We all know those bad days that come out of nowhere and catch you unaware. Those days are common enough, but mainly we just tend to remember them very well. Good days are somehow less memorable, even though I wish it was the other way around. Don’t we all?
There are some days I dislike more than the bad days and it might sound strange to most of you. What I dislike are the days that are not quite bad days. The days when everything that can go wrong goes wrong, but somehow, it’s not all bad. I don’t break down like a malfunctioning computer, but I also feel frustrated and almost sad all day.
Did you ever have days like that?
When I have a bad day, I can’t function at all. I can’t communicate properly, I feel like I hardly have any control over my body and my head is on pause – no life signs likely to return any time soon. I feel fatigued and weak, and I am very likely to spend the whole day in bed with the curtains closed in an attempt to make the room as dark as possible. Sometimes I just lie there and wait for it to pass, sometimes I feel well enough to watch one of my favourite tv series on repeat or maybe a playthrough on YouTube. I never really know how I’ll feel even though I’ve had more bad days in my life than I can count.
The funny thing is, these days should be as bad as it gets, right?
Well, maybe it’s because I had so many bad days in my life, but I’ve come to understand myself and know how to handle those days now.
Good days hardly need any explanation. I can do more and feel more relaxed, but of course there are different variations of good days too. Some good days I can walk down the street in a city, people everywhere, noises loud and obtrusive but manageable. Some good days I can’t, but I can go shopping in the local supermarket and I’ll be fine. On my bad days, I can hardly leave the house.
So, what is it about those not quite bad days that make them so terrible?
It’s like when you are not sick enough to stay home from work and rest in bed, but you are too sick to go to work and function properly. On those days I generally go to work, and people tell me I’m an idiot and should have stayed home. I couldn’t really have stayed home, because it’s not that bad.
That’s exactly what the not quite bad days are like. I don’t stay in bed all day; I don’t have to stay in my room because anything beyond those four walls make me feel scared and sick. I just don’t really function. Everything I do fails, and I feel weak and frustrated – which only makes me mess up more.
Okay, okay, so not everything, maybe. If it was everything, it would have been a bad day.
Just enough fails so that my body is tense, and I feel tired because the things I do take twice the time. I get a hint of brain fog, but nothing like on a bad day. Just enough for things to take longer. It’s the little things, you know. Like, I poor coffee beans in the coffee grinder and when I think I succeeded and put the coffee beans away my jumper get stuck on the coffee grinder and it falls to the floor, scattering the beans everywhere. Then, when I want to clean up I grab the broom and it gets stuck on something else and pulls it free and suddenly, a few minutes later, it looks like a tornado passed through.
You probably noticed that this post is a bit late, didn’t you?
Guess what.
I had many, many not quite bad days in a row. The whole week has been one long not quite bad day. The most frustrating has been that my office stopped working and all week I’ve tried to get it working again. Getting support for Word was not as easy as I thought it would be. I tried everything I could think off and nothing I did worked. It wasn’t just Microsoft’s fault, oh no, so many other things didn’t work either. Even though I had money in my account, I had changed my card and somehow the payment to re-activate my account didn’t go through no matter how I tried to pay. My internet didn’t want to corporate with me and my lovely pc didn’t feel happy about being turned on either.
So, long story short, I only got my office back and working today.
This post isn’t going to be my best, nor my longest, because I have had a hell of a week. Of course, not just bad things happened and because of this it wasn’t a really bad week – just not quite bad. In all honesty, and even though I know it’s terrible, I think I prefer the bad days.
At least then you know what you get – you know what to expect.
Knowing what to expect is one of the things that I really love. I don’t mind spontaneity, as long as it is planned before. What does that paradoxical statement mean? Easy.
I don’t need to know every moment of my day. I can go on holiday and not plan what I do every day. I can even go on holiday and not even book a hostel or anything and just travel each day without plan or purpose. I’ve done that before and I love it!
Just a backpack and you and the road and no plans. Just walking or taking a train or deciding to stay an extra night. I’ve slept in odd places because when travelling I didn’t make plans for a hostel and I couldn’t get a room. Once, I slept in a public toilet because the toilet was heated and it was freezing outside. I scared a poor school girl half to death when I got out in the morning because she had clearly been standing there doing her makeup for a while – and I had just been sleeping.
I’ve slept on benches outside, in internet cafés and once I slept in a telephone booth, but that dear friends, is not something I can recommend – it was too cold.
My point here is, I can handle not knowing where I sleep if I know that I don’t know where to sleep. I can handle not knowing where to go if I know that I don’t know where to go.
What I can’t handle is the not knowing. When someone calls me and wants to meet in half an hour – I panic. I can’t possible handle that kind of thing, I had no plans and thought I’d be doing something else.
I can’t handle changes. When we have plans and the plans change, I start to freak out a little. If I know the plans are only a possibility and not decided, I can handle the change. When something is planned and it doesn’t happen – that’s when it’s really difficult for me.
Sometimes people promise things – like watching a movie, eating food or they borrow a book from me and then they change it by watching the movie without me, eating the food with someone else or they pretend they never borrowed a book in the first place. I have such a hard time forgiving things like that, even though I wish it was different.
A not quite bad day is like that. It’s not the end of the world when someone doesn’t give you your book back, even though all your notes from that semester is written in the margin, but it does make the day worse.
I’ve struggled with every piece of machinery in my life this past week and I’m so tired now. I am sorry I’m late with this post, but I almost think it’s a miracle I had the energy and state of mind to write anything at all. A week like this isn’t planned, of course it’s not.
But I do plan my days even though I try not to plan too far ahead. I make plans in the morning and try to get things done, but all these days messed with that pattern. Every day I got up and planned what I wanted to get done every day and I just kept failing at following through. I would sit down, try to get my office working so that I could write and after a couple of hours I felt like I had only created more problems to solve. Then I solved the new problems, creating more issues along the way, and end up with more problems that had either been successfully solved or were waiting to be solved.
Days like that start spiralling for me and at some point, I have to give up and just hope it all gets better in the morning. It does sometimes, and I can do the things I need to get done. Other days, the not quite bad day is followed by more of its kind or even followed by bad days. Bad days I can handle, but I still have no idea how to break the spiral on a not quite bad day and make it better.
I hope someday I will find my way to make it better.
