Maybe.

Maybe you don’t have a “bad attitude.” 

Maybe you’ve actually worked VERY hard to have a “good” attitude. 

Maybe you’ve worked hard for years to be what everybody wants. To meet everybody’s expectations and needs. 

Maybe that project— of trying to anticipate and meet everybody’s expectations and needs— has left you burned out. 

Maybe it makes a lot of sense that, right now, you wouldn’t be all that focused or motivated about ANYTHING. 

Maybe your attitude toward and beliefs about life are informed by things that actually happened to you. 

Maybe feeling the way you do right now about the world isn’t a choice. 

Maybe you’d give ANYTHING to be enthused or open. 

Maybe you tried DESPERATELY over the years to be “low maintenance.” 

Maybe you had a belief that the only way you would ever be loved or accepted was to BE “low maintenance.” 

After all, what happens when people are “high maintenance?” 

Others get frustrated with them. Then those others give up on them. They leave. They abandon them. 

Talk about terrifying. 

So maybe you tried to develop the ultimate “good attitude.” 

Maybe you became not just flexible, but VERY flexible. 

Maybe you became not just willing to compromise, but VERY willing to surrender your needs, wants, perceptions, and priorities— because you believed doing so was necessary to others liking you, accepting you…or not attacking or abandoning you. 

Maybe years of all that takes its toll.

Maybe you’re not “negative.” 

Maybe you’re not even all that “angry,” at least not at the people around you every day. 

Maybe you’re just tried. 

Maybe you’re in pain. 

Maybe you’re struggling to scrounge together enough hope and motivation to get out of bed in the morning, let alone make it through the day. 

Maybe you really would give ANYTHING to NOT feel this way every day….but the path from feeling this to feeling anything else seems winding, uncertain— and uphill. 

Maybe feeling the way you do isn’t al that weird. 

Maybe we can have compassion for the part of you that IS so tired— and, sure, kind of cynical at this point. 

Maybe we can see what other people see as “lashing out” or “withdrawing” as what they REALLY are— your attempts to manage feelings that FEEL quite unmanageable. 

Maybe the first step to realistically managing ANY of this is to refuse to blame yourself for what you FEEL. 

Refuse to blame yourself for being tired. 

Refuse to blame yourself for being sore— physically and emotionally. 

And maybe— just maybe— other peoples’ judgments about how “negative” we can be don’t matter all that much. 

Maybe what really counts is what WE can do— to turn our attention to doing the next. Right. Thing. 

Maybe.