A Hard Day

This morning started out terribly—traffic was awful (as The Husband said, it was “the perfect traffic storm”), I’m behind on work projects, and to top it all off my team got the news this morning that one of our team members lost his 5 month old baby girl to complications from heart surgery. At 10 a.m. this morning, I didn’t think I was going to make it through the day without either screaming and throwing my laptop through a window or breaking down into a crumbly, weepy mess.

I am quite easily influenced by the twists and turns the day takes as I traverse from waking to sleeping. A rainy morning makes it next to impossible to get out of bed. A beautiful breezy spring day makes my blood rush and my heart swell, and I feel like singing. News of a tragedy, albeit remote from my life, sends me spiraling downwards. Beautiful pictures of my friend Amy and her gorgeous little family send me bounding the opposite emotional direction.

I am sure that it is unhealthy to be this affected by the course of a day. This morning I wasn’t sure how I would get through the rest of the day. I felt shaky and disorganized, a little like I was missing caffeine (which I was; maybe that was part of the problem), and utterly derailed by how a Tuesday morning started for me. I have described this feeling to a friend as “manic,” but not really in a bi-polar context—more like I have absolutely no control over my emotions, and I feel like I might explode trying to pull myself back into some sort of quiet emotional state. The two ends of my mental spectrum are emotional chaos (the “manic” state) and peace, rather than happy and sad. Mostly, I feel like which end I tumble towards has nothing to do with anything I can affect; rather, I feel like it is something that happens TO me.

Last week, Ginger introduced me to an interesting little blog called The Happiness Project. It’s something I haven’t thought about before—that setting your mood can be a project that you can control, and you can undertake a project (or multiple projects) to put yourself in a state of happiness (in my case, a state of mental peace). I was a little skeptical when I read my first bit of The Happiness Project, but as I’ve checked in on it every few days, I’ve realized I’m starting to become a believer.

Today’s post was an interview with an author named Sue Shapiro, and one of the things she said stuck in my mind. “Love doesn't make you happy; make yourself happy. Then you get love.” I’m trying to take that statement and apply it to myself (I’ve substituted “peace” for “love” in my personal instance). It may not erase the trials of the day, but it’s an encouraging start—if I want today to be beautiful, I may have to make it so on my own.

I've decided to attempt a bit of Gretchen's methods for finding happiness. I'll let you know how it turns out.