Contributed by Irene Watson, MA

Once we’ve been in recovery for a while, we start to feel like different people. We have learned to love ourselves; we find ourselves enjoying other people again; we quit obsessing about our old story; we learn to live in the present and have hope for the future. 

Then sometimes, we find ourselves down, and we don’t quite know why. Maybe someone said something that upset us, or something reminded us of the past. Suddenly we feel our old hard-on-ourselves, depressed mindset coming back. We may wonder whether the happiness we felt, the progress we thought we had made was all just in our heads. Were we just deceiving ourselves? Maybe life really is always going to be a mess. 

But didn’t we feel better for the last few days, or weeks, or months? The truth is that life will always have obstacles; bad things will happen. The difference is that now when life hands us lemons, we don’t wallow in the bitterness; we have learned how to make lemonade. 

If you wake up in the morning with the feeling you’re going to have a bad day, go ahead and have a bad day. Stay in your pajamas, mope around the house, eat the comfort food. Tell yourself, “I’ve worked so hard at my recovery that I deserve a break today.” You’re just resting is all, getting ready for the next step forward. Just tell yourself when you give into the bad day that it’s only for today. Tomorrow you’ll be back on the road to recovery. In fact, your bad day is part of your recovery process. 

You might find comfort in the bad day because it’s familiar. It’s difficult to be “up” all the time when we have so often been “down.” Recovery is like exercise. Even professional bodybuilders don’t lift weights everyday. They know their bodies need a day to recover now and then. Your bad day is your chance to catch up, to have a day off. 

Tomorrow things will be better. After all, it’s only one day. This bad day will help you realize you appreciate the positive changes in your life and don’t want to go back to the way things used to be. Relax. Read your positive affirmations. Breathe deeply. Get a good night’s rest. Compared to where you were a week, a month, a year ago, you’re making progress. Pat yourself on the back. You’re still moving forward. Tomorrow you’ll get back up on that horse and then watch out world! 

“I still have bad days. But that’s okay. I used to have bad years.” — Anonymous

Irene Watson, MA,  is author of The Sitting Swing: Finding Wisdom to Know the Difference, and co-editor of The Story that Must Be Told: True Tales of Transformation, and Authors Access: 30 Success Secrets for Authors and Publishers. She is a workshop leader, managing editor of Reader Views, and president of a non-profit Higher Power Foundation. Irene lives next to Barton Creek in Austin, TX, with her husband Robert.