THIS is what peak performance looks like.

It's honestly not great.

If, after surviving many years of intense upheaval, you no longer feel good and bright and optimistic—well, that makes complete sense.

If you WERE a ball of pure, joyous light and relentlessly positive energy, you’d be either in deep denial or on drugs that most insurance won’t cover.

The erosion of our emotional standing has been ongoing and painful. People died by the hundreds of thousands. Economies, families, educational systems, and supply chains were tested and all found to lack the flexibility they never knew they were supposed to have. The suck was intense. The suck continues.

This week, please know that just because you are not feeling like you best self, does not mean you’re not doing your best anyway. Your best self has simply been beaten into a newly dented, rusty form. As they say on the internet, “THIS is what peak performance looks like.”

Here are ten bad words we’ve all been intermittently feeling, and a few possible explanations for each of them because you’re feeling all kinds of bad for many a good reason.

Here’s to tomorrow being easier to navigate than yesterday.

1: Accept your crankiness. You’ve earned it.

2: Accept your messiness. It’s a natural side effect of living in a messy world.

3: Accept your weirdness. None of us are as basic as we feared (or as we pretended to be).

4: Accept your brittleness. Bend anything enough times and it will snap.

5: Accept your weariness. Being tired is not a crime.

6: Accept that you cannot focus on all things at all times. You are not a robot.

7: Accept your apathy. You cannot care about everything at once.

8: Accept your impatience. Nobody wants to linger in an uncomfortable limbo.

9: Accept that you’ve gone a little feral. We’re animals, not calculators. Sometimes we howl and smell and write poems.

10: Accept your anger. We all know life isn’t fair, but it still hurts endure so many examples of that statement.

Hope this set of terrible feelings made you somehow feel a little better.
You’re not broken. You’re just reacting to a broken world as best you can.

<3