Listen, life is hard…. period. Life is even harder when you deal with mental disorders, unstable emotions, and have a hard time coping with everyday things. Life can make you feel as though you are a complete and total failure at it. But its LIFE!!! How do you fail at something that has been given to you. You CAN’T! Everyday that you wake up with all of your faculties, is a day to conquer. “Win the day!”, they say. What does that mean? That all depends on your goal. That all depends on how bad your day is. “Winning” is subjective – based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions. You can redefine what “winning” means to you as often as you like. Failure and success… also subjective. Be cautious in your comparisons of yourself to those around you. How do YOU define success? Where are you in YOUR book of life?
There was a time when “winning” the day, meant that I didn’t act on the impulse to harm myself. After a while, it became not thinking about harming myself. Overtime, winning the day took on a life of its own. Some days, it was not reacting to every little annoyance at work or getting my kids tucked into bed by 10:30 even though bedtime is 8. I still have my bad days, and, I don’t always “win” the day. Some times it’s a tie, other days it’s a total knock out (the day is the victor). Those days I remind myself, I’m still here, I live to fight another day. I’ve had days when my last and only request was that if God saw fit to wake me the next day, that I awoke with a sense of renewed faith and hope. (He’s already promised us a fresh anointing of grace and mercy everyday. Trust in that. Stand on that. Hope in that.)
Make a list of 10 things you believe you should accomplish on a daily basis (see example). Make several copies of it and place them somewhere handy. On your bad days, those days you feel like a failure, pull put that list, see how many of them you can check off.
Before we move on, let’s define failure one more time:
- the action or state of not functioning.
- lack of success.
- an unsuccessful person, enterprise, or thing.
If you are able to check off one thing on that list, you are functioning. If you can check off one thing on your list, you aren’t lacking in success. If you aren’t lacking in success, then you can’t be unsuccessful; therefore YOU CANNOT BE A FAILURE! So put that thought/ feeling out of your mind. Put it on a post it note at your desk, and on your bathroom mirror. YOU CANNOT BE A FAILURE. Yes, you can fail at something, but you would have to work really hard at doing nothing in order to embody and become a walking, talking, breathing failure.
