I don’t do this often but I need to start today’s post with a rant. But I promise I have a point. In my educational psychology class, we had a group project due at 9 AM Monday morning. However, for this project, we had to do and submit individual work. The group portion was sending it to one person (me) who would put it all into a concept map. We met in class on Wednesday, and I gave them all the latest deadline I possibly could: Sunday at midnight. I even sent out a reminder email Sunday afternoon reminding them of my deadline. Well midnight came around, and I was missing one person’s work. I submitted the concept map at 12:22 A.M. Well, I checked my email again before going to bed, and I had the last person’s work come in at 12:50 A.M. I had to turn on my laptop, edit the project, and resubmit the assignment.

That set the tone for my whole day. Overall, February has been a pretty good month, but there have been a couple of bad days this month. As much as I hate bad days, I think they’re important.

How are bad days important? I’ll tell you. Bad days are important because they remind you not to take advantage of the good days. Again, like I said, February has been a pretty good month overall, in spite of the bad days. I am grateful for each and every good day. My bad days are not as frequent as they used to be, and I appreciate that so much.

My bad days remind me how far I’ve come. Without bad days, I could not be as excited about the good ones. In my bullet journal from January to February, I have seen a decrease in bad days. That’s a really cool change that I didn’t expect to see. Maybe one day, I’ll have a month that has no bad days. That would be nice.

Bad days also teach. Good days are for bad days, but bad days are for lessons. Bad days remind you who you are and test what you’re made of. In Disney’s Meet the Robinsons, at one point someone says, “From failure, you learn. From success, not so much.” If every day was good, I wouldn’t learn in the same way as I do from the bad days.

The rant I mentioned at the beginning I said set the tone for the day. I was emotionally spent by early afternoon, but my day didn’t really improve. I got to a point that broke me down to tears. I let them flow and cleanse me. I also take to walking a mile at work most days while listening to music. One mile didn’t cut it for me yesterday, so I walked two. I was still upset as I started mile 2. But about halfway through that mile, “champion” by Fall Out Boy came on. This song happened to be my song of the week a couple weeks ago in my newsletter. I don’t know if you’ve listened to that song (would recommend if you haven’t), but it’s seriously powerful. That was the game changer. I felt the chorus so deeply. The chorus says, “If I can live through this, If I can live through this, If I can live through this, I can do anything.” I sang that as genuinely as possible. If I can make it through the bad days, then I am unstoppable.

My day didn’t immediately improve after that song. There was no dissipation, no cheerfulness, nothing like that. Instead there was a gritty, passionate anger. Some of the things that happened were out of my control, but some things were not. And I’m gonna do what I can to fix the things that were in my control. That’s what I mean by “anger”. Once I got past the point of tears, I was ready to go hard and do what it takes to make it better. There’s nothing like a controlled type of anger. It’s a powerful feeling, but probably not one I would recommend having all the time. It’s a lot to hold on to at once.

I choose to believe everything happens for a reason. I don’t know what the reason for bad days are, but I know they wouldn’t happen if they weren’t important. I know I learn from them, and they make me better. So I’ll learn to be appreciative of the bad days knowing that good things come from them!

Check out my Weekly Roundup for my tips on dealing with a bad day!

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