Is It Sometimes Healthy to Hate Your Life?

I’ve been thinking a lot recently and I’ve realised that sometimes it’s actually healthy to hate your life…

The other night I didn’t know why I was crying so I picked up my journal and decided to write down what I want from life. Instead I filled four pages full of sentences all starting with, “I’m sick of _____.”, “why did _____ happen.”

Usually I don’t let myself complain for long in my journal, because I’m worried I’m digging myself into a deeper hole. But letting the floodgates open and just spilling about everything that was bugging me really helped. And if it helped, how can it be bad? Sure, I sounded like a grouch for all of those pages, but who fucking cares? No one reads my journal anyway, and in all fairness it probably kept me from blowing up at some innocent person in my life about the tiniest thing because I just had so much negativity in me that I had to get out.

Today my mum mentioned that I need to focus on what I love. Which is a pretty obvious statement if you ask me, but I thought, “No, no I don’t because I am not happy.”

What if someone was in a house that’s on fire and they said, “Help me, I hate this place!” and you said, “Oh, but don’t you like the colour you painted your bedroom?”

What if someone was in an abusive relationship and you said, “Sure, you hate living with this person but you do like their table manners?”

In either of those situations, it would be totally appropriate for that person in distress to reply, “Oh, fuck off!” to your suggestions. Right?

Yeah, I can sit here and focus on what I like and pretend that I don’t hate my life, but there’s only so much denying you can do before you are in serious denial and denial means you’re stuck.

So maybe hating your life means you need to change what you hate into something that you like better. Depression may still be clutching me and making me feel dead and sad all the time, but if I have to live with those feelings, maybe there’s some better way to do it. Some way to make things easier.

So how about changing things until I love them?

If you have depression like I do, it means that we have to try harder than the average person to be happy. It’s a shitty situation but just because it’s hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. We can’t just give up. If we have to try harder, let’s try harder. Let’s aim to change the things we can change.