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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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2 Replies
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I, too, am a bathroom and car crier. I’ve been doing it since I was a teenager — trying to hide those breakdowns from others. I didn’t want to burden anyone or make them think I was weak or overreacting to something. Then my therapist told some something that hid pretty hard. “Vulnerability is strength,” he said.
When someone tells me they’re struggling, I never think they’re weak. When someone opens up and lets me into their world, I’m 1) honored that they trust me and 2) in complete awe of their strength. As humans, we all deal with some crap. Life is hard and messy and, in general, adulting is incredibly difficult. Our breakdowns are simply a result of being human.
Since that breakthrough, I’ve gotten a lot better about sharing my breakdowns. Not that I’m a crying mess all the time (it’s only about 40% of the time, hah!) but when I’m really struggling, I’ve gotten a lot better about telling someone. My partner, my mom, my sister, my therapist. And I remind myself of his words, “vulnerability is strength.”
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Almost all of our experience that life is (super) hard, comes from our perception in the mind that it is. And the resistance we create against that what simply happens. Question this perception and resistance. Resisting is to indulge the feeling “it should not be like this”. To resist what is, is an act of sabotage and terror. If I do this, I will perceive to live in a broken, painful and unhappy world. If I don’t, I just live in the world. Contemplate the energy that goes to waste in the act of resisting. Visualize all this energy staying in the body for it to benefit. I don’t spill my aliveness to no avail. How many of the physical and practical problems would benefit from not doing this anymore? Realize that all the resistance could not and did not change anything about that what happens. Ask yourself: who is resisting and why? A definition of insanity is: to react the same over and over again and expect a different outcome. I can’t change what happens in a million years. I can change my perspective in a second instead. I don’t complain, I comply. What is so difficult about that? Go beyond the mind, the feelings, emotions, conditioning. They are so limited, limiting, repetitive, small and boring. For me, adulting is about transcending the mind and it’s immmature perspective on life. It is the only way to joy.
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