I started my day just okay, like any other Saturday. A regular day off, staying at home, catching up on things. Nothing special, nothing terrible.

Then, out of the blue, something broke. Literally.

There are no inspiring, LinkedIn-worthy life lessons in these kinds of days. Just living through them.

The problem with “good vibes only”

I hate that toxic positivity bullshit. The “always positive vibes” mentality goes against human nature. We’re humans. We experience all kinds of feelings: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

When something terrible happens, it comes down to how you choose to react: keep your calm and fix it (if it can be fixed), or throw a tantrum and feel even worse.

There’s a difference between acknowledging that something sucks and pretending it doesn’t. The first is emotional maturity. The second is just suppression.

You can be angry or frustrated AND still think clearly about what needs to happen next. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive. Sometimes the most honest response is “this is terrible, I hate it, and now let me figure out what I can actually do about it.”

What actually happened

Yesterday evening, my room’s door broke down out of nowhere. I live in shared accommodation, which means my privacy was suddenly at stake.

I had no spare curtains to temporarily cover the entrance. No tools (and definitely no handywoman skills) to fix the door myself. My roommate couldn’t help, and my landlord (also a roommate) had just come back from a long trip and went straight to bed. I couldn’t bother her. It was 8 PM.

I had just gotten home from grocery shopping. All I wanted was to enjoy a slice of apple pie with a cup of tea and relax.

But no. I couldn’t afford that luxury.

I knew what I had to do: go back out again to get to Walmart before it closed at 10 PM. I take public transit, and it’s a long trip back and forth. It was dark and -16°C outside, freezing cold, with snow everywhere that made walking difficult and waiting for the bus miserable.

I bought the most opaque curtains I could find in a hurry.

When I got home at nearly 11 PM, I realized I hadn’t turned off the oven. My apple pie slice had burned. It had been in there way too long.

I was relieved I didn’t set the house on fire. That was my first thought. Not the ruined pie I’d been looking forward to. Just relief that it wasn’t worse.

I put up the curtains. Good enough for now.

That was my bad day.

How I ended it

I reheated my tea. Ate something light I called dinner. Did my dishes. Lived the rest of the night as your regular Jane Doe.

Later, I added “buy curtains at Walmart last minute” to my weekend to-do list on my mini whiteboard and crossed it off. I don’t even know why I felt driven to write it down. Maybe it was my brain’s way of saying: this wasn’t part of the plan, but I handled it, and it counts as an accomplishment.

The whole point

Life is imperfect. Things derail unexpectedly. You don’t get to control everything that happens to you. And you don’t have to extract a life lesson where there is none, just to make it an engagement farming LinkedIn post.

I felt things: frustration, stress, disappointment. Then I chose how to react. No theatrics, no forced positivity, no catastrophizing. Just this is the situation, these are my options, here’s what I’m doing about it.

Shit happens. Life goes on. I felt things, then I chose how to react.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Featured image courtesy of Pexels.