It only gets better from herE!
The most memorable movie I’ve ever watched was Sing, the animated musical about a koala chasing his dream of running a successful theater. I remember it so vividly because the day I saw it was one of the best days of my whole entire life: my best friend and I ditched school, ate donuts for lunch and explored downtown Chicago together as our last hurrah before her family moved across the country. We ran all over the city window-shopping and laughing at absolutely everything, then ended the night watching Sing in one of those fancy theaters with the reclining seats and bottomless buttery popcorn. I’ll never forget it. I’ve since watched the movie many, many more times because it seems to be the only piece of that wonderful day that I can really replay, and by now I know the movie inside and out. My favorite part is when the koala tells his friends, “You know what’s great about hitting rock bottom? There’s only one way left to go, and that’s up!”
It’s a line that echoes in my mind all the time, as a reminder that when things are bad it just means that there’s room for them to get better. Change is the only constant thing in this world. It’s the only thing I can rely on, the only thing that prevents me from heading down the all-too-familiar spiral of self-pity and hopelessness when I’m having a rough day.
Each day is only so long. If I’ve found the worst part of it, then I find some measure of solace in the idea that the rest of the day will definitely be better than this moment. It helps me to better enjoy and appreciate the rest of that day and then to start fresh tomorrow. I use this idea to get the most out of my weeks, too. My schedule this semester has me up bright and early for a handful of classes in a row on Monday mornings, and by the time I make it through all of my lectures, I have just enough time to grab my chemistry goggles and head to the weekly lab session. And then around 6 pm is when the day really begins, and I finally have time to start studying. Monday is easily the rock bottom of every week, and the whole rest of the week just feels so bright and easy when I acknowledge how good it feels to have the longest day behind me.
I used to be someone who always counted down for things to be over. By my senior year of boarding high school, I had gone from counting down the weekdays until I could go home for the weekend, to counting down classes left in the day, to counting down the hours until I could go to bed, to counting down the seconds left in the current minute: “As soon as I get through this minute, then there will only be 44 minutes left of this class. And then there’s only 316 minutes left of the school day.” I wasn’t actually motivated by something at the end of any of my countdowns, I was just pleased to know that some minutes of a life I wasn’t really enjoying were over.
It was a very sad way to experience each day, and it started to feel like I wasn’t even really living life. Rather than waiting for things to be over just to know that they’re over, I’m trying to be more intentional about actually appreciating the things that come after the hard stuff. This shift in my mindset has encouraged me to feel happy during the lower parts of my week out of excitement for the better things that I’m confident are coming.
Rock bottom is a unique place, and it’s become somewhere that I quite like to know I’m in, if only because of the hope it fills me with for whatever will happen after I’ve made it out.