in there. Feel free to go deep. Remember, that drain’s there to collect your tears too.

2. Wrap yourself in a fresh towel and head over to your closet to pick out something nice to wear. Put down the scalpy smelling turban. Ditch your baggy butt sweats. Toss the stretched out hoodie. Those clothes didn’t comfort you anyway. If they did, they wouldn’t smell like sadness, that complex scent of tears, coffee and snot. All of it, into the laundry bag.

Whatever you choose, it doesn’t have to be anything special, but it should make you feel that way even as ugh-worthy as “feeling special” sounds when said aloud.

3. Stop. Before you do anything else, eat something. Since you’ve depleted yourself with a steady diet of time sucking Wikipedia rabbit holes, dead celebrity gossip, and a parade of your own insecurities, you probably haven’t gotten around to actually eating anything. You can be sad or you can be angry, but being sad and angry is as useful as being both slow and stupid. You are capable of better than that; you breathe through your nose.

4. Some people do not respond well to being force-fed made-for-internet-sharing affirmations and no sunset, no flowering field, no misappropriated quote, not even a rainbow or any amount of kitten swapping will change that about you. And that’s okay. Good god is that okay. But the weekend is over and that means you’re going to behave in a world that has blissfully turned away from expressing real feelings.

Sometimes you cry a lot for reasons you can’t quite explain but can’t quite help either. Other times the world is too much: too loud in its opinions, too busy for reasons you can’t understand, too ignorant to open itself to its own vulnerability. Your own voice sounds like a recorded version of itself. You’re unsure of what the following week will bring because you’re uncertain of what it is that you want. You wonder if there’s any way to ever feel complete or whole while knowing that there is no way to feel either ever.

You are, for better or worse, one of those too-sensitive-for-everyday-life kinds of people and no amount of emotional inventorying will ever help you determine how you’ve managed to spend another weekend away without having gone anywhere in particular.

5. Now, here’s the difficult part: you’re going to leave your house. Before you think to stop the clocks, cloak the mirrors, shutter the windows and climb back into your crusty cocoon, slow down. 
 
 Unlock the front door. Walk outside. Despite what your more socially lubricated friends will tell you, it’s actually easier to talk to someone when you’re walking, especially when that someone is yourself. Somehow the thoughts arrive more honestly when you’re putting one foot in front of the other instead of following one drink after another which can and will lead to the inescapable feeling of terror that so many try to avoid by cutting loose on the weekends only to feel even more bloated by the hopeless helpless nature of despair come Sunday evening. But that’s a shell game and you know it. You know something more than they do. You know this: Monday, no matter who’s trying to outrun it, still comes for everyone.