If you read my blog over the weekend, you learned two things about me:

  1. I had a yucky week, where I felt like Charlie Brown when Lucy keeps taking the football away as he’s about to kick
  2. My week was filled with outings with friends and husband, art, film, books and outrageous food- all my favorite things

Sometimes, even when you have everything that you love right there, you can still have a lousy week.

Now, there are people out there that will tell you that you have nothing to feel bleh about: you have what you need. Which is a great sentiment…for them….maybe…

It’s OK to have a crappy week and hold yourself a teeny tiny pity party, little violin included…

You hear me?

Every now and the, it’s OK to let yourself wallow a little.

I am giving you permission to take an occasional Self Pity Day….

Self Care is the term du jour. It beats you over the head with special sections in book stores. It crowds the posts on Purewow and BuzzFeed. Pinterest is just one big self care journal…The goal is to take care of YOU- make sure YOU come first…healthy mind, healthy everything else… Have spa days,read a book, journal. etc. Do things to take care of you. And I am good with all of this. I have books staring at me from my desk that are all about taking care of me: Calm, Simple Abundance, Page a Day Journal…etc. I put self care in my planner…

But even with the books and the journals and the vision boards…the colored pens and relaxing music and comfy chairs…the museums and concerts and outings…

I can still feel like the world is mocking me…

You know what?

Sometimes the world is mocking me. Sometimes the world is mocking you. Sometimes life just stinks…

And we need to know that it’s OK to have a bad day, or a bad week.

It’s OK to accept your negative thoughts and just say- yeah- life sucks.

but…

even though I’m giving you permission to wallow in your misery, I’m also telling you that after a few days, you need to put on your big kid pants and just get on with life.

You can’t let self pity define you.

Sunday nights I close out my week, and begin to think about the week ahead. I also try to close out any negativity that I might be harboring- because face it, where there is good there is bad- so I can start the week off on a good note.

The bad week is gone. My time to wallow is over. I’m going to try to right the wrongs of last week…

Allow yourself to feel, no matter what the feeling is. Self care is not thinking that life is always positive. Self care is accepting that we are multi faceted and have many emotions, and it is learning to accept and deal with those emotions in a healthy way. Self care means taking care of the authentic you: not just the good, but the bad as well…

Self care days and self pity days go hand in hand. It’s all about balance. If you don’t accept the not so good days, if you try to push them away and hide them, you’re not really taking care of yourself. You’re hiding those feelings instead of dealing with them. Don’t let your bad thoughts be like those items you throw in the back closet: if you keep throwing stuff in that closet, one day it’s just going to explode. It’s not great when it happens in a storage unit: it’s really bad when that storage unit is your mind…

Good and bad. Accept it. It’s OK.

 

 

45 thoughts on “It’s Ok”

  2. Great analogy. Yes, you can have all you need and more and still feel blue and the feeling is impossible to describe, some people feel you are being self-indulgent which only adds to the problem. You don’t feel right airing your thoughts lest you be judged. People should be allowed to have bad days or a week, if it goes beyond that professional help should be sought.
    There are days when staying in your pjs wrapped up in a afghan and binge watching HGTV is what you need to take care of yourself(well at least for me).

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    1. You’re absolutely right! (And you’ve backed into what I’m writing about tomorrow) part of being authentic and real is allowing your full range of emotions to come out. We think that bad things are negative, which they are, but they’re also just part of being human

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      1. Sometimes just the act of being human can be exhausting. I lay in bed this morning running through my to do list and knowing the first thing was to get in the shower, but it all seemed like too much effort. It would be so much easier to just get up have my coffee, watch some YouTube and piddle around, but that is not my Monday schedule.

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  4. I see what you’re doing here…
    This ties in well with the ideal that life isn’t perfect, no matter how some want to portray the perfection and ignore the negative unhappy parts…as in social media avoidance.

    How can it be possible to be authentic in life, say out loud the admission that you have crappy days and spend the weekend indulging in a gallon of ice cream and reruns of classic movies, if even a small part of you has to keep up a facade of perfection. Imagine the levels of cortisol that must be roaming around inside the bodies of the seemingly perfect people…

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    1. Exactly. There’s such a drive to focus on the positive, be positive, be perfect, that we forget that’s not balanced or frankly realistic. To be truly content, sometimes you need to accept that sometimes you’re sad, or angry or frustrated or whatever. If there’s positive, there has to be negative. We need to learn how to accept both sides.

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  7. The whole mindset of “someone somewhere has it worse so you shouldn’t feel bad” that people tend to throw around drives me nuts. It is toxic and tells people that what they are experiencing and feeling isn’t worthy of acknowledging. You absolutely have the right to feel how you feel, be it sad or angry or hurt or even the positive emotions of joy and happiness and love when there are not great things going on around you. I agree that people shouldn’t stay immersed in the negative emotions, but no one gets to define how or when they shift that focus. Sometimes people need to marinate in the ugly for a while to even be able to see and appreciate the beauty.

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  9. Authentic. I finished 3 online conferences this morning and some students got on! Afterwards, I had the opportunity to see me on camera…I asked my husband what he thought…well, the good thing is they won’t recognize you in the grocery store. I do not photograph well but I feel down to earth and real without my makeup this morning.

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  11. Totally with you on this. My life is full of all the best, but lack of sleep since my surgery has left me wallowing in self-pity. However, I’m learning to adjust and take it in stride – doing some positive self-care and smiling practice (fake it ‘til you make it). We all go there sometimes. Staying there just isn’t a good option.

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  13. Mental health and a minds wellbeing is a ‘biggy’, I guess the skill is being able to kick your butt from the occasional day of self pity before it becomes a habit, that takes a great deal of resolve and nervous energy…… if your really unhappy with work life or whatever I think sometimes you have make a complete change of direction for the better, remove yourself from toxic relationships and I don’t necessarily mean a sexual partners’!

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    1. I think if we’re “allowed” to wallow, we get over it quicker. Unfortunately we’ve been trained to think that no one has bad days..when we all know bad days are normal

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  18. I real an interesting article by someone who says that practising gratitude made her depression worse and it was only when he therapist said (the equivalent of) OMG your life sucks and encouraged her to express her sadness, frustration & general pissed off-ness with her life, that she was able to move forward. It resonated with me – as does your post 🙂

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