The Bad Day
The bad day starts like any other. You might not even know that it’s the bad day until several hours in. You’ll spot little irritations along the way, tiny things that seem set up to impede your progress, but you never suspect that it’s the bad day until the precise moment when you are so frustrated by your inability to even complete a fraction of what you’re supposed to do that you decide to step away for a second to clear your head and do anything else. You’ll run an errand to pick up something you’ve been meaning to get all week, something small, and the store will be out. You’ll leave in a huff, only to realize when you are too far away to turn back that there was something else you should have picked up while you were there that you did not. You’ll return, in a state of aggravation and defeat, to the task you were unable to accomplish before only to face the same intractable problems you had with it earlier, at which point you will quite reasonably conclude that you will never be able to do it again, particularly if it’s something that you’ve done millions of times before, something that your livelihood depends on.
It might start raining outside at this point or it might not, but it doesn’t matter, because this is the moment where you recognize that it’s the bad day.
During the bad day people you love will call or write or text and you won’t answer them, at first because you’re too agitated by your inability to fulfill even the easiest of goals—things so simple that even an idiot could complete them with a minimum of fuss, not that you’re not an idiot because quite clearly someone with your lack of talent and patience is the dictionary definition of plus each additional synonym available for idiocy—and then because you want to spare them the agony of having to be in contact with an imbecile such as yourself. You don’t want them to suffer the shame that comes from knowing they were foolish enough to feel affection for such a sorry failure. All calls go to voicemail on the bad day. No texts are returned.
Don’t go back outside on the bad day! You’ve been outside before and you know what waits there for you: additional opportunities to prove just what a pathetic person you really are. Do you need to grab dinner from the grocery? Forget it! You don’t want to be the one standing in line at Whole Foods with tears running down your cheeks because there’s something about the music that strikes you as sad. Besides, you don’t deserve to eat on the bad day! You don’t deserve to eat ever, at all, particularly given the way you’ve been putting on weight lately. And when’s the last time you exercised? I bet it’s been a while.
Don’t go anywhere on the bad day! The elevator won’t work and you’ll have to take the stairs. The elevator will work but it will be full of people and you’ll have to wait for it to go up, stopping at every floor, and come back down, stopping at every floor. You’ll be able to watch the whole thing because you forgot to charge your phone and now you have nothing else to look at but the numbers going up and down.
I hope you don’t need cash on the bad day! Guess who’s going to get to the ATM before you, just close enough that you can watch him slip through the door right as you’re about to? That’s right, the guy who has just gotten his first ATM card and is still a little unsure about how the whole transaction works. I hope you like looking over someone’s shoulder while they make a lot of rudimentary mistakes, because that’s what the next fifteen minutes have in store for you.
How is it suddenly 3 PM? The bad day has taken forever and every minute has felt like an hour but look how late it somehow is and you haven’t done anything yet! The bad day bends time and space, making all things simultaneously fly by and sit there suspended as if weightless while you wait for them to pass. Don’t try to understand the physics of it. It’s the bad day, it defies comprehension. The only thing you should try to understand is how someone as utterly useless as you are manages to maintain employment, or a social life, or even to dress yourself properly. Oh, did you put something on this morning that doesn’t match? Or that has a stain on it? Of course you did! It’s the bad day.
The bad day is a great time to think about all the stupid things you’ve done in your life and all the choices you’ve made—or chose not to make—that brought you to this point. In fact, when you look at everything in the light of the bad day, it only makes sense that you’re unable to achieve what’s expected of you and what you expect of yourself. The only real surprise is that you were ever able to achieve it at all or fool other people into believing that you were competent at it in the first place. In fact, when you give it more consideration, it only seems fair that you’re finally exposed as a fraud and a failure, because deep down in your heart you’ve always known that’s who you are. The people you’ve hurt along the way—and there are PLENTY—will be so happy to learn that everyone else is going to know the terrible secret about you that only they’ve been aware of since you first made them your victim with your indifference or incompetence. At least someone will be happy, here on the bad day.
The one thing you don’t want to think about on the bad day is the people who are having actual bad days. Yes, you suck. Yes, you’re a terrible person whose sheer existence is proof that there’s no such thing as “too stupid to survive.” Yes, it’s hard to believe that you’ve been able to put one foot in front of the other and get yourself back and forth between home and anywhere else for as long as you have. But you still have a home. There is still someone who would be worried if you never came back. If an accident happened you would still have the resources to survive it. There are plenty of people, some of whom you walk past but never notice every day, who do not. Think about how wrapped up in your own nonsense you’d have to be to consider your bad day in any way equivalent to theirs. Don’t you feel horrible about yourself now? On top of everything else, you’re shockingly selfish. No wonder you’re having a bad day.
It’s night now. Somehow the bad day is over. You did what you had to do to get to the end of it and as your head falls back on the pillow all you can feel is relief that you made it through. Surely tomorrow won’t be anything like today. It was silly of you to even get down about it. We all have bad days and they never last. Now that you’re able to look at it with some equanimity you’re a little embarrassed to think about how certain you were that this was it, that the bad day was permanent. It wasn’t! Go to sleep. Soon the bad day will be but a distant memory. Tomorrow will be a totally different day.
Tomorrow will be the worse day.
Good night!