We’ve all heard it before. Something along the lines of, “Be nice, you never know what someone’s going through.” Yes, it’s cliche. However, I think it’s a helpful reminder.
This semester has been the easiest I have had in a long time in terms of work. However, it has also been one of, if not the, hardest I have ever experienced in terms of mental health. On day one of classes this semester, the mixture of syllabus shock, pandemic stress and a myriad of other thoughts racing through my head made the day feel like an eternity. In simple terms, it was a personal hell.
Throughout that day, I looked at the people around me almost with contempt. I saw smiles and excited faces. The whole time, though, I was miserable. I started a small spiral because I didn’t think there was anyone else that felt the way I did about this semester.
I was wrong.
My mistake was not in struggling with my own mental health. My mistake was in thinking no one was as miserable as I was. Though there may not have been people with the exact same thoughts as me, plenty of other people probably had anxiety about one thing or the other.
A few years ago, when I was in counseling, my counselor told me that everyone’s worst day is going to be different. So, what may have been my worst experience will seem way worse than what someone else’s worst day was. For example, at this point in counseling, I was dealing with the loss of my father to cancer. Before my counselor pointed this out to me, I developed a sort of superiority complex when it came to sadness.
“No one could possibly be suffering as much as me,” or, “Oh, they have no right to be as sad as me because they didn’t lose their dad,” were some of the thoughts that rushed through my head.
That kind of thinking is misleading. No, someone may not have lost a parent, but their standard for sorrow may be vastly different than mine. I don’t even remember what my “worst” was before losing my father because that event overshadows anything else. For someone else, the worst day of their life could be something significantly different than grief or loss.
Just because someone may be sad about something like a breakup does not mean they are not allowed to feel pain like someone that just lost a loved one. Each person’s battles are their own. If our sorrow was all ranked by the same metric, few of us would really ever have a valid reason to say we had a bad day.
Worst days are not universal; allow space for people to feel their emotions.
This also does not just apply to how you treat other people. You should also allow yourself to feel pain or whatever emotion presents itself. If you constantly compare your struggles to others, you will constantly be ignoring feelings that are important to have. If you feel an urge to cry because you did something as simple as spilling your drink, let yourself cry.