I Just Can't, Today.

I don’t care who you are or where you’re from or what you do for a living or how many friends you have…we all have these days. They are real and we all have them. If you want to pretend like you don’t, then that’s fine, but I definitely don’t believe you. These are “the bad days.” Or, at least, that’s what I call mine. If my fiancé asks me what’s wrong and I respond with “just a bad day,” he knows exactly what I mean and exactly how I’m feeling.

These are the days that we allow doubt and insecurity to run the show. We spend every second of these days picking ourselves apart like a lion after he’s killed his prey and he maliciously peels back skin from bone. If you’re like me at all, this is one of the days… really the ONLY day that you’re not picky. You’re not selective. You’re not a control freak. You hate literally ever part of yourself from your way-too-brassy blonde hair to your always-regretted 18-year-old-you house tattoos all the way down to the slightly off shape of your right eye and the small curve of your left middle finger. Once you’ve attacked all possible physical attributes, you immediately dive into asking yourself those big questions that you’ll never have a solid answer for. “What am I even doing here?” “Does my existence mean anything?” ‘Why didn’t I get a job and start saving money when I was six years old?” “Would anybody even really care if I died?” And the process begins. You panic. You lose control. You start to drown. And then you get so upset that you’ve let yourself begin to drown that you start expelling all of your energy towards getting your head above water when, in reality, all you’re really doing is trying to re-surface just to sit and wait for the next big wave to hit you and pull you back in. And it doesn’t even take anything to bring this up, either. Nobody called you fat and your significant other isn’t lacking on the compliments lately. You actually just wake up in the morning and before you’ve even gotten one leg off of the bed, you already wished you hadn’t opened your eyes. Your immediate thought is, “fuck. Is it at all possible for me to avoid all of existence today?” Sorry babe. No can do. There are a ton of people that will cluelessly word vomit to you that there’s plenty of simple fixes for this feeling. “Just don’t look in the mirror today. Avoid it at all costs.” Or, “Take a shower, put some make-up on, and get dressed. You’ll feel fine.” My favorite…”Just ignore yourself and be positive today.” Well, sometimes we just can’t be positive, damnit. On these days, nothing, and I mean NOTHING, works for you. I honestly think the only thing that might be able to make a dent in your self-loathing is if a total stranger walked up to you and randomly handed you enough money to go out and fix everything that you think is wrong with yourself. And it better be a lot of money because today, the list goes on. But let’s bring our heads down from the clouds and be realistic and realize that you’ve got a better chance of winning the lottery twice than you do of this ever happening. You’re left feeling hopeless because you’ve exhausted all of your options and you can’t be a hermit today and nobody is going to pay for your mistakes. You’ve really only got one choice left…let yourself hate yourself.

Bear with me, here. We are constantly telling ourselves that it’s OK to love ourselves. We’re constantly reassuring ourselves that we’re super cool and we can be totally in love with ourselves. We actually give ourselves permission to feel a certain type of way about ourselves. Hell yeah, if this is you… it should be. But it’s not always this way, and I’ll be the first to admit that. We can portray ourselves as put-together, strong, and confident. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s how we feel inside all of the time. If you can give yourself permission to love yourself, then I’m giving you the go ahead to go on and hate yourself every once in a while if that’s what you need to do. It’s OK. It’s OK to dwell in this emotion for a little bit and honestly, I think that it might be necessary.

I am 100 percent a firm believer that, in order to be able to control your emotions, you’ve gotta first know what you’re up against. I’ve learned that for me, the only effective way to do this is to let myself feel them in their entirety. I’ve gotta sit with them for a bit. I have to open myself to them and let them in and give them the power to run their course. This gives me the ability to determine how strong they are and what I need to do to be able to control them. I love myself. I really do. It’s taken me years to get to the headspace that I’m in, but all of the fighting was worth it because I am so proud of the woman that I am becoming. But I still have these days. Sometimes they’re quite often and sometimes they’re not. But I know how to make it through them because of this. I accept the fact that today, eh, I just really don’t like myself. Do I know that tomorrow will probably be completely different and I’ll return to feeling like an attractive, fierce, badass supermom? Yep, of course I do. But it’s only because I have accepted that it’s impossible for me to feel that way always, and it’s totally OK that I have my days where I just feel lower than low.

Your emotions are extremely powerful, but they’re also such a wonderful thing that sometimes, we try to push away and hide. There’s no need to. They make us who are and the better we know how to deal with them the more control we have over ourselves.

So give yourself a break. Let yourself have your bad days with the knowledge that they will lead to more frequent better days. Sometimes you have to struggle in order to progress. And sometimes, you’ve gotta mix the dark to get to the light. And as always, keep walking forward, headstrong and shameless.