Internal weather - weathering the rise and fall inside

I have had a bad week. Have you ever had a bad week? Sometimes it happens. No matter what events occur, if you add up the facts objectively, good stuff might have happened, but somehow it still feels like a bad week. It’s that internal weather. The emotional weather we all experience. Whether you call it emotions or mental health or mental wellbeing, for half of the population who ride the dragon of hormonal cycles that also has an influence, we all experience ups and down in feeling good or feeling low.

If I look at my week objectively, some great stuff happened, we had an interview panel, we have an amazing new person joining the team, I met with someone to plan a trip abroad for work - I love travelling, normally I’d be juiced about that, but despite all of those things I can point to that were great, I still ended the week gritting my teeth, clinging on to professional demeanour by my fingertips, to get through.

I think what I had this week is what you might call grey mist glasses, you know the opposite of rose tinted glasses. You know, when you are new in love or just started that great new job and your whole life is viewed through rose tinted glasses, you are full of optimism and bouncy joy and no matter what happens, things are good, you can miss your bus, break a heel, get hacked and with your rose tinted glasses on - it simply doesn’t matter, you are full of confidence that no matter what you can figure it out. The world will be ok, you will be ok. The opposite of rose tinted glasses are grey mist glasses. That grey mist that seems to sit over everything, a cloudy sky of winter grey (like the image, a picture I took on a beach in New Zealand) that no matter what objective good is happening in your life you just still feel…. grey.

Do you think we have internal weather seasons? An internal summer, an internal winter? That we have grey times and rosy times, and a summer squall in a rosy summer season is easy to weather, but a winter storm in the grey times just about capsizes your boat and takes you down. This season for me has been a grey winter season. I’ve been working for a programme for 17 years and it is ending at the end of this month, so this winter has been full of the grey and the sad. Saying goodbye to something I’ve put time, effort, late nights, tears and laughter into. It all ends, I’ve watched it fade, crumble and all but disappear. However, there is nothing I can do about this. It’s not within my control. It is the definition of making yourself crazy trying to control what is not within your control. So all there is left to do is say goodbye, remember the good times and look to the next horizon.

It is March and the daffodils are out in London and the skies are getting bluer.

Last week I posted about reframing, thinking about things in a positive way, the stories we tell ourselves make such a difference to how we experience life. I’ve had some conversations with people in the last week about reframing, how it can help or it can used to simply excuse or manage bad situations and sometimes reframing is only a temporary fix and the root cause must be addressed or nothing will change. I have to say I tried this week, I tried all the tools in my tool box to lift the grey mist, I reframed, I wrote gratitude, I meditated and still I could not shift the grey mist. The negative was too sticky, it wouldn’t be shaken off.

So all that is left for me to do is draw a line under this bad week. Goodbye to the old and hello to the new. New week, new season, new weather. The line where the sky meets the sea, it calls me. I’m off to see if I can find a new season of internal weather.