What did you do at the weekend?

It’s a seemingly innocuous question we ask and are asked pretty much every Monday of our lives.

Some Mondays I feel a bit embarrassed when the answer is that I got up early to go to the supermarket before it got busy, did three loads of washing and replaced the dodgy hinge on the bathroom door. It’s not exactly glamorous, is it? Not one for the Insta story.

And when others are sharing their weekends away in Spain drinking wine and waltzing about in a t-shirt in February I’m happy for them but it can make you feel a bit rubbish about yourself and your life. How comes they get to do the nice things? What about me?

The weeks when I have done something a bit different, a bit special, I really lay it on thick, bigging everything up and basking in the attention of my friends and colleagues, knowing that it’ll be their turn some other week soon. It feels good to share that I went somewhere new, saw something not everyone has seen, ate something unusual. And people say, ‘Wow that sounds incredible. I’d love to do that’, and I feel great. My life is great. I am great.

“And you could see it and you could actually see how uplifted they were they felt instead of the underdog they felt equal.”

No one is keeping score. I probably don’t notice that not everyone takes their turn. Not everyone gets to off-set the mundane reports with the occasional break from the norm. And if you’re the person feeling a bit rubbish about your life every week, with no hope of your moment in the spotlight, it grinds you down. You can start to believe that you’re not a person who gets to do nice things. That’s not for you.

That’s a tough feeling to sit with as an adult, to try to rationalise and push back on. For children its much harder to understand that it’s not about you.

“My little boys say silly things. Like, for Christmas, I only got this and you know, that naughty boy in class, he got a PlayStation, does Father Christmas think he's better than me? You know, where they judge themselves on that sometimes”.

 If that doesn’t make you sad, I don’t think we can be friends. Rail against our culture of comparison if you want, but if you think a little boy whose family can’t afford to get him a fancy Christmas present should be feeling less than another then maybe stop reading here.

 In my work at Family Holiday Charity, I hear stories describing this sense of low self-worth often. Almost half the families we support have never had a holiday. They’re living on a low income and coping with a bunch of things that make life extra tough, affect their confidence and isolate them from the world around them. Their weekend has been the same for years without a trip out or a new experience to mix it up and give them something positive to share when the dreaded question comes around on Monday.  

 Now that I’m four years in, if the only positive thing to come out of our work was a chance for people to enjoy answering that question, then I honestly think for me it would be enough.

“Mum said that one of the children was able to write about his experience as part of his school homework. That has definitely boosted his ego in that it gave him something new to share as opposed to previously when he never had anything to say when others are sharing about their own holiday & exciting experiences they had with their families”.

Because we all know that enjoying answering that question isn’t really about the question. It’s about feeling you have value, taking up a bit of space, having something positive to share. It’s about feeling as good as the people around you.

 That’s a pretty powerful feeling.

“Dad's feeling a lot better about himself. So it's surprising how a holiday can whip that around, you know…. straight away, he's talking more positively about everything. So it's not all sort of mundane, because it was it's quite hard to get somebody motivated.”