So You’ve Had a Bad Day?

Hello everyone.

Today’s post is as the title suggests, about having a bad day. “But Mollie, nobody wants to think about that, it’s such a depressing subject!”. Ahh well my observant well-spoken reader, the truth is, I know.  Having a bad day isn’t fun at all but it is something that just happens sometimes and besides, this post ends positively. Promise.

I feel I should justify why I have chosen such a melancholy subject to talk about today so here we go. For me today began as just ‘one of those days’. You know what I mean, you wake up with a sigh and an “Oh, here we go again” attitude and nothing seems to go right. The jump in the shower to find there’s no hot water left or style your hair nicely just to find that the wind and rain have other ideas or maybe like me you’re just a little bored of the prospect of yet another day at school/work sort of business. From the moment you walk out of your front door you’ve already got your ‘Well, let’s just get through the day’ head on. This now is where I see I’ve gone wrong.

One reason being that because you’ve got the idea of having a bad day already into your head, you’re stuck thinking you’re going to have a bad day and so all the little things that go wrong which would usually go unnoticed suddenly become your impending doom. You begin to think negatively about everything and before you know it, you dropping that pen for the second time was God’s way of telling you to quit everything. But see, this is where I began to stop and think.

Was me having a double free first thing at school with hardly anything to do with myself really such a bad thing after all seeing as I ended up learning lines for a play and having a giggle with my friends?

Was the dread of going to my admin class and working through a past paper really going to ruin my day when I ended up learning some important skills and identifying a problem with my computer now which if me and my teacher hadn’t spotted could have affected me in my exam?

And was the prospect of me having to stay after-school for two more hours for the school’s play rehearsal going to get me down when I ended up practicing some new scenes and laughing hysterically with one of my friends?

Even after returning home from school, I still thought about my day in a negative way because I failed to notice these positive outcomes to what I felt were frustrating circumstances to be in. That was until just an hour or so ago. You see, following ‘one of those days’ from a few weeks ago I came home and reflected on the day to see what it was that made it a ‘bad day’ and the truth was, I found it wasn’t such a bad day after all; in finding these negative situations I began to remember many of the positive ones that happened either on their own or because of a negative situation.

It was on that ‘bad day’ that I decided I was going to stop remembering the negatives in my day and focus on the positives. It was also that day that I began my “What I’m grateful for today” diary. Starting that day, whenever I’ve had a bad day-or a good day- I’ve sat down in the evening before bed and thought about the things that made me smile. To my surprise, even when I thought everything had gone wrong that day, there was a list of at least 10 things that really made me smile; whether it had been talking to an old friend I hadn’t seen in a while to simply someone holding the door open for me or paying me a compliment. It all adds up and it all leaves me feeling my day might not have been so bad after all.

I hope this post hasn’t been too sad. It’s just something I felt I wanted to share and that I know a lot of people can relate to. (It’s also another item to add to my list of “What I’m grateful for today”!)  I hope that after reading this you will want to begin a diary like this or even just take 10 minutes of your evening to focus on what positive things happened in your day; you will be surprised at how many you can list if you really think about it!

Remember: everyday may not be a good day, but there is something good in everyday. And besides, I think you're awesome.

Mollie

♥