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Bad Days: Are They Contagious?
Yesterday I wrote on Instagram about “crying in cars”, and was surprised how many amazing women replied that they also do the same thing throughout the week. Although it’s just a metaphor (I tend to cry secretly in the bathroom instead), the feeling seems to be the same: life is super hard and there is very little outlet for the harder moments as grown-ups. Whether parent, professional, or patient… Is adulting this hard for everyone?
One of my dancers couldn’t make it to rehearsal this week because she was having an epically bad day, and felt like she was failing. She described an overwhelming feeling of dread- as if something bad was about to happen- despite how much she’d been hustling and bustling all month. “Stay home,” I said via text, without thinking twice, “No guilt. You need this. Stay home.”
You’d be surprised how many of my adult professionals experience this with no one to talk to. They’ve hit a wall and need someone to just let them off the hook. And, more often than not, if one of them is having a hard time, I find a way to regulate my own inner turmoil to balance them out.
Stepping up to support is so much easier than wallowing in my own comparisons, but… sometimes bad days can definitely feel contagious. Even though we get habituated into thinking that being a “sick person” is harder than what others experience on a day-to-day basis, if there is one thing I’ve learned from working with an amazing group of women (and posting about crying in cars), it’s that: We all feel this way.
We all have bad days. We all feel like we are failing. We all feel like we have hit a wall.
Question: How do YOU deal with days like this?
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