What do you do when you have a shitty day?
Me…
I let myself feel it. I don’t bury it (anymore) or pretend everything is fine. Sometimes I don’t even believe everything will work out and be OK because, well, sometimes it does just get worse.
I could say I always “count my blessings” and list gratitudes… blah blah blah… But the truth is I don’t always. Sometimes I bury myself in a chair under a blanket and cry. Sometimes I grab one of our cats and cry into her fur until she practically scratches my eyes out to be let down.
Now in the past I’ve been ridiculed for allowing myself to feel. Like many women (and humans), I’ve been accused of just creating drama or crying about nothing. Some people have made told me I should just be a robot and not show any “negative” emotion at all, because only happy emotion should be shown.
But you know what? I’m calling BULLSHIT on that right now. Because we’re humans, we’re emotional creatures. We’re not “always happy” emotional creatures, we’re EMOTIONAL creatures. That means we’re built, engineered even, to feel all the feels.
All. Of. Them.
That’s right, even the “bad” ones.
I’ve learned if I just push the crap under the rug or put on a fake smile to “push through,” I’m actually putting a cork on a bottle that’s been shaken up and is ready to explode. That energy has to go somewhere. Yes, it has to be “let go,” AND it’s healthy to feel it first.
I mean if you refuse to let yourself feel the bad, how would you ever know what good feels like? Without the ying, how would you know the yang even exists? If everything is always good, how would you know it’s good unless you had evil to compare it to?
Instead of pushing my feelings down and bottling them up into a bomb that could be set off by any trigger at any moment, I’m learning to let myself feel. To let myself vent, let out the frustration and then giving myself permission to take a break to reset instead of just shifting gears to “get my mind off it.”
I’ll admit, today was scary. Like some of my worst, deepest fears surfacing scary. And in the process of letting myself feel the fear and letting the tears out instead of pretending I’m fine, I released.
Most of the day was still pretty much hell. But a couple good things happened – BIG good things – that I can now look back on as I lay in bed ready to close my eyes on this almost-as-horrid-as-I-felt-it-was-at-the-time-but-not-really-THAT-bad day.
And I can rest knowing that tomorrow is yet another chance for a fresh start and a better day.
Even if it seems like most of 2020’s days have been this way… there’s always hope of a new day tomorrow when the sun comes up… again.
Because despite our deepest fears and shittiest days, somehow that sun just keeps on rising over and over again.
Like it knows something we have yet to learn.