The Book of Moods: How I Turned My Worst Emotions Into My Best Life

by Lauren Martin

There’s light in the words I feel the same way. There’s sanity in a diagnosis.

It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.

Yet try as I might, I still didn’t understand what the bad moods were. Still didn’t know how to describe what was happening when I didn’t feel like doing something, going somewhere, or being some way because I was in a mood.

Let the emotion go and you won’t have the mood. Stop feeling the thing and move on. But it was so much more complicated than that. So much harder than that. I felt like the emotions came from nowhere, and before I realized what I was feeling, it was too late, I was already in a mood.

To get rid of my moods would mean to get rid of both the light and the dark, leaving me with nothing but white space, like one of those empty-shell women you meet who have no glow, no life, no spark to them. I didn’t want to get rid of my moods, I realized. I wanted to harness them.

Moods weren’t just about understanding my emotions, but the triggers that prompted them.

Anxiety is defined by the American Psychological Association as “an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts and physical changes.” Feelings about things that could happen. Things that will happen.

When we’re anxious, we’re not really living. We’re surviving. We’re holding on, waiting for the anxiety to pass, losing out on minutes, hours, and days of our lives.

How the future was none of my business and the past was no longer my problem.

We’ve survived everything we’ve faced. For better or worse, we’ve come out the other side, again and again. Yet we still doubt our abilities when the time comes.

didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

—I’m in pain all the time. —Where? —Inside. I can’t explain it. —Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)

My problem wasn’t the blemish, but the feelings it brought. The feelings of inadequacy, shame, and fear. But these feelings were just byproducts of my obsession with myself.

You know, there’s a thing about the woman across the room. You see the woman across the room, you think, She’s so poised; she’s so together. But she looks at you and you are the woman across the room for her. —Diane von Furstenberg

We’re storing negative moments in order to learn from them, to be able to recognize the triggers and avoid the situation in the future.

awoke this morning tired and sad. Feeling physically inadequate before the day, feeling like closing my eyes again. —Anaïs Nin

When we say things will be better in the morning, it’s because sleep is one of the psychologically proven ways to restore willpower.

Joyce Meyer wrote, “Patience isn’t the ability to wait, but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting.”