You know those mornings when you just wake up in a funk? You didn’t have a nightmare. You didn’t open your eyes to a headache. Your back isn’t unusually stiff. You don’t already dread something about your day. But yet, for whatever reason, you just wake up in the kind of mood that makes you want to start the whole day over because you know that if you don’t then you will inevitably waste your day trying to figure out what’s going on.

And you know the times in life where those aren’t single-day occurrences? Maybe they’re a few days, maybe it’s a week, maybe it’s been a rough five months, maybe you’d like to redo all of the last two years. And maybe you can’t even pinpoint why.

This was me. Before our coffee break, we left off in the spring of 2018. Let me give you a little insight. I was fully into training for the job I currently have, and it was a doozy… late nights, early mornings, lots of studying, and plenty of stress. I had all the reasons in the world to feel funky (aside from the fact that I was, if I do say so myself, basically rocking it). But those reasons weren’t enough. I knew there was more, but I had no idea what to study outside of my notes in order to figure it out.

Don’t get me wrong, I knew the basics: I was excelling everywhere in life except in my marriage. I knew it was messed up, but I still didn’t know HOW??? What was happening? How did it actually happen? What was it going to mean? So at this point, I had gotten to where I was while being pretty quiet about everything, and a little too tender for the thought of trying again to go to the source to talk about it… not to mention that I was clueless as to what to say or how to go about it.

So I figured out how to take advantage of my company’s Employee Assistance Program (which a TON of companies have now), and actually began the process of utilizing it. I was so overwhelmed, though, that guess what? All I could figure out to talk about was a hobby the first time I went in late-May of 2018.

The good thing is that I had a wonderful counselor who knew how to take something that shouldn’t matter and help me evaluate what was, or at least could be, at the core of it. We met about once a month in the beginning while I learned how to focus on what only I really could… a very key practice to success as I have learned it… ‘Control what you can control.’ Things like being a mom, being a daughter, being present, and taking responsibility only for what I should be taking responsibility.

There is a quote that talks about how it takes years for a woman, or man, to unlearn how to be sorry for that which she, or he (insert “equality”-induced eyeroll here), has learned to be sorry. Ummm, say what? Here’s the thing. I could state an opinion and do my very best to state it kindly and still apologize if it wasn’t appreciated. I was a serious pro at it.

Fact: To this day, I apologize out of habit when I snort because, well, how dare I embarrass you? But I can also tell you that I have begun telling people that I really wasn’t sorry and shouldn’t have said it… I snort. It’s just what I do. The people I want in my life are the people who find it charming. This conformity business is for the birds. Not sorry.

So while I began to try and unlearn a few unhealthy practices and pick up some healthy ones, my counselor helped me remember that there is no hobby that could be at the core of what was going on in my life even if it was the easiest thing to consider.

The trouble with hobbies is that we allow ourselves to become so wrapped up in them that we can begin to forget about the people we are supposed to be doing life with, even if we don’t mean to. Hobbies are healthy. Hobbies out of proper priority are not.

Slowly my ability to explain why a hobby bothered me became an ability to explain why a priority bothered me. I wish that I could say with more time I could have gotten to that point without help, but I don’t want to think about how much further into the pit I was in I might have fallen in the process.

I didn’t know how to start the conversation, so I picked what was easiest for me to put into words, and we worked from there.

Talking to someone about what’s going on in your life will not feel monumental in the beginning. I cried and felt very stupid that first session, but there will never be the session from which you walk out with clarity without the session that starts it all. Exactly like how you will never make the payment that finishes the mortgage on your house if you never make the very first one. It’s the law of opposites. You want closure from what’s eating away at you? You have to be willing to open what’s hurting in a healthy way… just like how you can’t button a messed-up shirt right without unbuttoning the one that first messed up the pattern.

Be willing to be raw. Be willing to undo some things. Be willing to get to the point where you try and initiate a conversation about what’s maybe going on, even if sometimes you don’t know.