I have this shirt that says “No Bad Days”. I wear it almost weekly. But if I’m being completely honest, I don’t believe it. Not for a second. There are plenty of bad days and I have them regularly.
I consider myself to be a pretty positive, uplifting and, moreover, a faithful person. Given any day, I can usually find the joy in it or just something, however small, to be grateful for. But even my faith doesn’t preclude me from having bad days. As a matter of fact, it sort of guarantees that I’ll have lots of bad days. They can consist of an extra healthy dose of autism, arguments with my kids, a crappy encounter with a really mean person, physical exhaustion, or just a difficult mental health day. No matter the size or level of “suffering”, it comes with living this temporary life we live on Earth.
Now, I’m all about the glass half full, having a positive mindset, using positive language, and keeping a positive perspective overall. But some days, even though I know I shouldn’t and even though I know I should be grateful for it all (yeah, I said that, grateful for suffering), I just want to sit and wallow in it for a bit. Not like a “woe is me” deal because there is always someone going through more, but more like a momentary lapse in my usual sunshine and rainbows attitude. Because trust me, not a single one of us can be that positive 24/7, 365 days a year. It’s just not humanly possible.
Crazy as it may sound to some, we are meant to endure pain and suffering here. Sure, we should do our best to be grateful, but we’re human and sometimes there are things that just suck, pure and simple. Sometimes we just have to say we’re having a bad day and just deal. It doesn’t mean we don’t know that we are meant for much more eternally.
So yes, positive people have bad days too. Let us have them. We’re not immune to them. People of faith don’t have more or less hardships in this life. The difference is they know that pain has its purpose. That the suffering we endure here will one day be no more because he suffered for us. Yes, there will be plenty of bad days. I can guarantee you of that. I may complain, be angry, or ball in a corner of the house where I can escape my children. But because I believe, I know the bad days won’t last forever.
If you can, embrace the bad days. Find the joy, the gratitude, or the purpose in each of them. If you need a moment to be completely angry and annoyed at the difficulty of it all, do it! There’s no joy in seeing anyone suffer, but if there was never pain in a day, we would not appreciate the painless ones nor the ones full of joy.
As the saying goes, “everybody wants happiness, nobody wants pain, but you can’t have rainbow without a little rain”. Remember that sometimes the people with the most sunshine and rainbow attitudes have gone through a lot of pain themselves. We’re resilient people when it comes to our positivity. We may bend and have our down moments, but we will never break. Faith keeps us from dwelling on the bad and keeps us looking toward all the many things we have to be grateful for.
Bad days are a given. No one can’t pretend they don’t exist. But even if we are miserable for moments, we don’t have to live there. We can choose every day to find the ever present joys, bad day or not.
