4: The Bad Days

When I was trying to come up with something to write about for today, I asked Alastair what he thought I should write about. He took a moment, then smiled.

"Bad days," he said.

"Bad days? Like… what do you mean?"

He walked over to me and put his hand on my knee. "Just that you've come to far to the end of this thing, and even though you're happy and things have calmed down and life is good, there are still bad days. It's just that now you know that you're worthy of love, and everything's going to be okay." Then he laughed and said, "I don't know, I got nothin'," and kissed me and went back to work.

But really, I think he might be on to something.

There have been a lot of bad days on this blog. Days when I cried, curled up in the fetal position, laid down in the middle of the road and could. not. move. Days when I wasn't eloquent, or funny, or even entirely likeable. Days when I felt like everything was such a mess it was never going to get better.

Then, much to the surprise of my negativity, it did. Life stabilized, wounds healed, the world kept turning and eventually, I got back up. And now, for the first time in a long time, I can't remember the last time I cried. Oh, no, I can. A week or so ago when I was holding Lyle, but that's because he's beautiful and he's dying and that sucks. The last time I cried because life was too much, too sad, too hard for me? I don't know.

And, as Alastair said, there are still bad days. I got completely overwhelmed a few weeks ago and had to drop a few things – the Storywonk Podcast, Popcorn Dialogues, anything that wasn't work, the book, or family. But nowhere during that time did I feel hopeless, or like my life was going to split open under my feet and swallow me whole. Even in my worst moments – most of them when I was freaking out and Alastair had to calm me down – I have known that I would figure it out, it would be okay.

So the difference now isn't so much that I don't have bad days anymore – although I will say, they're not bad the way they were, the high drama seems to have passed, which is lovely – it's that they don't have me as much as they used to. Their claws have been trimmed and filed, and when they grip me, they can't keep hold of me for too long. I'm much more slippery than I used to be, I guess.

And I think that's what happens with these things. Crumbling towers, massive changes, complete failure… with time, if you just hold on, it gets better. Things calm down. Life improves. The days when I want to sit down in the middle of the road and just lie there because I can't take another step, those are fewer and farther between now, to the point where I can't even remember the last one, after such a long time in which, typically, the last one was yesterday or the day before. Now it's been a stretch of weeks, months. The bad days just aren't as bad, and I don't react as badly to them as I used to.

Gotta admit. Feels kinda great.