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I felt like crap today, so I decided to just go with it.  I built myself a little nest on the couch and surrounded myself with books, music, knitting, tea, and chocolate. I felt a little bit guilty for what I felt was wallowing in the crap feeling.  But as I finished a book (the last in The Hunger Games series), started a couple new ones, did a little schoolwork and knitting, I began to feel better. And I decided that although I see the value in "act[ing] the way you want to feel" (from The Happiness Project, one of the new books I started), I also think there is value in being honest and just acting the way you feel. I am all for trying to feel happier and better, but I also that we have a tendency to fight negative emotions and to try to push them away, which often doesn't work and ends up making us feel worse. I think sometimes we need to just name how we feel and live with ourselves in that space, and allow others to do the same.

"Such an argument is necessarily an essay ---a trial or an an attempt. It risks error all the time; it is in error, inevitably, some of the time. The idea that it could produce a verdict is absurd, as is the possibility that it could be concluded. I am never completely happy with this project, and sometimes I am not happy with it at all. I dislike its necessary incompleteness, and I am embarrassed by its ceaseless insinuation that it is a job for somebody better qualified. I keep returning to it, I think, because the study of connections is an endless fascination, and because the understanding of connections seems to me an indispensable part of humanity's self-defense."                                                    -Wendell Berry, P...