You Have The Right To Have A Gray Day
As human beings, we have the right to have a gray day sometimes, not to be one hundred percent, not to constantly have a smile on our face and to be sad. Self-help books have taught us something else: you have to be happy, you have to be positive.
A day without a smile is a lost day… Have you read something like this somewhere? Personally, I do not believe that any day is lost, no matter how we feel emotionally.
You laugh, sing, cry or jump. Everything is a part of your human nature and you learn something important about yourself from everything.
It is almost as if a day with fever is a lost day and this is of course not true. Humans have survived periods of fever because the body’s elevated temperature helps our defenses to confront the virus, making us no longer sick.
Emotions, whether positive or negative, are also important weapons of information. They tell us what is happening around us and what needs to be solved if we do not want to get sick.
Let yourself have a gray day
In psychology, we know that a person needs help when his negative emotions (sometimes even positive ones, such as euphoria) are too intense, long-lasting and frequent.
If one day we are sad about something that has happened to us, it is something we can allow. It is normal and healthy because this sadness will help us solve our problems.
But if we have negative emotions within us every day, we can not live a normal life or function as we usually do. We can not stop crying, feeling bad about ourselves and the world, or we have too many negative thoughts. If we have then fallen into depression, we may need to seek professional help.
The key is not to criticize ourselves if we feel a little sad one day.
We are constantly looking for perfectionism in everything we do, what we are and even when it comes to our own emotions. This is called emotional perfectionism.
Emotional perfectionism does not help us to get better, but gives us discomfort as it becomes more difficult to get out of a spiral of suffering.
Exercise your right to feel
We have been taught not to care, to please others and not to make too much noise. This often makes us say yes when we mean no, to smile when we want to cry, to accept meetings we do not want to go to.
The result is a lack of respect for our own feelings. It is not written anywhere that we have the right to feel what we need to feel at the moment.
It is important that you learn to set boundaries when it comes to the interests of others. We have every right to have a gray day. 24 hours with half our strength will not make the world go under.
If we can regain our strength later, there is no problem. And our energy will come back, and we will want to smile, but for the moment, we should be patient with ourselves.
Everyone has bad days. We are sometimes irrational, have absurd fears, cry without knowing why. Even the most rational person is human and can also get angry, feel scared and have a gray day.
Human nature allows us to be emotional. To cry with happiness or sadness when we hear our favorite song. To let the tears flow when we finally get that hug we have been waiting for so long…
Therefore, express today how you feel, respect yourself and love yourself regardless of your mood at the moment.
Do not feed the emotional perfectionism that says you should “always” smile and jump for love. Behave the way your body, mind and heart ask you to. And make sure this is not too intense, frequent and long lasting.
Remember that it is not abnormal to have a gray day. It is abnormal to never have them. Follow what a Greek philosopher once said, that the middle way is the best.
