I woke up today in a crap mood. It happens to all of us sometimes, but it passes and life goes on. Unfortunately, it’s the in-between time of waiting for it to pass that can be excruciating.
Sometimes it’s kinda fun to be in a bad mood. To shoot down everything that every person says to you with a nasty, snide remark is a victory in smug self-righteousness. Unless, of course, the person to whom you’re speaking is a dear loved one.
Then you’re just being a bitch.
For quite awhile, I would just force myself to snap out of a bad mood for the sake of others. No one wants to be brushed off, however unintentional it might be, so I figured if I faked it til I regained my composure I’d be doing everyone a favor.
But faking it does no favors. You just end up feeling worse and as it turns out? The people around you are not imbeciles and pick up on your fake-ness, which makes for more unnecessary dramatics. The other person no doubt wonders why you have to try so damn hard. Do you no longer enjoy his or her company? Is there some sort of thing you are hiding from him or her? And because you are behaving so standoffishly, he or she might not be so inclined to confront you about it anyway. So they wonder, and begin to stew themselves into their own crap mood, until you’ve effectively created a disgusting, disastrous recipe. Or at least, that’s been my unpleasant, admittedly dysfunctional, experience.
It took me shamefully long to realize that just owning up to the fact that – for whatever reason – you are just in an impatient / angry / otherwise crappy mood alleviates so much more tension. For some reason, telling someone “I’m so sorry, but I’m in a bad mood and I know I will not be good company today so can we reschedule for another day?” seemed like some GREAT BIG DEAL OMG OMG OMG
Don’t get me wrong, I still sometimes find myself in the midst of faking super-happy-awesome-fun-times-yeah! and then apologizing, after the fact, for actually being such poor, snarky company.
Because as it turns out? I’m human. It’s what we do.
the sloppy copy 