Thank you if you responded to my last post. I learn from all of you, and when you commiserate with how I feel, I don’t feel so alone.
This week, keeping in touch with a friend, I wrote: I feel twenty-two percent better. She replied that these words had made her smile. When I read that, I felt an additional three percent better. Doing the math, I quickly realized that this meant I still felt seventy-five percent sad.
How was I able to make these precise calculations about my state of mind, you ask?
Several days before, it was one hundred percent dark inside and out and my current state of mind.
Now, a sense of lightness was coming on. I speculated the lifting of my spirits this twenty-two percent might be related to feeling sad without judgment. I had stopped getting down on myself for still feeling sad. And my friend’s reply strengthened my resolve to stop looking for what I had done wrong to feel this way.
Perhaps the judginess of my sadness had solidified it for those 100% days? And kept me stuck? All that I learned as a child about stuffing my “negative” emotions?
And self-reflection was responsible for the twenty-two percent improvement with an additional three percent bump from a friend?
I’m curious to see what will happen with the remaining seventy-five percent.
IMAGE: Clouds
