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Writer's pictureAlex H

redefining bad days.

About a month after I was put on my current medication, I had a revelation about 'bad days' and what that phrase really means. Bad days used to be filled with suicidal thoughts and isolating myself and not having the energy to eat or care for myself. I still have bad days, but they're nothing like that anymore. I still have passing suicidal thoughts, I still sometimes feel the urge to isolate myself, but it's far and away more manageable with the help of my medication than it was before, without it.


The revelation about the how subjective the idea of 'bad days' actually is came when it dawned on me that, for most people, "I'm having a bad day" means they're upset, or they don't feel like themselves, or they're a little on edge and bitchy. The idea that my neutral was someone's idea of the worst day ever was unfathomable, and it took a lot of soul searching to wrap my head around it. This continuous cycle of discovering just how bad I was doing before medication, and just how ill I really am, still has the power to completely floor me. And oh boy, am I one damaged bitch.


It's honestly still a bit of a trip for me trying to figure out if I'm just being a human and having an off day or a bad week, or if it's more than that and my medication needs to be adjusted. That's just part of my reality now, and it's still taking some getting used to. Feeling like I'm even "allowed" to have bad days is another challenge and something I'm still navigating as well. I often still feel guilty or wrong for having a bad day, when a lot of the time that's not even in my control! As much as people like to pretend that your life and your mood and your mental state are all in your control, they just aren't. Sometimes I wake up feeling pointy and no amount of mindfulness will turn a cactus into a sunflower. Making room for bad days and negative emotions and thoughts is an integral part of healing, and doing that can be so hard when toxic positivity is so incredibly rampant not just on the internet but in a lot of real life mental health spaces as well.


There's this idea that being "healthy" means being happy all the time, and being medicated and seeing a therapist or working through your mental health issues means you should never have down days or you should never feel like shit. Yeah, that's absolute bullshit of the highest order. I still have a lot of bad days. My trauma is still surfacing and that's heavy and overwhelming a lot of the time. I'm still working on getting to a stable enough place that I can start to properly heal all those wounds that keep reopening, and it's hard. It doesn't matter how worthwhile it is, it's still hard. But for the first time since I can remember, even when I'm having a bad day and I feel like shit and I just want to stay in bed, about 90% of the time I really believe that it will pass. And it always does. Maybe that's progress.

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