Three lines on a genuinely bad Tuesday
The day did not improve. The entry was not a correction. It was just the last thing I looked at instead of the message at 6pm.
The Grateful Team · · 2 min read
Example submission. The Grateful team wrote this to show the format. It is not a reader's story.
The message arrived at 6.12pm and I read it four times.
I will not go into what it said. It was work, it was not fair, and it was not going to be resolved that evening. What I want to describe is the two hours afterwards, because that is the part I have some say over and I did not know that until this year.
By 8pm the entire Tuesday had one colour. Eleven hours of it had gone fine — a good morning, a call that went well, lunch outside — and none of that was available to me any more. Ask me how Tuesday was and I would have said bad, and I would have meant it, and I would have been describing about four minutes of it.
What I wrote
I nearly skipped it. The idea of writing three good things about that day felt insulting, like being asked to find the silver lining by someone who had not been listening.
What I wrote in the end was:
Rain started right after I got inside. The call at 11 went better than I expected. A. noticed I was off and asked.
None of those were consolation. The rain was not an argument against the message. A. asking did not fix anything. They were just three things that had also happened on Tuesday and would otherwise have been deleted.
The point is not that it helped me feel better
It did not, particularly. I went to bed annoyed.
What it did was change what was still on the shelf a week later. When I think about that Tuesday now, the message is there — of course it is — but so is standing inside a doorway watching the rain start, and so is someone noticing my face and asking. Three entries in a race that would otherwise have run unopposed.
That is a smaller claim than most things you will read about gratitude journaling, and it is the one I can actually stand behind. The bad thing keeps its size. It just stops being the only thing.
If you are having one of these
Write one line, not three. Make it small. "I got through it" is a real entry and I have written it more than once.
Then put the phone somewhere else, because whatever you look at last is what the day gets filed under, and it does not have to be the message.
Common questions
- Should you journal on a bad day?
- Yes, and shorter than usual. The aim on a hard day is not to argue that the day was good — it is to record that something survived it, which takes one line and about ten seconds.
- What do you write when nothing good happened?
- Something small and true rather than something meaningful. Ten quiet minutes, a hot drink, one message that landed well. If nothing at all comes, "I got through it" is a legitimate entry.
One good thing, weekly
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