Rollercoaster

Your boss is impressed with you, and you're happy. The next day they find what you did disappointing, and your heart sinks.

You meet someone, things click, and you want to spend time together. When you make yourself available, they aren't. It’s complicated. You understand and retreat and they are back, persistent, filled with regret. You make yourself available and then they are gone.

Welcome to the roller coaster of life.

One day you are up, the next day you are down. Surely the way to fix this is to do it right. If you get it perfect, this thing that feels special may stand a chance. But we can’t control the ups and downs of life, we can't make it go higher instead of lower, we can't stop the times where your world is upside down and nothing makes sense.

Ups and downs come at various times and different lengths throughout our lives. We really never know what to expect. The lows in life make me feel like there is no hope or end in sight. The highs make me feel like life is perfect and will always be that way.

What we can do is decide how we will feel about the ride. We can scream and hate it, or we can throw our hands up in the air with a big smile on our face and yell out joyfully at the thrill of the ride. Life is a blend of joy and sorrow in unknown proportions. We need to taste the bitterness of pain and sweetness of joys without hesitation; we don't know when the next time we will experience them.

When you are happy or in a positive place, you remember the bad times, reflect on when the situation was difficult, when you were crying and thinking life would never get better. When you extremely sad or in a negative place, you miss the time you were happy, when things were easier and when life looked like it was perfect.

You can't have one without the other. We need to enjoy the life we were given and embrace it every day. We need to have the same attitude and positivity towards life when we experience these down turns.

The essential realization of your boss being impressed or disappointed has nothing to do with you. The only way off the roller coaster is to not let their disapproval or approval affect you. The interest and lack of interest from the new person in your life has nothing to do with you. They are going through whatever and while it may be justified and understandable, the one on the roller coaster is you and you need to disengage.

Reaching perfection in the eyes of others is impossible yet we strive for each and every day. We want people to like us, to see us how we see ourselves, to understand things how we understand them.

And that's the issue. We can't expect others to see things exactly like we do, to share our feelings completely, to agree with what we say is right. We all love approval, but ultimately the measure of our work, our worth, our love, is ourselves.