Rot girl summer - not

Tip #6 : plan a wallow day

This post is part of a series I’m writing from mid-June to mid-November 2024, on things that helped me rebuild my confidence, sense of self, and increased my delight in my life after massive difficulty in multiple areas. For full details and post links to all 110 things, go to this post here.

Alright, y’all remember last time how we planned a delight day and how wonderful and productive and soul fulfilling that was?

This is going to be just as helpful, but way less immediately fun.

We’re planning and thinking through a wallow day.

Just as much as a delight day is not a treat yourself day, a wallow day is not a day to rot in bed and ignore responsibilities or eat trash food and decompose…even if you’d like to…

This day is about letting all of the feelings you have surface, observing and respecting them, and feeling all the details.

It’s really tough if you do it right.

Here’s what you need.

You need to be alone again, for as much time as you can have, and in a comfortable place or two.

You’re intentionally making space for whatever your’e feeling or need to feel, or that you know needs to get felt but don’t know how to feel. Hence the comfort spaces and time and peace around you.

When you’ve had struggles processing feelings, dealing with traumas or intensities of any kind it can be really tough to know how to handle stuff. And with the pace of life it’s hard to find time to naturally incorporate that stuff…especially if it’s a new skill to learn, as it was for me.

Anyway it can be tough to actually do this emotional shit when it requires you do appear “unproductive” to the rest of the world. Just remember, your inner growth doesn’t owe the world shit, it’s not about anyone else but you.

And so I came up with this little trick because we’re probably going to feel guilt anyway. We just might. It’s hard. I get it.

When you make the wallow day a planned intentional thing, with the goal of the day to be to wallow, then if you have managed to wallow that day then you have been productive, you have accomplished what you needed to and you have made progress.

It works. It combats that should tendency we have to be productive at the expense of our feelings or actual immediate needs, and then get nothing done and the problem is compounded.

Dealing properly with one’s feelings is actually an incredibly valuable and underutilized skillset, and learning how to do that as an adult is tough. So worth doing.

Anyway.

Kinda love this meme because the scheduling is pretty exceptional awareness of the Grinch, but self-pity isn’t the thing. You’re feeling things but not feeling anything about the feels that show up besides ok that exists for me, good to know.

It hurts a lot and is not fun.

You aren’t rushing through a cry, but letting it linger if it wants to.

You aren’t suppressing a spontaneous laugh or a shout or the need to lay on the couch with a cold wash cloth on your face.

You are walking if you need to walk in order to give attention to the one thing you need to think about or feel.

You are looking hard at the facts of what is and has been and observing without judgment how those feels turn up for you. It’s hard. Really awful sometimes and I keep saying that because it’s really important to know that opening yourself up to let things come to the surface is really scary.

You don’t need to listen to things or try to learn anything on this day and you don’t need to try to heal today either.

This is just a day for feeling everything and letting it be there.

ilysm - you can do it.

xoxo - Marian