Who is popular today?

NATIONAL Start Over Day is on my father’s birthday: June 5. I don’t usually go in for seemingly arbitrary days of commemoration, but I like the idea of this one. Who amongst us does not want a do-over for something or someone?
This is a wild guess – just throwing it out there – but I feel most of us instinctively want to right wrongs, fix the broken things, and reconnect with people, ideas and places we let slip away. And for the most part, “want” is what we do. Because we can’t see our way to doing all it would take to reset.
“National Start Over Day” is truly as random as I thought. It was made up by a guy at daysoftheyear.com. It just seemed like a good idea to him. I think he missed a beat. It should be “World Start Over Day,” the US is not the only place in need of one.
No matter. I’m embracing it on behalf of the world. A lot of what is written on the website is about looking at things you deem failures and making up your mind to transform them into learning experiences. You’re losing your touch at work? Reassess. You didn’t make the school football team? How can you take this disappointment and turn it into more focused training?
I’m looking at the words and not even I can pretend it seems easy. Because altering our mindsets is hard. Doing something to change what we have already chalked up as a loss is excruciating.
I know I’m not selling this. Maybe what really caught my attention was the name. There are a zillion ways you can try to convert failures into successes. Read any book by any high-performing athlete and you’ll come away thinking any obstacle is get-overable.
But what of relationships we have lost? Personal decisions that went wrong? Fractures in the way we engage with the world?
I fell into the lap of this start-over business because I was thinking about the way individual and collective rage affects us. On any given day, any number of people could be thinking it’s the worst day of their lives. On such a day (I had one just this past week), nothing else seems to matter but your own private sphere of misery. You will give more bad drives, lose patience with people in shops, quietly or loudly hurl abuse at anyone who delays the one thing you want: to get home and try to let your mind go blank.
On a better day you know the maxi that cut you off has nothing to do with your real problem. On a better day you know you have the ability to make different decisions about likely everything.
But not on a no-good-terrible-the-world-is-plotting-against-me day. On days like that, every irksome thing is someone else’s fault.
When I have a day like that, all I want is for everything to stop. It’s like when people ask you what superpower you’d choose if you could have any. The ability to freeze time is a popular one. I don’t know what other people want to do in that time, but I want to wrestle my more in-control-self back to me. I want to know that if I pause, I’m not going to be caught off guard by a stealth right hook from the universe.
I need to do this all month, actually. Take a few steps back and survey my dominion. What am I doing? Really, what? Am I doing, or only reacting as each blow lands?
While I feel I’ve recently suffered every indignity under the sun (not excluding having to rain fire and brimstone on some unfortunate young woman who was trying to sort out my stalled online banking), I genuinely know that’s not the case. My problem right now comes back to time. Some things are moving way too fast, some are stuck in the starting blocks.
I never mean to offer advice. If I have in the past, it was unintentional or I was under a spell. I don’t have any advice to offer here.
What is always important, however, is to acknowledge things that are happening that we don’t talk about enough.
And more than that, I see you. So much of the many things that plague us eventually alight on a feeling of invisibility. Aloneness. A no-one-understands-ness.
The world is spinning me in circles and the only way I can imagine finding any sense of perspective is to stop. I’ll figure everything out somehow.
But for now, I’m starting my reset with a deep breath and a pause.

Remember to talk to your doctor or therapist if you want to know more about what you read here. In many cases, there’s no single solution or diagnosis to a mental health concern. Many people suffer from more than one condition.

The post Press reset appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.