Thursday, August 2, 2012

"Yeah I Just Need Light, I Need Light in the Dark as I Search for the Resolution"

I know I have spoken often of my tendency to live in the past. That habit seems to rear its ugly head especially when things either aren't going well in the present or when I'm in an indescribably bad mood for seemingly no reason. Now I usually know what it is that puts me in a bad mood, it may be something buried way beneath the surface and all it takes are superficial surface things to pull it out and make things ugly. For me, the bad mood becomes like a boulder rolling down a hill so that I view everything that happens that day or that week in a negative light; everything bad is happening to me, this day is just fated to get worse and worse. Things that happen may not have even affected me on a better day. I might have been able to laugh off that customer's remark yesterday, but today it is a shot at my personal being. I could have been able to smile and shake my head when everything in my purse topples out on the street, but today it happened to spite me. We all know how it goes, and the past week I have been the queen of bad moods. 
I don't know why it happens, but once the mood begins, everything seems to align itself to remind me that I'm upset and have a reason to be in a bad mood- the song comes on the radio that reminds me of my ex, I dream that a man I once loved proposed to me, a customer yells at me because I asked for identification, I am offered the job I don't want when the one I do remains out of reach. It's stupid little things that set me off and keep me rolling right down the hill instead of fighting to stand back up and climb. I use things that happen to fuel my mood and claim as examples to why the world hates me. Then I step back and think, who is this really helping? No one. In fact, it serves its purpose quite well in pushing everyone around me away. I become bitter and miserable and no one wants to be around me. There comes a point when I don't even want to be around me. 
It's been a week like that- a week where work seems impossibly long and dreadful, a week filled with dreams of people from the past (people I no longer speak to in the present), a week where my desire to flee to my hometown has become overwhelming. But it's never really as bad as that, is it? If I take that step back, take a deep breath and look around me, I realize that it's a bad mood and I need to let it pass instead of fueling it. It's so easy to take every negative thing that happens and build it up into this monster that follows us around. We take on the "woe is me" attitude and continue to believe that we deserve to wear it and use it as an excuse for our attitude. When someone asks us what is wrong we relish listing off everything that has happened so we can gain sympathy. Again, only fueling the fire. I now have a couple days off to get my priorities back in order, to get my mood in check. I'm letting the negativity pass and moving on because there's no need to push those who care away or to think that we are the only ones suffering. When we get in these moods, we often take the people who care and the positive things happening in our lives for granted. I'd rather enjoy them instead of rolling down my hill of negativity and urging others to follow. So today I'm climbing, how about you?

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