Bad Days: They Happen.

Being a writer for the YouAlberta blog is one of my favourite parts of my university experience. I love sharing my experiences and I also love that I am creating a digital library for myself with my university stories. Sometimes though, I feel like I am creating a curated experience. I only ever share the upswings, the best part of an experience, or my advice once I have overcome a challenge. If I did not know me, I would read the posts and forget that each story or lesson had some very bad days attached to it.

As a pharmacy student, I have shared stories from my colleagues promoting the profession, provided a pharmacy student’s perspective about attending naloxone training, and written a post promoting a healthy lifestyle. You might think that my degree is going perfectly. You might think that once I got into my professional program, life got easier (as I often thought about other people when they got into their goal program). I will have you know that that is not the case. I cannot tell you the number of bad days I have had during my degree. I have had days where I have walked into lab and completely blanked. I have had days where I have received harsh feedback from professors and classmates and found myself wondering if I was meant to be in this program. I have had days where I just was exhausted, so the day was just bad. Just last week, I was at my placement site and it seemed like no matter what I did, I ended up making a mistake. One mistake is easy to brush off, but once you get to ten back-to-back mistakes, it starts to really get to you and the day kind of begins to suck…. I slyly mention in “25 Signs It’s Time to Graduate” that I can successfully manage university now. Yeah, in my last year I mostly can, but in my first year I slept through a midterm. That was not a good day.

I once wrote a post about the advantages of being single. In this post, I admit that I felt lost. But the story is such blanket post, it does not acknowledge the singular bad days. There were a lot of bad days. Some days would be going great and then suddenly destroyed because of an uncomfortable run-in with my ex-boyfriend. Some days were just bad because my own thoughts were clouding up my day. Some days, I just acted stupid and ruined my own day. In my friendship breakup post, I share that ending a friendship with my best friend was hard. It almost sounds like a nice clean friend breakup, but what is missing is the day where I found out that she lying to me (BAD DAY) or the challenging days that followed where I grappled with my own hurt and anger.

I also recently wrote a post on balancing part time work with school. I do love my jobs! But you know what I did not share? I didn’t share the pressure-filled days where nothing seems like it is going right. The days where the computer won’t start or the power goes off. I do not share the days where I went home extremely upset because of a clash with a co-worker. I write about how I have a lot of jobs. What I didn’t tell you? I didn’t tell you about a day where I completely tanked an interview for a new-grad job and started to question my entire future. I also don’t tell you about the stabbing feeling I get when I get rejection letters for jobs and how I usually can’t shake that feeling for the entire day. I tell you that I love writing. I don’t share the days where all I have is writer’s block and I just stare in frustration at the screen all day wondering if I will ever be able to write a piece.

But I know why I don’t share the bad days: it is because they are just bad days. They happen. I learn from them, try to improve from them, and I get through them. They don’t define an experience. I have learned to accept that no matter how good my life may be going, there will always be some bad days. A bad day can be my own fault or it can be completely out of my control. They might just be days where I am tired or sick. They might be days where I go home, question my entire existence, and wonder how I will ever get through this day. Maybe it will be a day where I cry or run to my bed to escape the day. Or, I might not have the time to acknowledge that the day was tough. I might reach out to friends, or I might not want to talk to anyone. It honestly does not matter as long as I wake up the next day and continue to give it my best go.