An Imperfect Guide to Dealing With a Bad Week, Month, or Year
When you are fed up with being down, this is how to get to the other side.
One of the beautiful things about hard times is that they push us to be truthful with ourselves. They allow us to get honest about what really contributes most to our inner suffering.
When shit goes down, my default move is to assume my bed-rotting position—I put my phone on Do Not Disturb and avoid the world. The bed-rotting period of my life has gone on for some time. It started out as a necessity in 2020, like most of the world. A few days of avoidance seeped into weeks, then months, then years. My health, my business, my marriage—suffered.
I wanted to write about what to do during hard times for a few reasons.
1. I am in one.
2. I am no longer turning to my bed when things go wrong.
Let’s talk about why.
I’m at point in my own rough patch that when yet another issue pops up—a bill, an argument, a stall in a project—and I’m just like, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ LOL, put it on my tab! When I watched a 16 oz. cup of coffee tsunami crash onto my computer last week, I didn’t think, WHY ME? I thought, Yep, that tracks. The hits just keep coming.
Facing My Inner Critic
This week, I noticed something. There’s been a shift in my relationship with my inner critic. We are at a tipping point, she and I. I’ve been having an internal battle where I find myself thinking, What the fuck. Can’t I just live? Why does everything have to feel so difficult? I have become fed up with being put down. While we can't control so much of what affects our mood or our level of anxiety or depression, we can acknowledge that there is something responsible for a LOT of our suffering. And that thing is the way we talk to ourselves.
So I have been asking, What is this really about? I think it’s that for most of my life, my self-worth has been tied up in external approval. This conditioning runs deep, but it doesn’t serve me anymore. I haven’t yet figured out what to do with that realization except feel the grief around it.
The only goal I’ve had for myself lately is to not give up. It’s to show up in the way I said I was going to. The more I’ve been doing this—despite how I’m feeling on any given day—the louder my inner critic is getting. I have an acute awareness of her right now. She creates so much additional suffering that has nothing to do with what is actually happening in my life.
This Is a Universal Experience
You may be experiencing your own bad week, month, or year because of a relationship issue, an impending deadline at work, or overwhelm brought on by the state of the world. Maybe it’s hormones. Maybe you’re going through a massive shift around the way you see yourself. Or maybe you’ve lost a loved one, or a job, or a marriage and are having a hard time knowing what the next step is. These things are hard and sometimes destabilizing. But they happen, and they happen more than once. They are part of the human experience. I think knowing that we’re not alone in this helps. You didn’t do anything wrong to wind up here. It won’t last forever but it might feel like forever when you’re in it.
How I Deal With a Bad Week, Month, or Year
When I know I’m having a bad week or month (ahem—year), it’s about shifting to a different mindset. Perspective is everything. Most of my life I've been a fixer, so when things go wrong, I’m often looking for ways to avoid the fallout. Unfortunately, when I’m experiencing a bad streak, spending the energy trying to fix it isn’t always worthwhile. The two things that do help the most are acceptance and letting go.
Lean Into Acceptance
Accepting and owning our feelings gives us a sort of agency over them. It’s a way of showing ourselves inner love and validation. We need to release and experience whatever emotions this process brings up in order to move on. I’ve tried to skip this part—would not recommend. (In fact, it’s bad for your health.)
Though begrudgingly at times, I’ve learned to accept my true feelings and the complications in my life. Being a human is hard. It’s painful. How we show up in the world has consequences—both good and bad—and those consequences are ours to deal with. They're not a moral failing. It is the nature of living.
If we’re constantly trying to fix something, we can’t process what’s actually happening; we can’t experience our emotions so we can work through them. This feels different than soldiering through a bad day or looking for ways to distract ourselves from the fact that we're hurting. It's a radical acceptance. It’s a surrender. And it works.