It is late on a Wednesday morning, you got up whenever you got up, a new day has started — and things are bad.
You cannot remember when you last felt good about yourself. Something is grinding badly in your life. No relationship, or a wretched one; a stalled career; no money; the children are difficult or lost; you are bored, you are alone, you are sad. There is no chance this is the life you were promised. Somebody up there made a mistake.
You want to feel good about yourself, and in truth I have no problem with that.
My problem with you begins with the fact that you want to feel good about yourself right now.
And that is not going to happen. I hope it does not happen.
Not because I am a sadist or wish you ill. I simply think that if you focus on what will make you feel good immediately, you will return to the wretched loop sooner or later.
Because you arrived at the bad state for reasons.
Some of them connected to you.
And the reasons matter, but there is something that matters more.
The actions and ideas and decisions that will get you out of it.
And to reach those you need three things.
One. To understand that the best thing you can do for your feelings is to work with your mind.
Two. To come to terms with the fact that this will continue to hurt for a while.
Three. To be creative. Without fear.
That second one is the whole difficulty, and it is worth being explicit about why. Every route out of a bad period requires you to spend a stretch of time doing the right things while still feeling terrible — because the feeling lags the action by weeks.
Which means that the people who escape are not the ones who felt better first. They are the ones who continued while it was still awful, on no encouraging evidence whatsoever.