It's bad enough to have one miserable day but when your entire week takes a turn for the worse, it's hard to imagine the end of it. While there's no way to magically end the grueling seven days, there is value in understanding and accepting the steady decline of your week. Here's five stages of a bad week that may or may not be a recap of my past week.
1. Denial
It’s Monday morning and you’ve already slept through your alarm, spilled coffee on your shirt, forgotten to grab that essay due from your printer and tripped down the stairs in front of your crush. While these are promising signs of a bad week, you’re still hanging on to that iota of hope that the rest of your week could not get any worse.
2. Anger
It’s Tuesday afternoon and your professor hands back the midterm you thought you aced. While you’re still in shock from that stunning C you just received, someone takes the last cookie from the cafeteria, and now you’re just angry. You storm back to your dorm just to realize you’ve locked yourself out of your room. You call the RA but they’re conveniently off campus for a service project so your only option is to go sulk in the library.
3. Bargaining
It’s Wednesday and you think, “If I can just get through today, the rest of the week will be all right.” Wrong. You step out of the door confidently only to realize it’s a good 15 degrees warmer than you anticipated. As you’re sweating buckets on your way to class, you see your crush holding hands with someone that isn’t you. You start to wonder what you ever did to have such a horrible week. Maybe if you hadn’t tripped that girl in 5th grade, this week would have been fine. You promise the world you’ll become a better person if this week could redeem itself.
4. Depression
Wednesday night slowly shifts into Thursday morning as you try to crank out the 20-page annotated bibliography before your 8:30 a.m. class. You finally finish and drag your weary soul to class only to have your professor give the class an extension. You trek back to your room through pouring rain because the weather felt the sudden urge to match your mood: sad, gloomy and cast down. Once you’re back, all you want to do is curl up under your blankets and cry into a bowl of mac and cheese.
5. Acceptance
It’s finally Friday and you wake up with a cold sore on your bottom lip. But it’s okay. You've now accepted the fact that this week was and will continue to be a bad week. You make it to your last class of the day and your professor starts handing back the essays from Monday. But today, you’re ready for whatever grade might be marked on the paper … until you remember that paper is still sitting in your printer. You heave a sigh, grab your stuff and leave with ten minutes still left in the class, eliciting a concerned look from your professor. You pay no attention to it because you've decided that today has ended 8 hours earlier than usual, thus ending the past week straight out of Dante’s Inferno.
The Aftermath
To say it's been a long week would be an understatement. On the bright side, you have the entire weekend to recover—whatever that entails for you. Plus, if you could make it through this week, there's no reason why you can't make it through another one.
