If Today Is the Worst Day of Your Life - It's OK (A Christmas Reflection)
For some, Christmas is the loneliest day of the year. If today feels unbearable, science and humanity agree: your pain makes sense - and you’re not alone in it.
Today carries an expectation that few days in the Gregorian calendar can match. It's Christmas Day. Which means you should be happy. You should be with family having a lovely old time. You should be festive, and merry, and full of Christmas Dinner. You get the idea.
But what happens if you're not? What happens if today is just, utterly, utterly miserable? And the weight of expectation is squeezing your head like a boiled egg in a vice? If have something for you.
If you are reading this on Christmas Day, here’s some food for thought (or maths for mulling? Forgive me): if there are 8 billion people on the planet, and the average life span is roughly 26,000 days (71 years), then statistically there are roughly 300,000 people right now having the worst day of their lives. On Christmas bloody Day.
Matt Hussey
If that’s you today, then I’m sorry. The cosmic lottery of worse-day bingo has called your number and you’ve fallen into your own abyss; alone, and without a light. It’s terrible in there. If that’s the case, I want to tell you: it’s ok.
You see, the abyss is a place that lives in all of us. You may have already visited it, or it may be something that lies ahead. Whatever side of the chasm you stand on, I want you to know this: everyone will have at least one visit, and everyone will deal with it differently.
Let me explain.
You're in good company
This essay isn't about giving you five easy tips to resolve the worst day of your life. If you've read any of my work, you'll know that's not really what I go in for. And I know nothing of what you're going through right now.
But what I do know, and what I do want to share is, some sage words from people who have been to bottom of their own private abyss, and found a way back. Some of the world’s best-known musicians, artists, creatives, and politicians have been where you are right now. You’re in good company.
“Were I to vanish from the face of the earth today, it would be no great loss to Russian music” - those were the words of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, you know the Russian composer who wrote the score for The Nutcracker and Swan Lake.
Abraham Lincoln had a series of shit days. He lost his mother at 9, his sister at 19, and later, his 11-year-old son. “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth,” he wrote to a friend.
Matt Hussey
Frida Kahlo had probably more terrible days than anyone. At 18 the artist was involved in a horrific traffic accident when a tram crashed into the bus she was travelling on.
Her spinal column and pelvis were each broken in three places; her collarbone and two ribs broke as well. Her right leg, the one deformed by polio, was shattered, and fractured in 11 places, and her right foot was dislocated and crushed.
She underwent 30 operations to fix the above, and eventually lost her leg. In fact, looking into the history books, there are surprisingly few people who have not fallen into their own abyss.
Here’s a mini list of people whose worst days have been well-documented.
There are millions upon millions of people who feel or have felt the way you do right now. You are not alone.
A punch in the face
People have been around in one form or another for nearly 2 million years. We’ve learned a lot in that time: how to build things, how to harness the world around us, how to leave the planet, how to cook an omelet in 14 seconds.
We’ve learned how to put our bodies back to together, but we still don’t know how to fix the soul when life takes a run-up and kicks it square in the nuts. And no, drugs don't work either: both legal and illegal. When we suffer, we really, really suffer, and it’s terrible.
It’s the one thing that seems constant throughout history: the abyss is in all of us. And that’s ok. But why is it ok? Why on earth does our heads process emotional pain in the same way as physical pain? Why does the loss of a loved one feel like we’ve been shot?
This may be one of the cruelest truths of being human: the cost of loving deeply is the possibility of devastating pain. It feels unfair, almost sadistic, but science tells us this suffering isn't a flaw in our wiring - it's the point of it.
Why this all hurts so much
For most of our evolutionary history, being alone wasn't a lifestyle choice, it was a death sentence. We survived not because we were strong or fast, but because we stayed close, bonded tightly, and panicked when those bonds were threatened. Emotional pain evolved as an alarm system, every bit as urgent as physical pain - not to punish us, but to keep us alive.
That's why heartbreak doesn't just feel painful; it lights up the same regions of the brain as a broken bone. The mind never bothered to build a separate circuit for social loss - it simply hijacked the one for bodily harm. And when someone leaves or dies, we don't just lose them; we lose the version of ourselves that only existed with them.
Matt Hussey
Our sleep unravels, our appetite falters, our internal map of the world collapses. The pain is so acute because, on some ancient biological level, your body still believes something catastrophic has happened - because once upon a time, it had.
Throughout our entire shared history as a species, our story has been littered with absolute terror: plagues, famines, wars, more wars, colonialism, wars, more plagues, oh, and wars.
Humanity's worst year
I asked Google if there was a single point in history that everyone could agree on was utterly terrible for all concerned. And there was one according to a Harvard historian: the year 536.
In that year, a mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night, for 18 months. Crops failed, people starved, and a plague turned up to finish those that had survived what became the coldest decade in 2,300 years.
The known world had slipped into the abyss, alone, together. But few outside academia have ever really heard of it. But what does seem to happen during these periods of absolute poo is they pass. And with the elapsing of time, we tend to emerge from these low points with a thirst for meaning-making and re-imagining ourselves and the world around us.
Matt Hussey
The Englightenment came out of the 30 years war that left 8 million dead in the 1600s. The Black Death gave birth to humanism; the founding idea that most of our society is now built on. Existentialism, stoicism, and Confucianism, all emerged after periods when life was crap. We bounce back, hard. We survive, and we build structures, systems and ideas that help reduce the chances of finding ourselves back in the abyss once more.
How do we do that? When we finally find a way out of the darkness, we tend to go back to have a look around. Except this time we have a light, and this time what we see is all the marks left behind by everyone else who ever found themselves lost in their own personal abyss.
All the people I've mentioned, and the millions upon millions, their marks, their musings, their creativity is in that same space you were in. It's probably the most universal of truths that ripple through all of us: we will go through the shit.
You will survive
But know this: this might be the worst day of your life, but it will pass. The fog will lift, the emotional famine will pass and you will be able to look back and reflect on what was a shit day.
There’s a wonderful word I learned recently: Énouement. The bittersweet feeling of seeing how the future turns out, but not being able to go back and tell your past self that all will be well. I love this idea.
That inside you are future selves lying in wait to greet you once you emerge from this dark period. Each time you find yourself in the place you are in right now, know that there is life on the other side and that life can be full of meaning, and understanding, and kindness. You just need to weather this storm.
When Frida Kahlo was asked about the incredible pain she had endured throughout her life she said, “At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.”
You can endure this day. You can find a way out of the abyss. You can find that future self waiting. You just have to keep going.
We'll be here, waiting for you.
