The Bad Days

    Often, unless I've been full-on panicking, when my therapist asks me how I am at the beginning of a session, I'll say, "Eh. I'm fine." Then she'll reply, "Like actually fine, or the kind of fine where you're about to tell me all the reasons you're not actually fine?" (A lot of the time it's the second "fine".) 

    I don't like talking about my bad mental health days. Even after four years and eleven months in therapy, my knee-jerk reaction to a bad day is to act like it's a dirty little secret. Part of it is because I'm naturally a very private person. Part of it is because I have a hard time trusting other people with such "valuable ammunition" like information about my bad mental health days. Part of it is still the mental health stigma that is woven into our society, like the unwritten rule in our (American) society that tells us that people aren't going to want to "put up with us" if we show symptoms of a mental health condition. It actually took me a couple of YEARS to be able to tell my best friend when I was having a bad day with my OCD despite the fact that we talk almost every day, because I was afraid she wouldn't want to deal with all my nonsense. (She doesn't think it's nonsense, and she's a good member of my support system.)

    I also had this idea, at the start of my journey with mental health counseling, that once I had spent enough time in therapy that I wouldn't experience bad days any more. I thought I'd go in, work on my OCD, and then my brain would be "fixed" enough so that I wouldn't have any more really bad days. So, you can imagine my frustration when the bad days were still (less frequently) happening one year into therapy, two years in, three years in...I thought I'd be "better" after all that time. I thought healing meant that the bad days would magically disappear. That idea made it feel like I was failing every time I had a bad day, so of course I treated the "failures" like a dirty little secret.

    I have since learned that bad days are a permanent part of living with a chronic health condition, like mental health condition. They may happen less frequently, but at some point, a bad day will happen, and that's okay. A bad mental health day isn't a failure. It's just a bad day, like the days you wake up and the knee you sprained six years ago is aching for some unknown reason, and so you manage the pain as best you can and be extra careful with your knee that day. It doesn't mean you aren't healing properly, it just means that day is one in which you need extra care.

    As permanent events in life with a mental health condition, bad mental health days need to be acknowledged and accepted. Yes, it's unpleasant, but acknowledging that it's happening and that it'll happen again at some point takes away some of the power the bad day has to make you feel even worse about the fact that you're having a bad day. It's just a bad day, not a personal failure or a dirty little secret, and it's only temporary.

    I'll end with this: If you're a very private person, like me, it can be extremely difficult to let people in, especially to be able to talk about anything personal, like the details of a mental health condition. Bad mental health days aren't a dirty little secret or a personal failure. They're a permanent event in life with a mental health condition, and that's okay. Despite what the mental health stigma tells us, it's okay to have bad days and to show symptoms, and it's also okay to talk about it while it's happening or after it happens.