We’ve all got one Big Ol’ Bad Thing waiting for us all at the very end, and no matter how strong your faith in the afterlife or rebirth, dying is pretty, pretty Bad. But before we even get there, we’re all going to have a heartbreak, a setback, a layoff, a diagnosis, an accident or other event that will qualify as a Bad Thing.
So as hard as it is to accept, you’ve just simply got to come to terms with The Bad Thing. One will enter your life, eventually, no matter how canny you are, how savvy your choices, lucky your genes, etc. The Bad Thing is a given; it’s table stakes for being alive. The question, the real question, is what you do when The Bad Thing happens.
A funny thing about when The Bad Thing happens — and I’m drawing here from both personal experience and keen powers of human observation — is that you really don’t know how you’re going to react. You may think you do. As you are reading these words, a part of your brain is saying “Of course I do! I’m a very [strong/calm/anxious/insightful/unstable] person, and I will react accordingly!” To which I say: Bullshit! Sorry, but it’s true. Until you are in The Bad Thing, you really don’t know which part of you is going to show up when it arrives.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t plan for it.
Planning for The Bad Thing
Planning for The Bad Thing will look different for everyone. And perhaps “planning” here is a misnomer. All plans are just gossamer hopes in the face of The Bad Thing. Instead, imagine yourself a prepper, one of those people stocking away food and ammunition for the End Times. What do you need to have in your go bag, metaphorically, to grab when the sirens start to go off?
This could be cultivating close relationships with family and friends (a support network), a spiritual or meditative practice (personal tools), even just emergency funds to see you through a rough spell (resources). The nice thing about all these planning steps is that they’ll make your regular, non-Bad-Thing life better, too. You’ll get paid twice on your investment.
Living through The Bad Thing
First, I just want to say I’m sorry that The Bad Thing is happening to you. You (probably!) didn’t deserve it; life is a cruel vending machine that doles out pain and suffering and won’t make change for a $20, and it sucks.
Unfortunately, there’s no appealing to fairness or righteousness or justice. If The Bad Thing is here, it’s here to stay. This is very much one of those “the only way out is through” kinds of situations.
Even if it’s just a temporary reality, and you know things will get better (they usually do), the first and most important step you can take is just acknowledging the reality of The Bad Thing. This is in fact the thing The Bad Thing most wants and needs, though perversely it is also the thing that robs it of its power.
After The Bad Thing
As you live through The Bad Thing, there will come a time where it will start to seem Less Bad. The timeline is hard to predict, but it will happen, and probably at first you won’t notice it. It may be some time later that you look back and see, “Ah yes, it was already starting to be Less Bad then, I just didn’t notice yet.” How long this will take depends on oh so many variables: What The Bad Thing is, how much planning you did, what part of you shows up when it arrives, how long it takes to acknowledge your Bad Thing. But the after will come, which is a highly irritating thing you will undoubtedly hear repeatedly from well-meaning people who know about your Bad Thing, but unfortunately they are right about this.
You may, once you are in the after, never quite feel the same again. In fact, if your life magically returns to the exact same sense of normal you had pre-Bad Thing, I’d suggest that perhaps you’ve maybe not totally come to grips with it?
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