Our lives are arranged into a mosaic of good moments and bad. Yet those bad moments tend to cobweb our thinking into redefining an entire situation as utterly detestable. The days where I am literally crying out in pain seem to muddle my thinking and can eventually lead to distorted catastrophic type rationalizations that are far from rational. I have to remind myself I am not my bad days, and neither are you.
I think we’ve all had those times. Those times where it feels like we were dropped into a black pit and all we can see around us is blackness. Nothing seems like it is cutting through with any light of hope. It goes something like this…
“If this has been life for over two years now, life will never get better, right? It will only get worse.” I turn to my husband, Michael and look into his eyes that seem to grow heavier with those words.
“Sarah, life has not been consistently the same for years. It just hasn’t. We’ve had times of laughter when we’ve gone to the park together. We’ve had times of joy even when it seemed impossible. You still have your challenges. You have days that remind me of the hell in the very beginning. But you can chew solid food and swallow it now. Do you remember the days when you could barely have any light on? The only light your nervous system could take was a dinky nightlight.”
Those moments hush my complaining as I’m jolted back to a time where I’m positioned on the same patch of the bed I always lay- but a time where every hour seemed like an impossible struggle. Then I realize it. Every day is not like those nightmarish days of yesterday. I told one of my doctor’s I was going to get better, even when he steadfastly said I would never. Yet I have.
Then I realize, I’m having one of “those days” every human alive has to experience at least once in their lives. I’m having a bad day and I used this bad day to transfer into all my other moments to the point where even the days of mirth are muted. That pain I’m currently feeling on those bad days reels me into such a depressed state that even Eeyore looks like he could be the poster child for Prozac.
Yet my identity is not in those bad days. My life has not been generalized. These past several years do not neatly fit in a box marked “throw-away days,” and with whatever you are enduring, dear friend, your days are not generalized either. You are not defined by your bad days.
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