sunday is the woman i want to be

i stumbled across it on pinterest, of all places—a simple text post on a neutral background: “sunday is the woman i want to be.” i saved it instinctively, the way you save things that hit a nerve you didn’t realize was raw. i didn’t think much of it at the time. it looked like the kind of thing you’d find on someone’s vision board, tucked between photos of tulips and coffee cups and women wearing oversized sweaters reading in sunlit rooms. but later, when i went back to it, i realized it wasn’t just cute or aesthetic. it was something i hadn’t known i was trying to say. sunday, if i was honest, was exactly the version of myself i had been quietly chasing for years without ever putting it into words.

i think a lot about sundays. not the rushed sundays, where you’re cramming grocery runs between meal prepping and pretending you’re excited for monday. not the anxious sundays, the ones hijacked by the slow panic that creeps in around 5pm. i mean the real sundays—the slow, golden ones. the mornings where you wake up without a to-do list pressed against your forehead. the afternoons where you wander through parks or read without checking your phone. the evenings where you cook something simple and imperfect and it feels like enough. sundays have a different texture. they are slower, softer, a little lazy in the best way. they don’t perform. they don’t demand. they just are. and the more i thought about it, the more i realized: that’s the woman i want to be. someone who exists gently but fully inside her life. someone whose worth isn’t tied to how much she can produce, fix, prove, or optimize.

it’s funny, because for most of my life, i worshiped a very different model. the model where life was about forward motion, measurable improvement, tangible upgrades. i wasn’t trying to live like a sunday; i was trying to live like a monday on espresso. i thought success lived in acceleration. in bullet journaling your future self into existence. in having answers ready for every awkward dinner party question about what you’re “working on.” i thought that if i could just outrun the slow parts—the parts where nothing big was happening, where no one was clapping, where growth wasn’t photogenic—i would eventually land in some shiny, perfect version of myself. it was easy to confuse speed with meaning. after all, we live in a world that rewards urgency and visibility more than it rewards depth or consistency.

the internet didn’t help. one scroll through linkedin or instagram would convince anyone that life is a competition you’re supposed to be winning by 27. every accomplishment felt smaller once it was uploaded into the endless feed of other people’s curated milestones. ordinary days didn’t count unless you could spin them into content. hobbies were only valuable if they could be monetized. downtime was allowed, but only if it made you more productive later. even joy had to be efficient.

sunday, somehow, refuses all of that. sunday isn’t building a personal brand. sunday isn’t trying to scale. sunday isn’t interested in becoming an optimized version of herself. sunday is a woman who eats strawberries out of the carton and forgets to take a picture. she reads bad novels because they’re fun. she wears the same soft sweatshirt three days in a row without apology. she has nothing to prove, and because of that, she is infinitely more magnetic than the version of me who is trying so hard to impress a world that is mostly scrolling past anyway.

i wonder sometimes why it took me so long to want this version of life. part of it, i think, is how we were taught to think about success. in school, in work, in early adulthood, the message was clear: keep moving. collect gold stars. build a resume, build a portfolio, build a life that looked enviable enough to feel worth living. and there’s nothing inherently wrong with ambition; i still have it, stubborn and lively as ever. i still want to write things that matter, build things that last, leave something behind that feels real. but i no longer want to build those things at the expense of myself. i don’t want to wake up at forty having checked every external box but feeling hollow inside. i don’t want a life that is impressive but brittle.

i want a life that is deeply livable. i want a life that feels the way a good sunday feels—rooted, unrushed, richly uneventful in the best way. i want to walk slower. cook worse. laugh harder. sleep longer. text back when i feel like it. stretch conversations past their “usefulness.” celebrate the kind of work that feels nourishing even if it’s not scalable. make art that isn’t marketable. say yes to slow mornings and imperfect dinners and phone calls that don’t lead anywhere strategic. trust that small, slow things grow big and deep when you let them. trust that maybe it’s okay if you’re not on fire all the time. maybe it’s okay to simmer.

part of the reason sunday feels so powerful is because it’s ordinary. and we live in a world that treats ordinary life like a consolation prize. the myth of exceptionalism runs deep—the idea that a worthwhile life has to be unusual, that happiness is reserved for the people who figure out how to hack, monetize, or optimize their existence. it’s exhausting. and it’s not even true. study after study—psychological, sociological, longitudinal—says the opposite. the harvard study of adult development, for example, one of the longest studies on happiness ever conducted, found that long-term well-being wasn’t tied to success or status but to close relationships, emotional resilience, and a sense of belonging. ordinary things. small things. the things you can miss if you’re too busy becoming somebody.

maybe that’s what sunday knows—that life is happening now, not at the next achievement checkpoint. that you are already inside the thing you think you have to earn. that the people who love you aren’t auditing your life for excellence. they just want to sit next to you while you eat bad takeout and talk about nothing important.

sometimes i catch myself still slipping into the old thinking. i open my email too early. i mentally rework my five-year plan while brushing my teeth. i imagine an alternate life where i’m sharper, quicker, shinier. i can still feel the pull to be impressive, to be seen. it doesn’t fully go away. but when i feel it start to tighten around me, i think of sunday. the way sunday holds itself—not lazily, but gently. not idly, but wisely. sunday doesn’t apologize for moving slowly. sunday knows that slowing down isn’t the same as falling behind. it’s just a different kind of winning.

maybe the woman i’m trying to become isn’t building a brand-new life from scratch. maybe she’s just learning to live differently inside the life she already has. to stop treating rest like a transaction. to stop mistaking speed for substance. to stop measuring her worth by how visible her success is to strangers. maybe she’s just learning how to stay.

sunday is the woman i want to be. she believes in long conversations and bad novels and soft clothes. she believes in slow dinners and messy rooms and friendships that stretch wide and weird. she believes that joy is worth pursuing even if no one is watching. she believes that life is allowed to be good without needing to be groundbreaking. she believes that enough is a skill worth mastering. and she believes that growing quietly, like ivy or roots, is still growing.

i don’t know if i’ll ever become her fully. i suspect it’s a lifelong practice. but on the good days, when i remember, when i move slowly enough to hear my own thoughts, i catch glimpses of her. in the way i savor my coffee. in the way i let myself wander instead of march. in the way i stop refreshing, stop comparing, stop needing to prove.

and when i do, it feels like a small, ordinary miracle.

like a life worth living.

like coming home.