Irritable

You know those days when everything, absolutely everything gets under your skin and you swear to the good Lord you could punch someone in the face?

Today is one of those days. It’s the kind of day where every customer is rude, the pandemic makes you want to pull your hair out and your jumpsuit breaks at work so for a split second you’re going free-titty on the sales floor.

It’s been a long day.

The kind of day where nothing lines up. When you’re tired but
you can’t sleep. When you’re antsy and fidgety, but too lazy to do something about it. When you’re hungry but there’s nothing in your fridge that is appealing. Every turn feels like a misstep and you’re just waiting for fate to throw you a bone.

But it never does. On days where you’re irritated you never get “thrown a bone”. It’s the day where you get a parking ticket or come home to a messy house or check your email and find 3,000 emails a you hate bout the thing you forgot to do for work. Days that don’t stand out in any particular manner, but are filled with mundane annoyances to the point that you’re going to scream at the next person you see (which I did, oops).

Because that’s the thing, your bad days never line up with the bad days of the people around you. When my sister is in a bad mood, I want to cuddle in her bed and go for a walk and make cookies and she wants to be left alone. On my bad days, she wants to play boardgames and sit on the couch together and talk while I try to get things done. Somehow the world has been designed as to not give simultaneous bad days.

Which means everyone around you seems so annoying. Every question, every inquisition, every attempt for someone to be nice makes you grind your teeth. And when you explain the fact that you’re irritable people try to help, but you don’t want help, you just want to rant about how the person in front of you couldn’t drive their Honda Civic to save their fucking life on your way home from work.

But other people are in a good mood, and they want to bring you up to their level, so they make suggestions for how to fix the problem. They see a problem and try to find the logical solution. However, your good-mood-brain and bad-mood-brain have drastically different problem-solving abilities. Your bad-mood-brain lashes out or wants to wallow. On the other hand, good-mood-brains want to have open-ended discussions and be proactive and find healthy outlets for stress. Your good-mood-brain makes good decisions.  

Your bad-mood-brain catastrophizes. It makes specific situations seem overarching. When your kitchen is messy, your bad-mood-brain assumes that it symbolises the fact that your life is a mess. When a customer is an asshole, your bad-mood-brain thinks that everyone on the earth is an asshole. The reality of the situation is that you were running late this morning and couldn’t clean the kitchen and just that particular customer was a dick (maybe they were having a bad day too), not the whole world. Although, your bad-mood-brain has difficulty making these distinctions.  

When people and their good-mood-brains come around with their optimistic outlook, you get frustrated because it feels like they’re not listening, or they’re not seeing the world from your perspective. Which is true, they’re seeing it with their good-mood-brain and your seeing if with your bad-mood-brain. Your seeing the world painted in grey and their seeing the world in technicolour.

So, I’m not trying to give you solutions to solve your bad mood, I frankly don’t want solutions to my bad mood. Sometimes you just want to wallow in your bad mood and eat a sleeve of Oreos while watching reruns of old TV shows. Sometimes that will even make you feel better. However, it is important to know that just because today was awful where people didn’t listen to you and your hands are all peeling and gross from hand sanitizer and you think your coworkers may have seen your boob in an unfortunate wardrobe malfunction, it does not mean everyday is going to be trash (okay, that last one was a little bit specific to my situation but you get the point).

So good luck with your bad mood, I’m going to go have a glass of wine and hope for a better day tomorrow.

From me, with love, to you,
​
-Victoria