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Gah.
There are few words as comprehensive, which can communicate so much in so few letters. The anguish and frustration, the feeling of almost giving up.
Gah.
Not all days go according to plan, but some days really don't go according to plan, for no reason at all. And it feels not so much like a gut punch as a rip-your-gut-out-and-punch-you-in-the-face-with-it. But what can you do? Life must go on. If I gave up every time I had one of these days, I wouldn't have made it past the age of 12.
Easier said than done. What can one do?
Do something you love. For me, it's always something creative. Being in a technical field, the only thing that doesn't feel like work is art. So I write, or I draw. If I'm in a mood to look away from a screen for half a second, I read a book. Whatever it is, as the inimitable Tom Haverford said, "Treat yo' self".
Make sure it's not an escape. The last thing one needs to do when one feels like one's world is crashing upon one's self is escape from who one is (If you haven't guessed already, I'm the 'One'. This is literally a self help article). Things like TV shows and movies let you dive into a fictional world and embody the characters in mind and spirit, taking on their problems as your own, and when they magically fixes those problems through some slight of storytelling that would never hold water in real life, you feel like you fixed your own problems, and for a brief while, you feel good about yourself. Until you remember your actual problems.
Remember you're not alone. No matter what it was that made your day insufferable, the odds that you are the only person in the history of the world that this has ever happened to is pretty slim, to say the least. And whoever else it happened to has gotten on with their lives, and if a random person in a random place at a random time can do it, so can you.
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It's not as big of a deal as it first feels. You could be forgiven for thinking in the
moment that the universe is conspiring to screw over just you and no one else. But after the emotions fade away, you'll always realize that it's not really such a big deal. You've dealt with worse things before, and you'll deal with worse things again. Today is not a day that will live in infamy in the grand scheme of things.
You can't have good days without the bad. This is an old cliché, but one that rings true with devastating simplicity. If all days are equally good, then no day is good. Because for good to exist, it needs to be better than something else. And the least good day automatically becomes a bad day on your scale of reference. So maybe think of your bad days as a set up for the good days to come.
That being said...
The good days won't come without work. Good days are made, not found. Whether a day is good or not is entirely dependent on your perspective of it. And a perfectly ordinary day of going to work, coming home and going to sleep can feel like a good day if you begin and end it with the right attitude. In order to do that, you need to do the work to break out of the blues of the bad days, and set yourself up to enjoy the good ones.
Enjoy the little things. There's only so many outright good things that can happen in your life. Don't sit around waiting for them. Learn to find joy in the little things like a quiet morning with music or a fresh cup of coffee. These are things that no one can ever take away, and are a consistent and bottomless source of happiness once you learn to appreciate them.
Wait for the next bad day. You know it's coming. Don't fight it. Roll with the punches, hit the mat, bounce back up and give the universe a big right hook to the face and tell it exactly where it can put it's bad days.
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