When You're Having a Bad Day
On What It Means to Stay With Yourself When You’re Struggling
A lot of people are “happy with themselves” as long as they’re functioning.
The real test is who you are to yourself when you’re not — when life isn’t going the way you want it to, when you can’t access your usual competence, optimism, or spark.
When you’re tired. Foggy. Disappointed. When you’re not producing. When you feel off. When you’re behind. When you’re grieving. When you’re anxious. When your body is heavy. When your mind is loud. When you wake up and want to stay in bed but still have to get up, show up, and be productive. When you get rejected. When you get bad news. When you’re in conflict with a partner and your nervous system starts screaming. When you can’t make yourself do the things that usually make you feel proud of yourself.
That’s the moment most people leave themselves. When life isn’t going great. Ironically, the time we most need ourselves is when we check out.
In this space we don’t just feel bad — we turn on ourselves. We start negotiating with reality (“this can’t be happening”), comparing, catastrophizing, and looking for someone to blame. A hard day becomes a character flaw, a moral failure. Or we completely check out, stuff it down, pretend, deny, and put on a smiling face when in reality that little kid inside of is slowly dying.
And we don’t do this without reason.
We do it because this is how we were programmed.
It usually starts in childhood: in attachment relationships, in family rules and roles, in environments where being “easy,” “good,” “high-achieving,” “tough,” or “low maintenance” was rewarded — and where messy feelings, needs, and vulnerability created tension, withdrawal, criticism, or shame. You learned, consciously or not: I am more lovable when I’m fine.
Then it continues throughout our lives because we live in a culture that worships functionality. A culture built on good vs. bad, strong vs. weak, productive vs. lazy. A culture of idealism and denial — where struggle is treated as a problem to fix immediately, not a human experience to be held. So when you have a hard day, you don’t just have a hard day — you start measuring yourself against people who have had entirely different lives, nervous systems, resources, and histories.
And then comes the layering.
You feel off → you judge yourself for feeling off.
You struggle → you shame yourself for struggling.
You need rest → you call yourself lazy.
You feel lonely → you tell yourself you’re unlovable.
You’re anxious → you try to control everything.
You feel hurt → you dissociate or perform or chase reassurance.
And each time you do that, you add another layer on top of the core pain. The original wound stays untouched, but now it’s covered in judgment, avoidance, perfectionism, overthinking, numbness, and self-abandonment.
Over time, it becomes harder to “stay with yourself” because you’re no longer in relationship with yourself — you’re in management of yourself.
Eventually you don’t even know who you are beneath the coping. Or you’ve locked that part of yourself so far away that you can’t fully hear it anymore. Maybe you can access it on the good days — when you feel confident, social, productive, desired, inspired. You can hear yourself then.
But the real work is learning to hear yourself on the bad days.
Because staying with yourself isn’t a mood. It’s a practice. It’s the choice to treat your imperfect, messy, human moments as worthy of care — not as evidence that something is wrong with you.
What It Looks Like to Leave Yourself
Leaving yourself doesn’t always look dramatic. It can look totally normal, even productive. But it has a specific flavor.
