You Have the Right to Have a Gray Day
As the human beings we are, we have the right to be sad sometimes, to not be one hundred percent, to not be with a smile on our face continuously, to have a gray day. Self-help books have sold us something quite different: you have to be happy, you have to be positive and those authoritarian and absolutist “haves” are ultimately what make us even worse than we are.
A day without a smile, is a day lost… Have you read something like that somewhere? Personally, I don’t think any day is lost, regardless of how we are emotionally.
You laugh, sing, cry or jump, everything forms part of your human nature and you can achieve a teaching or an important self-discovery from absolutely everything.
It’s almost like saying a day with fever is a day lost and obviously this is not so. Because of fevers, humans have survived because as we know, a fever, which is the rise in body temperature, helps our defenses confront the virus, which causes us to stop being sick.
Likewise, emotions, whether positive or negative, act as powerful informational weapons, which tell us whether what is happening around us, at the moment, has to be solved if we do not want to get sick emotionally.
Allow yourself a gray day
In psychology, we know that a person needs help when their negative emotions (sometimes even positive, such as euphoria) are too intense, long-lasting and frequent.
If one day we are sad about something that happened to us, we can allow it. It is normal and healthy because that sadness will help us devise solutions to our problem and get out of the rough patch.
But if a negative emotion is present in us every day, it does not allow us to lead a normal life or function as we normally do. We cannot stop crying, feeling bad about ourselves and the world, or we have too many negative thoughts. Then perhaps if we have fallen into the clutches of depression, we have to turn to a professional.
The key is to distinguish these parameters and not criticize ourselves if one day we are a little anxious or sad.
People are constantly looking for perfectionism in everything we do, what we are and even with our own emotions. It is what has been called emotional perfectionism, or the requirement and no longer exciting pursuit of happiness.
In the end, emotional perfectionism, far from helping us to be better, causes us increased discomfort because it makes us perturbed for being perturbed, making it much harder to get out of the spiral of suffering.
Exercise your right to feel
We have been taught not to bother, to please others and not make too much noise. That often forces us to say yes when we mean no, to smile when we want to cry, to accept appointments because of commitment even if we don’t want to.
The result is a lack of respect for our own feelings, when it’s not written anywhere that we have no right to feel what we need to feel at that time.
It is important to learn to set boundaries and to put, even just a little, of our own interests to those of others. We have every right to have a gray day: 24 hours with half of our strength and the world will not end because of it.
While we are able to overcome and draw our strength later, there is no problem. And our energy will return, and we’ll want to smile, but for now, be patient with yourself.
Everyone, absolutely everyone, has bad days. We are sometimes irrational, have absurd fears, cry and do not know why. Even the most rational person is human, and also gets angry, cries, feels fear or experiences a gray day.
Blessed human nature allows us to get emotional: cry with joy or sadness, that our hairs stand up when we hear our favorite song, when those tears jump out when we finally get that hug we waited so long for…
Therefore, today, express how you feel naturally, respect yourself and love yourself regardless of your mood of the moment.
Do not feed the emotional perfectionism that says you “should” always be smiling and jumping for joy. Finally, behave the way your body, mind and heart ask you at this time, making sure that all this is not too intense, frequent and long-lasting.
Remember: a gray day is not abnormal; what’s abnormal is never having them. Nor is it normal to always having a gray look, therefore you might need some help. Following what a Greek philosopher once said many years ago, at the midpoint is the virtue.
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