What To Do When You Just Wake Up With The Blues

There’s a line in the song ‘Just Can’t Lose’ by The Deep Dark Woods that goes: ‘I’ve got those blues that I just can’t lose.’ Recently, upon the line’s third or fourth recital over the course of the song, I realized, hell, I really do have a case of the blues today that I just can’t seem to lose. These aren’t your standard blues, though.

They’re not constant, and they don’t call for the emotionally-fueled consumption of ice cream by the gallon like it’s your damn job.

No, these blues are the kind that will linger and lie in wait to strike when you least expect it. You’ll go to bed at ease, with a light heart and an optimistic mind, and you’ll wake up cold, bleary-eyed, and alone. You’ll feel as if you’ve been struck down with the weight of your life’s burdens and responsibilities alike, all howling for attention.

But all you want to do is proceed like everything’s just alright and hunky-dory, never mind the fact that nobody even says hunky-dory anymore. Because maybe if you act like everything is alright, some of it’ll weigh just a little less on your mind that silently complains for just a little more peace and quiet.

And you keep asking yourself, how’d this all come about in the first place?

You felt phenomenal last night, hell, you didn’t even need the herbal tea that if we’re being honest is tantamount to a sleep-inducing hypnosis session administered by a professional with a voice that may or may not run superior to the legendary voice of James Earl Jones. Nothing mattered last night, save for whether or not you’d throw a few handfuls of chocolate chips in that pancake batter the next morning, so as to consume as many pancakes as humanly possible. But now — now everything matters, and it kind of fucking hurts. That paper you should’ve started on a week ago, that double shift that might as well be running towards you at full speed, that special someone who never texted you back (not even an emoticon, just iced out entirely), and that empty spot beside you in bed that you’d rather not acknowledge most every night.

Sure, we have those mornings where we might wake up, and for whatever reason things that didn’t trouble us the night before trouble us to a borderline unbearably constrictive degree, and well, it all kind of weighs a ton — but only if we let it though.

Life’s a game of moves and counter-moves, in which we’re really just trying to fuck up as little as possible relative to everything else we do on a day-to-day basis. I think that as long as we keep moving, keep adapting, keep striving towards our best selves, we might just stand to lighten an otherwise heavy load of ‘troubles’ that really aren’t troubles half the time. By continuing to move, and refusing to stay strung up on what might’ve been, what could be, and striving towards these better selves, I’d place a wager quantifiable to a rather obscene amount of imaginary money (no real money allowed because I’m a college student and Top Ramen is a luxury meal these days) that we’re bound to find ourselves smiling a lot more often, and troubled a whole hell of a lot less.

Granted, there’ll be days where we just can’t seem to shed the blues, but if that’s the case you just keep on movin’, keep on truckin’, and know that those troubles might just weigh a lot of little bits less if you divest your energy towards anything besides getting caught up on them.