The Moser Messenger: How to Overcome a Bad Day
By Abraham Johnson '15 - '15
Maybe you’ve forgotten your laptop charger at home and the battery is on 2%. Maybe you barely had a chance to throw on clothes before getting to school, and then realize that everything you are wearing looks as if a homeless person rolled around on it. Maybe you woke up late after having to stay up late studying, so you look like a walking disease. Maybe you are beginning to realize that you are involved in way too many school activities, but can’t bear to drop a single one of them. Maybe your grades look as if Forrest Gump has been taking tests for you. Maybe you feel like when teachers have pop quizzes instead of announced quizzes, they are really just having an academically-guised power play, yet no one seems to care. Maybe it’s something simpler; maybe you are just annoyed at the fact that you have one large “pack” instead of the six-pack you are “supposed” to have.
If you have experienced any of these, you know what having a bad day is like. If you know what all of these feel like simultaneously, you know what kind of day I’m having. The hardest part of being a leader in anything is that you lose the privilege of going AWOL or freaking out. When a normal student gets a little stress-crazy, it’s not great but it’s at least acceptable. Being a leader, one has to conduct themselves with maturity and civility. This can suck.
Something that I have learned this year is how to survive. I mean like day-to-day survival, as in “Hey, I have a project due tomorrow and have been working until 9 p.m. on extracurriculars, but I’m not going to die…. necessarily.” Bringing up all of this subtle bragging has point besides narcissism, however.
The fact of the matter is that everyone has bad days. Everyone has days where they want to stay in bed and just soothe their crazy schedule with chocolate and ice cream. It would be a lie to say that certain red-headed leaders who have dazzling personalities have never called in sick because of stress. It would be a lie to say that adults don’t do this either. Because bad days are prevalent in our lives. It’s unfair to ask someone to deal with these days completely unfazed -- because really, where is the empathy? These days must be battled with a sense of humor, leaning on friends, and the occasional power-nap.
So before you retreat from days like these, I thought I would give some advice from a student-leader's perspective. Here are some steps for conducting your bad days with civility and sanity:
1) Breathe. Most likely no one will die. You will forget about the bad today when it is replaced by the good of tomorrow.
2) Chocolate. Congratulate yourself for the work that you have done as well as the work you are about to do.
3) Prioritize. Make a concrete list of the things you have to do. Then make a list of all of the things that are wrong with your current life. Then, after wiping tears and apologizing to whoever is around you for the howls you just made, get your feelings out by venting all over that piece of paper and throw it away. Negativity is corrosive and you will get nowhere by focusing on it.
4) Plan. Make a game-plan for what you need to get finished and commit. Whether you have to go through a couple seizures to get there, you are capable of reaching your goals and will with the right mindset.
5) Breaks. Get on Google and look up pictures of funny cats. Then babies. Then type “Abraham Johnson” and stare at my face for a while. After crying from the exposure to sheer beauty, re-center yourself.
6) Finish. This part is hazy to me because I rarely commit this much and should not be giving advice. Either way, finish what you have to do for the night and the day ahead, but get to sleep as soon as possible. Losing sleep will just make the next day as bad as the day you're already having.
If none of the above work, go watch this video and realize that you are a good person. In our number-driven society, this is often forgotten. We mix up the difference between our grade-point average or our salary and our human worth. Know that no matter how awful your day is, it does not say anything about you as a person.