The Anatomy of "A Day"

When people have had a bad, stressful, or eventful day, a standard summary often given to friends and family (at least in my experience) is a variation on very simple sentence: "Today has been A Day."  Well, yesterday I had A Day that made me think about the nature of Days, so let's take a look at them to see what makes them tick.

In my opinion, there are two major forms A Day can take (with a spectrum of Days lying in between).  The first is the one where things just go wrong.  A plane leaves four hours late, traffic is a mess, you forgot to do a homework assignment, that kind of thing.  Nothing tragic or horrific (those events are outside the scope of Days), just a pile-up of standard day-to-day issues.  I had a minor version of this kind of Day today when my flight was significantly delayed.  The second form is the one where nothing particularly goes wrong except inside your own mind.  This is the kind of day I had yesterday, and it is far worse than the first kind.

In the mental Day, most everything goes normally on the surface.  The milk stays fresh, the power doesn't go out, a test isn't failed.  But somewhere along the way someone says or does something that shakes you.  It's probably accidental, but their words knock-down a card in the base of delicate house of cards that is your happiness.  That little card that holds up the self-esteem section of the structure has always been weak - it has a crack where one part of your self-worth has always been vulnerable.  You had tried propping it up with glue and toothpicks and a prayer, but it falls down anyway because a word from a friend accidentally struck it like a stray bullet.  You start running around trying to right the card, but the foundations of the whole structure have been shaken.  The rest of the glued-together cards start to give way bit by bit, leaving you scrambling to catch up and put right what has gone wrong as the whole thing continues to slowly collapse.  This second kind of Day is much worse than the first because there is nothing to blame for your mood except your own pieces of self-contempt.

That was what happened to me yesterday for a few hours.  I was tired and a certain adjective had been tossed around as a description of me a few too many times for my comfort.  That word triggered the initial breach of my defenses.  From there it never really went to all-out sadness, but rather to a feeling of mild hopelessness.  Luckily, I had medicine.  One of the few things that can combat the inner struggle of A Day is an unexpected kind word.  The source isn't the important bit, but the meaning and sincerity is.  I talked to someone who used a synonym of my trigger word to describe me, but then immediately, sincerely, and intently told me that the word was one of my most positive character traits.  There was no prompting; she just somehow intuitively understood that it needed to be said.  For that, I am truly grateful.  Now, a kind word can't entirely fix A Day.  A person has to do that on their own.  But that little bit of honest encouragement can help catch some cards as they fall so that they can more easily be righted.  It is a great help to have.

I guess the take-home message of this post is the following: be careful of your words.  When people are with friends, it's natural to joke around with them, making fun of some aspects of their personality or some mistakes they have made.  Much of the time, this is okay.  Most people are good at accepting good-natured jokes from friends.  But in my experience, some of those jokes/jabs/words leave small cuts every time they happen.  They might be laughed off at the time by the person being targeted, but they do add up over time.  Now what I'm not asking you to do is to stop teasing a friend (unless the person actually shows signs of discomfort).  Good-natured teasing is part of friendship, and from my experience, 90% of it is fine and won't trigger any long-term negative reactions.  However, every once in a while, make sure that your friend knows that you really are teasing.  Make sure that they understand what you really think about them.  It could save a lot of pain in the long run.

I've been deliberately vague about my trigger word in this post.  I hope it wasn't too annoying.  My reason for not disclosing the word that slightly hurts me (other than it not being the main point of this post) is that I have too many good friends who use it to describe me for me to risk them feeling bad about it.  It is a perfectly reasonable adjective to use to describe me - people have used it for years and will continue to do so as long as I keep meeting new people.  So to my friends, don't worry about what you have said to me.  I don't hold any grudges against you for using this word and I never will.

Finally, I'm writing this on two nights of greatly reduced sleep and after a full day of airports and airplanes.  Any stiltedness can be attributed to that until I actually come back and edit this post sometime in the future.