CAN'T YOU READ

“It Could Be Worse.”

“It could be worse.” is my least favorite phrase.

You don’t hear it when someone’s body is in tip-top shape and they’re living in love and everything’s unfolding as best as it could around them. That’d be cool if you did because there’s an appreciation for the situation—but that’s not when you hear it.

You hear it when people feel anxious or powerless or run down or upset or frustrated or mad, MAD, MAD and they want to do something—anything—with that terrible fucking feeling.

So, maybe you stop. Maybe you take a deep breath. And maybe you say to yourself, “It could be worse.”

And the message you send yourself is terrible. It’s like saying that you don’t have the right to feel that way because, hey, someone is probably being stabbed somewhere.

That’s apples and oranges.

Or maybe the question is logic. It doesn’t make sense to feel this way; I should know better. Tough luck. You don’t actually have a choice in this matter. You can’t fight this feeling anymore and I would guess that you’ve forgotten what you started fighting for.

When you get hungry, you think I should eat soon. When you get tired, you think I need to sleep soon. You don’t think I could be hungrier and on my 25th waking hour.

Your emotions, like these sensations of hunger and sleepiness and gotta-take-a-shittiness, aren’t inconveniences. They are perhaps inconvenient from time to time, but they aren’t the raised drawbridge keeping you from getting to work.

Your emotions are cues.

They often feel like shit but cues are all they are. And like hunger or sleepiness or a scraped knee, if you don’t tend to them—if you don’t give them attention—they’ll find a way to get your attention. They’ll get louder.

Maybe you’ll get sadder and call in sick to work or maybe you’ll start to feel insecure without understanding why or maybe that fucking cat needs to make up its god damned mind. (Seriously, this is the nature of cats; if that makes you mad, understand cats or don’t get a cat.) These feelings find a way to get your attention.

When you think it could be worse, you’re basically guaranteeing it.

So, I might suggest to those who know that it could be worse different, that you don’t think it through. Don’t try to gain perspective. Don’t try to come up with an answer. That’s not what that feeling needs.

Your logical brain can say “this is a big response to something small” but that’s not the part of you that’s screaming.

If you want to truly resolve this feeling, maybe just listen.

It just wants to be heard and, if you honestly just listen, it’ll probably tell you what you started fighting for.