When everything goes wrong, I choose to smile

I’ve had a bit of a week. Well frankly, a couple of weeks.
I’m in the home stretch of finishing my master’s dissertation for university (and still have so much more to write), my family who I struggle with came to visit (and things went south as expected), I’m having a few health issues and just to top it all off, I just got dumped.
I’m not gonna lie, it’s been rough.
But at a certain point, you just gotta smile at it all?

“When you are ready to move on or
if you come to peace with pain, you’ll find a silver lining.”
– Miley Cyrus

Truth is, there’s always stuff to be upset about.
There’s also always stuff to be happy for.
And it’s up to me to choose whether I want to focus on the massive pile of shit that has been delivered to my front door, dragging it across the house as I go on about my day, or whether I decide to use it for composting.
The shitty things have already happened, and the quicker I move on, the quicker I get to the good stuff.

“Instead of worrying about what you cannot control,
shift your energy to what you can create.”
– Roy T. Bennett

Focusing on all the ‘bad’ things that have happened recently makes me feel small and out of control: I cannot control how other people feel about me or whether my body aches today.
My mood however, to a degree, I can control.
I can pick up the phone and let my loved ones know that I care about them. I can take the extra effort to apply suncream to my face, cook a fancy meal or spend some quality time with my pets.
I can choose to feel like a participant or the main person in my life.

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
– Oscar Wilde

Not feeling like all this horrible stuff is simply happening to me makes me feel better.
It’s not to negate that it sucks and that I deserve time to be angry and sad, but I try not to let it define my days.
While my mind might be predisposed to focus on the bad stuff, I choose to make the happy stuff stickier.
How do you cope with bad days? Let me know how you allow your body to heal and yet move on?