You Don't Have to Feel This Way

I woke up to a lovely morning. Cooler temperatures, a bit of fog, that smell and feel of fall being just around the corner.

I love summer, don’t get me wrong. But in Southern California, with the fires raging, and the recent temperatures soaring well over 100 degrees, the thought of fall is an altogether nice thought.

I had the house to myself, so I spent a leisurely hour drinking coffee and reading. I felt great. I felt like I wanted to write a story, or a blog, or even just journal. Sure, there was work waiting for me. Work work. The work I do for a living. Never mind that it was Saturday morning. In the thick of the academic semester, I work every single day. It’s just how it is.

But I thought: today I will write a bit.

After finishing my coffee, I sat down at my computer and started typing away.

Within a few minutes, it became apparent to me that I was hating what I was writing. In my opinion, it was crap.  

I didn’t give up, though. I was really in the mood to write, so I tried something else.

And it was crap, too. And on top of that, the Word program started malfunctioning. (OK, let’s face it, it probably wasn’t a malfunction. It was probably that I accidentally triggered some feature and didn’t know how to get out of it. Which is why I never deliberately use any special features. I just want to type a document. Just type a damn document. How hard can that be?)

In frustration, I closed up everything I was working on, got out of my chair, and was notably in a far worse mood than when I started.

I had some ground pork in the kitchen that I needed to make into some breakfast sausage. The eggs were gone. There would be no trip to the grocery store until tomorrow, so if I wanted to eat, I had to make something.

There I am, smashing spices into the ground sausage with my hands and feeling mad as hell. Feeling like I’m going to waste this day like I’ve wasted so many—and, anyway, there’s ALL THAT WORK I HAVE TO DO BEFORE MONDAY!

I was suddenly reminded of my last trip to Italy. (Oh yes, let that sink in for a moment: my last trip to Italy. What little spoiled groucho gets to sit around on a Saturday morning feeling sorry for herself because she can only write crap today when that same person gets to summer in Italy? No, the irony wasn’t lost on me). In Italy, we had grown fond of saying—in an appropriately whiny tone—“Why is my life so hard?” whenever anyone among us saw fit to complain about something.

I mean, there we were, in central Italy, living in a literal castle for ten days, hanging about with dear friends, writing to our hearts’ content, and being served meals from a four-star Michelin chef. And yet…somehow we managed to take issue with the wine not being served soon enough with our meals. Or the time between meals being too short or too long. Or not having cream with our coffee. Or the weather not suiting our particular fancy. Or being able to hear the dogs barking down in the valley. For all I know, someone probably wondered aloud why we had a four-star Michelin chef instead of a five-star one. It was ridiculous, and we knew it. Therefore, we came up with a way to bring it all back into perspective:

“Why is my life so hard????”

Any time someone said it, we would all burst out laughing. Our lives were not hard! They were flat frikkin’ charmed! We would do well to remember it. It was all a matter of where we chose to place our focus.

So, there in the kitchen this morning, as I was smashing sausage and feeling mad, and realizing that the anger was a self-perpetuating thing—the more mad I was, the more I thought about things to be mad about—I just stood straight up and said, out loud: “I don’t have to feel this way.”

Ha.

I DON’T HAVE TO FEEL THIS WAY.

And that is the absolute truth. I was acting as if my “feelings” were a direct result of something out of my control—and therefore the feelings themselves were out of my control—but that was all a load of shit. With regard to both my circumstances AND my feelings.

In so many ways, I actually get to choose both.

I finished making the sausage, got my ass in the shower, put on my clothes, and sat down and wrote this blog.

And I feel great.