Seize Your “Bad Day”
And why I read and write
I went to bed last night after a productive day of research and writing. I had a lovely bedtime with the kids. I read to them from my daughter’s third-grade pamphlet about the history of Michigan and was frankly quite appalled about the quality of content being taught in our schools. Anyway, I digress. My point is when I went to bed, I was feeling content and looking forward to seizing the next day.
But I woke up like I was a sack of potatoes. Both my physical and mental capacities felt like that. A big fat sack of big fat potatoes.
No problem! A nice shower and a cup of tea can fix that, right? Ha! An hour later, after I had made lunch and dropped my older two kids to school, I stared blankly at my computer screen. Last night’s research review sounded awful to me. The carefully crafted outline for my essay might as well been in Mandarin. I can’t read Mandarin. It was like I couldn’t process my own work. Maybe it was because my three-year-old daughter, Zara, was tugging at my leg and was no longer interested in her breakfast cereal?
No problem! It was a lovely day outside so why not take a walk? Walks always sort out my head and there is ample evidence that all great thinkers took walks. There was still hope for this muddled thinker. Well, there I was a few minutes later standing on our driveway dressed from head to toe in my warmest attire with Zara looking like a stuffed teddy bear.
The air was crisp, and the sun was bright. Yup, this morning walk promised to put things right. My daughter and I spotted three blue jays in our bird feeder, mulled over the symbolism of holiday decorations around the neighborhood, lamented over why the hell people rake leaves and finally returned home — drumroll please — a disgruntled pair.
I was apparently agitated about the loss of those raked leaves to Mother Earth and Zara was by now a growling grizzly bear. After both of our rather dramatic meltdowns — I’ll spare you the painful details — I finally found myself slipping out of her bed like an Olympic gymnast as she napped.
The dishes sat sullenly in the sink and the laundry looked at me questioningly as I walked defiantly past them. Carpe Diem! Let me just quickly try to focus and get my writing done first. I must send this article today to my editor. Surely, it should only take me an hour or two to polish it up?
Fast forward to 5 p.m. and I have a raging ball of anxious fire in my stomach. There was something uncontrollably horrible about today. Neither the walk nor the yoga worked the wonders they usually do. My daily spiritual practices didn’t direct me toward the stillness I needed. My family’s laughter helped but didn’t turn my day around.
I was frustrated. And I hadn’t even started.
Long story short, here I am eight hours later, writing this stream of consciousness piece. I have done the dishes but not the laundry. I have told the kids my revisionist history of Michigan but haven’t been able to finish the article I tried so hard to focus on.
Sometimes some kinds of practices help when others fail. Simply typing out my thoughts and emotions here, for you, is therapeutic for me. While writing this, I just came across Danielle Monique’s soulful essay about her bad day and finally my own day felt less lonesome, less burdensome. Writing these words have drained the stress from my soul and reading Monique’s have lightened my heart.
There is someone else out there who was feeling pretty much the same as I was earlier today. Monique had the vocabulary to write it out beautifully and I had the lucky chance to read it. She doesn’t believe in coincidences. Just connections. So it wasn’t just a coincidence that I found her essay right on top of my homepage on my bad day just when I needed it. Yes, there has to be a connection. I felt that connection, physically and emotionally, emanating from the words on my screen.
Her words. My emotions. Our connections.
Monique and I are both authors of the same, yet unique human experiences. She somewhere in Asia and me in snowy Michigan went through a day that just wouldn’t take off. It made her think of her mom and it made me frantically search about “can perimenopause cause severe mood swings and loss of focus” (yeah, I am definitely the crazy one here and by the way, yes.).
I suspect someone out there reading our words, might have a similar “aha” moment as I did a few minutes ago. I’m sure at some point in your life you’ve had a day when despite how hard you tried, you just couldn’t put things back on track. When you dug deep and tried hard to “fix” whatever was going wrong, but it just didn’t work out. When you felt that you had the energy to focus on getting it right one moment only to have suddenly lost all your attention the next.
Those bad days, yours, Monique’s and mine, are not a waste. They are invaluable. They are the human experience that connect us. They are there to remind us that we are not complete strangers. That despite differences of color, geography and religion, we are quite similar. Admittedly, we are different enough to be interesting to each other but thankfully, our deep emotional, sensory experiences of being human — of plowing through our everyday lives, of creating and crashing, of loving and losing - are so relatable, so familiar that they inextricably connect us.
The words we read and write are a testament of that. Words heal us, excite us and most importantly, connect us. They allow us to welcome each other in our messy, beautiful worlds. They let us share the joy and pain we are feeling. And they let us, complete strangers, to cross each other’s life paths as we tumble, run and crawl our way knowing that we are not alone.
This is why I read and write. For myself, for my friends and all the wonderful strangers I am somehow connected to. And I suspect that is why you do too.
So let’s seize the bad days as we do the good ones.
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P.S.: Interestingly, Monique found her own meaning in words penned down by Martina Clark a day after her own bad day. Isn’t that utterly beautiful how I just got randomly drawn into Clark’s writing?!
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You can find other essays I have written about self-reflection, stillness, gratitude food, love and animals. Follow me if you are interested. Thanks for reading.
My latest essay about Relationships and Love: Looking for Good Ole Love. Seek and thou shalt find it | by Maria Khan | What Is Love To You? | Nov, 2021 | Medium
