Who Are You on a Wednesday Afternoon?
On routines, possibility, and the other versions of ourselves.
by Lindsay Eldridge · Sat 26 Sep 2026
I used to work a 9-5 job, although, let’s be real, it was actually 8-5 with a one-hour lunch break. And that one hour was never, ever long enough.
The funny thing is, this was my absolute dream job. I was working for an international study abroad company in North Carolina called Broadreach, planning multi-week trips for students all over the world. People rode their bikes to work, there were dogs in the office, and you could wear whatever you wanted. This was around 2012, well before that kind of work culture had really made its way to the East Coast. I was thrilled to be there. I just struggled with the “being there” part.
I will never forget my first day. Everyone was welcoming me and showing me around, and then someone pointed across the room and said, “That’s your desk.” I remember looking at it and thinking, Oh, shit. Am I supposed to sit there?
Like…all day?
It had somehow never occurred to me that having an office job meant I would actually have to sit in an office, and I had a miniature internal freak-out. At the end of my first week, I walked outside and let out this enormous exhale. Unfortunately, two of my managers happened to be standing there, and all I could think was, Dang it. They saw me. They had just watched me exhale like I had escaped from something wretched.
I did eventually adjust. I worked there for seven and a half years, and I loved a lot about it (it was a group of the most fun and passionate people!), but I was constantly trying to figure out how to make the structure work for me. I wanted to have fun, keep learning, get outside, and find ways to make a regular Wednesday feel a little less regular.
During those years, I got my Pilates certification. I convinced my coworkers to come in early so I could teach them Pilates in the parking lot and get my teaching hours, and eventually I started teaching classes on some of my lunch breaks at BarreUp, a studio whose ethos I love (you're accepted here)!
This meant I wore leggings to work a lot, which is where one of my favorite games began. Sometimes I would use my lunch break to go grocery shopping. First of all, I thought this was an absolutely brilliant life hack. If it was winter, I could buy groceries at lunch, leave them in my cold car, and avoid going to the grocery store after work. Genius.
What I really loved was walking around the grocery store at 1:00 on a Wednesday afternoon wearing leggings. At the time, leggings weren't as widely accepted as they are now, in 2026. I would push my cart around thinking, Look at me. I’m at the grocery store in the middle of the day on a Wednesday wearing leggings. Who am I?
Then I would make things up. Maybe I was an emergency flight nurse and this was my day off. Maybe I taught Pilates full-time and this was just what I wore every day. Maybe I didn’t work in an office at all. I wondered what the other people in the grocery store thought I did.
Obviously, nobody in the grocery store was thinking about me. They were buying avocados. But that wasn’t really the point: for an hour, I got to try on another version of my life.
I started doing the same thing with my work schedule. Pretty early on, I told my bosses that I was struggling with the traditional schedule. I wanted to hike and explore, and I wanted more than an hour in the middle of my day. Incredibly, they let me experiment!
At first, I tried hiking in the morning, coming into work at 10, and then staying until 7. I quickly realized this was not particularly revolutionary. I had just moved the exact same problem two hours later. Eventually, I tried something different. I would work for five hours, take a three-hour lunch break, and then come back for the final three. Sometimes I would drive to a park and go hiking for two hours in the middle of a weekday. And there it was again, that same feeling..
Look at me. I hike in the middle of the day. This is just what I do!
There was something almost delicious about it because, for those couple of hours, I wasn’t imagining that I was some completely different person. I was still me. I was just experiencing a version of myself whose life worked differently. I think there’s something important about that. We tend to put possibility somewhere in the future. We tell ourselves that someday we could do something, maybe when the kids are older or when we have more time. Or, you can just try it on!
Go hiking at noon on a Wednesday, take yourself to lunch, or spend a morning writing even if you don’t call yourself a writer. You could even go somewhere without waiting for someone else to come with you. The freedom in that!
Do one small thing that belongs to a different version of you, not because you’re pretending, but because that version of you might already exist.
Maybe that person just doesn’t get very much airtime yet.
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