When your best just isn't good enough...

Just another rainy day...

Sometimes you can do everything you’re supposed to do, but it still doesn’t work out.

Maybe it’s the weather – a typically British rainy bank holiday, or maybe it’s being overly tired. Or maybe it’s a memory hidden away, or a regret that’s too late to fix. But whatever the reason, some days it’s hard to pick yourself up – the CBT tools are harder to remember/implement, the medication seems to be not quite compensating for the probable chemical imbalance, and you're on your own.

This is me today, and it got me thinking about how this translates to the ‘bigger picture’ of life.

I’m reading a book at the moment and it’s making me sad, so I’ll probably not finish it. It’s a non-fiction book about relationships and the author has been talking about all the things a woman ‘should’ look for in a man, things like being trustworthy, faithful, safe to talk to, caring and respectful. I found myself thinking, “I’ve done all that, and still ended up alone.”

I’m not saying I’m perfect, because no-one is. I just mean that I feel as though I did everything I could, and it wasn’t enough. (Clearly I’m not as ‘ok’ with being single as I sometimes make out…it’s no secret that relationships are a major trigger for me with Depression, so perhaps that’s my excuse for a pre-occupation with the subject!)

It can be true of work as well – a person can produce excellent work, be punctual, do everything they’re asked and more, but still lose their job if the company hits hard times. Doing everything ‘right’ doesn’t guarantee success. It’s a worry for me in my quest to be a writer too – I can study the right courses, make the right career choices, work hard to be creative, original, or engaging, but I could still fail.

I’m trying to make this blog positive but not at the expense of reality, and the above is very ‘real’. The positive is less obvious, but I think it can be found within the fact it’s better to try, and maybe succeed, than to definitely fail by giving up.

And, with relationships, well, I wonder: if I/you really were all those wonderful things, then whose loss is it really that the relationship ended?

But anyway, as so often seems to be the case, perhaps the wisest words today come in song-form: