I’m tired and my eyes hurt.

It’s a good sort of tired because I’ve spent all day having adventures with my kids, but tired just the same and I honestly don’t feel like writing right now.

I tell you that to say this: sometimes you feel like it and sometimes you don’t. This is true of a lot more than just writing. So far I’ve found this ten-minute-a-day experiment to be not-overwhelming and mostly fun. I’ve felt like it was getting easier, that it was something I could continue doing for a while without getting burnt out.

But today, nothing.

I’ll attribute most of that to the long day, followed by a long drive, during which I listened to that clusterfuck of a presidential debate, which is enough to make anybody want to close their eyes and take a nap for a solid week.

This is how it tends to go with me: sometimes things feel pretty great, and just when I think they’ll continue feeling great they stop feeling great again.

It happened in therapy this month too. Friday a week or two ago I felt fairly steady, on top of my shit, not about to drown. I even considered going to every-other-week therapy sessions because I felt like I was on pretty solid ground. But the following week, I was turned upside-down every day by anxiety and confusion and depression and could barely remember what it felt like to be ok.

I think it’s easy to make the mistake of believing that the way it feels now is the way it’s always going to feel. When things are going well, I believe they’ll always go well. Then, when things are going badly, I quickly despair because I believe they are always going to go badly, that this is as good as it gets, that I’m never going to be happy again.

But life seems to go on and on and on, around in circles and up and down, and it never is the same thing for too long. This holds true in writing, in therapy, and in all the other bits and pieces of existence too.

I guess what I want to remember from all of this is to not get too comfortable when shit feels good, because I’ll probably have some rough patches ahead, but then when those rough patches come to not flail into a pit of despair either.

Just do the damn thing today, and then show up tomorrow and do the damn thing again. And maybe it will be harder, or maybe it will be easier, but we’ll deal with that tomorrow.

This blog post is part of #write31days. This year I’m skipping out on a theme and going with ten minutes of unedited free-writing every day (unless I don’t feel like it, let’s be honest). You can read more posts from my #write31days by clicking here.