This post is also available in: Español (Spanish)
It happens, right? Some days we wake up feeling down. If you thought that never happens to me, let me tell you it does. Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays because I believe that gratitude is a powerful tool, and I love celebrating one day when we all connect by being grateful. But I don’t limit my gratitude to that one holiday; I practice gratitude daily. I have a gratitude journal that I grab as soon as I wake up every morning, and “thank you” are the first words I say to God as soon as I open my eyes every morning. I love being grateful.
For some reason, though, this year I had a little issue on Thanksgiving Day: I woke up feeling really down! While it wasn’t the first time I ever woke up feeling down, it was the first time I ever did so on my favorite holiday. The problem is that when I feel like that, I tend to attack myself emotionally. On this occasion, I was criticizing myself for how little progress I’ve made on my fitness journey and in my personal growth. I was in a deep hole of criticizing everything about myself.
I got on the phone with a friend and vented about almost everything I was thinking. I thought for a moment that maybe sharing what I had going on in my mind would help me because my friend could help me snap out of it. But I was so down that I took everything my friend told me very personally, so I ended up feeling even worse. I got really sad when he told me that by attacking myself that way, I was messing up the concept I try to promote, which is that life is beautiful. I felt attacked. I felt like my friend was saying that I was a phony for writing about happiness and gratitude when in reality I was depressed and had low self-esteem. My self-attack escalated for a little moment. I thought, “Oh great, Irene. Not only are you not progressing, but you’re also a scam.” That was an ugly moment for me.
The good news is that I was able to turn my awareness muscle on. The bad news is that I did it when the day was already gone, meaning that I didn’t enjoy the holiday the way I would have liked. However, I am happy that I was able to snap out of the self-attack. How did I do it? Well, two things helped me. 1) My nephew Jack’s smile while we were eating dinner brought me some light, and 2) when I was back home from the family dinner, I saw a really great video about gratitude that my best friend sent me. The video reminded me about my gratitude journal, so I took it, read few pages, and my smile came back!
I decided to ponder on everything I went through that day, and I’ll share with you what I got from that reflection. The first and most important lesson is that it’s okay to feel down sometimes. We’re human. We’re not perfect, and our minds take us to dark places sometimes. Of course, it’s not nice to stay there, but if we consistently practice increasing our awareness, we’ll be able to recognize when we’re having that kind of day, which is half the battle.
Sometimes when we’re down, venting to others is not the best approach. I don’t mean that other people can’t help us; it’s not actually about them. It’s just that sometimes we set expectations for the way we want people to help us—that’s the mistake. We share our crazy thoughts, expecting people to understand how low we are, and when they reply with something we don’t want to hear, we feel attacked. In my particular experience on Thanksgiving Day, hearing that I was messing up the happiness concept I keep promoting hurt me pretty badly. For a few hours, I kept telling myself, “You can’t have down days, Irene. You have to be ‘that’ happy person—always positive and motivated.”
When I did my reflection that night, though, I understood it differently. The reality is that I’m not always happy, and I’m not always motivated. I’m as human as the rest of the world. I am a beautiful mess of ups and downs, and you know what? That’s okay. The only thing I have to keep working on is on recognizing those down moments, letting them pass, and (once I’m back up again) finding the lesson that the down moment was intended to teach me.
What we need to focus on is on being aware and mindful. Awareness guides us to keep noticing when we’re down. If we know that it’s simply one of those days or moments when we don’t feel good, then we know for sure that the moment will pass. Our job is to keep learning from our ups and downs, and key to that is knowing that it’s fine to not be okay sometimes. If we’re okay most of the time, then we’re doing great. Our minds are really complex, but we can manage them in a better way by practicing awareness and gratitude. Let’s just keep swimming in this beautiful, complex journey called life with our hearts open to love and accept ourselves the way we are.
Love,
Irene
