I Would Rather Be In Bed

Do you ever just feel ugly?

I don’t mean looking in the mirror and being unsatisfied with the reflection. Realistically, everyone has experienced that at least once in their lifetimes and most likely, more than once.

There is room for body positivity, but I also feel there’s room for seeing our shortcomings and letting it drive us towards something better. I could weigh six hundred pounds and have a positive energy about it, but the fact remains that it is grossly unhealthy and can lead to many, many health conditions resulting in an early death. Having body positivity and also recognizing healthy living can make for a complete feeling of wellness.

Regardless, that is not the feeling of ugliness I am referring to at this time.

Some days there is just this sticky, dark, quagmire you’re struggling to swim through in the core of your soul. Maybe things aren’t even that bad, in reality, perhaps you don’t even understand why you’re feeling that way. You just feel heavy, weighed down, and lost.

When you’re lost in the complete feeling of ugliness at your core, just trying to make it through to another day, sometimes there is no room for anything besides doing the bare minimum. Just finding the energy to keep fighting every day to not give up completely is sometimes all the mental load you can carry.

I’m here to tell you…same.

Let me tell you something that makes this sticky glop you’re wading through even worse, bearing your own expectations for your life and yourself though the spyglass of social media. There are so many people in this world and feeling a need to compare yourself to people you went to high school with or work with or even those you know casually, and their portrayal of themselves on social media is an unrealistic life you’re setting yourself up for. Remember the days when the only lives you compared yourselves to were fictional TV families?

The biggest problem, we KNOW that TV families are completely fictional and unrealistic. However, when our perception of these people we can connect to real life are bragging about living some fantasy life, we feel like we are falling behind if we are not living the same life that they are. The life that people portray on social media is almost never real. It’s the highlight reel…or even the lowlight reel. I have seen people with mental health issues who feel that they’re not as low as some people who are vocal and very forthcoming with their mental illness and struggles so they feel like their problems aren’t real problems.

The same concept applies for the highlight reels. This nurse that you work with in the same department got to go on an extravagant vacation, but you can’t afford one so obviously you aren’t being a very good adult. Perhaps their college was all paid for and you’re in student loan debt. Perhaps they haven’t had a car payment for five years and you have. Perhaps they’re very budget conscious and prefer to save their money for a more extravagant one-time expense and you prefer to get your hair and nails done monthly.

It’s all about perception, someone who had a beautiful, elegant wedding may have sacrificed several other expenses and trips in favor of that. Seeing one perfect wedding that induces envy then makes you feel like you failed because yours wasn’t good enough. Not Instagram worthy enough. When did the emphasis shift from the love shared between two people to it being about the “it” photos for the internet?

This feeling of ugliness festers into a storm of unhappiness, often leaking into the relationships around us. All for the sake of a picture and a failing in some imagined expectation we have for ourselves because of what someone else has done.

At some point, we let that poison in and it pulls us further and further into that dark abyss of ugliness. The only person we are poisoning with it is ourselves. This starts subconsciously and compiles without conscious thought. However, it requires conscious effort and thought to overcome.

There’s never been a time in our lives when social media has felt more like a plague and a blessing at the same time. In a time when we are struggling to connect with people in person, we have social media to still experience someone’s life with them in some way. I get book recommendations, financial advice, thought provoking quotes…and an unbearable load of frustration and feeling of “want”. Targeted social media ads are built specifically to make you feel like your life isn’t filled if you don’t have this item, this trip, this lotion, this makeup…etc.

Mix all that up in a vat with all your other anxieties, depression, bipolar, OCD…whatever it is that may plague you at baseline, and it overfills that vat and spills over into everything. What may have seemed manageable before, now feels like it’s taken completely over your life. Many times, people don’t understand how poisonous we are to our own selves. It’s up to us to leech that poison out, we can’t expect someone else to rinse our souls clean.

That’s self-work, and it’s hard. It’s so hard to look yourself and say I did this to myself and I have to fill up my scrub brush with soap and muck out the ugliness I’ve invited into my heart.

Often times, with cleaning, things get worse before they get better. Cleaning out our closets frequently results in a mess that spills into other rooms before we clean it all up and take out the trash.

So, when you’re struggling, stop…look around. Remember that you are your own housekeeper, and this mess is only as ugly as you let it be.

Man, it’s hard. It’s so damn hard. To be honest with yourself. To clean yourself up. To bring some light in the darkness.

I’m on the journey too, believe me, I understand.

The light at the end of the tunnel remains that it will be worth it. That the weight of this feeling of ugliness will be lifted and I’ll breathe fresh air again.

My soapy water sometimes gets murky, but I empty it out, get fresh water, and start again.