Gray Monday

geralt via Pixabay

It's Monday. I spent the weekend grading papers (and didn't quite finish -- or get to any writing). This morning dawned cool, but gray, and I wasn't in the mood to Monday.

As usual, I enjoyed my students this morning, so I was in a slightly better mood when I left campus to run my errands. Then I dealt with a teller who put my money in the wrong account then gave me attitude when I complained, and a copy store that wouldn't charge me extra for staples if I did the job manually (with their stapler) but would charge me if I let the machine do the stapling. I know. First world problems.

In need of some positives,t I stopped for my favorite Panera soup on the way home (but not before my PayPal account insisted on speaking to me in French instead of English), then picked up an iced chai latte at my favorite Starbucks, where I left a ridiculously large tip for the people who give me good customer service on a daily basis.

Once home, I decided I needed to just chill. I turned on the television and ate my soup in front of soap operas, then moved on to the clerical tasks that were easier to tackle than the still-looming papers. And, after a while, I felt a little better, and a little better prepared to tackle the papers.

Am I whining? A little. But my point -- and I do have one -- is that sometimes, we have gray Mondays. Whether they actually fall on a Monday or another day, and whether they're literally gray or filled with sunshiny skies whose brightness is the polar opposite of our mood is immaterial. We can let off steam with those we trust (I called my husband to vent about the teller) and we can keep powering through if we must but, sometimes, we just need soup and soap operas.

Adulting is hard. Because it's something we do on a daily basis (and we don't have a lot of other options once we hit the magic adulting age), it's easy to forget to cut ourselves some slack. We try to think our way out of our feelings, forgetting that, much of the time, that's about as useful as a PayPal account in Chinese (or some other language you don't speak). Although our thoughts and feelings are connected, sometimes they travel on separate paths.

Do I have a good life? I do. Did that make me any less annoyed with the rude teller? It did not. Do the good things in my life outweigh the bad? By far. Do others have it worse than I do? For sure.

Alexandra_Koch via Pixabay

But none of that exempts me from the occasional gray Monday. I recognize that life's little annoyances are just that -- little annoyances -- and firmly believe that tomorrow will be better. But for today, it's okay to honor my illogical feelings (sometimes that's just how feelings are) and engage in some self-care.

How about you? Do you think that self-care is an indulgence for everyone else? Or do you let yourself do what you need to do to chase the gray Mondays away?