Sometimes we have days that just suck.

When that day also happens to be your birthday, it can leave a lingering bad feeling that seems impossible to shake off. This is what happened to me last week.

My birthday sucked.

And then the next day started to suck, too, because all I could think about was how the previous day had been my birthday, and well, it had sucked.

But everything that comes across our paths is here to teach us a lesson. Everything—even a sucky birthday.

And I know that on the human suffering scale, a sucky birthday is pretty minimal. That I get. But the lesson it gave me, the lesson I have received over and over again from so many events in my life, is definitely not. And that lesson is, the only way to transform anything is acceptance.

As long as we try to shove away our feelings and experiences, to hide them in the recesses of our minds and bodies, they will keep having power over us.

But when we just see them for exactly what they are, feelings and experiences, and may I say transient, impermanent and even malleable feelings and experiences, poof—they have a way of disappearing.

The morning after my birthday I was overwhelmed with dread. I kept thinking about all the things that had gone wrong the day before. All the negative circumstances I felt like I had created. The fighting with my spouse, my rudeness to my mother-in-law, a criticism from an editor, dejected looks on my children’s faces.

All I could see was disappointment after disappointment from the previous day and this feeling had a deepness to it—an overwhelming heaviness that felt like I would never be able to feel better about these experiences.

But where do flashes of inspiration come from?

How does it happen that we suddenly see something differently? Sometimes without even trying?

I suddenly started writing about my bad birthday in my mind, very directly but with humor and sweetness, and seeing the events that happened—actually looking at each event exactly as it was instead of just swimming around in the generaldoom and gloom—made me see my birthday differently.

The events on my birthday weren’t negative situations I had caused. They were just funny, normal things that happen to humans all the time, and when I decided I would share these funny anecdotes about what seemed like a shameful day with the world, I felt freer and freer.

Although I felt vulnerable by turning what seemed like a series of shameful experiences into a Facebook post, the more I thought about doing it, the lighter and happier I felt.

This idea to humorously report the events of my birthday in a Facebook post literally turned my mood from an “I hate everything and how am I ever going to make it through the rest of my life” mood to a “Life is pretty funny you know, I’m glad I get to live it,” mood.

Acceptance, facing it head on, laughing at the craziness of human existence, not being scared to share our failures, letting vulnerability in, not taking ourselves so seriously…these might seem like trivial choices, but I say they are life-savers when our mistakes and negative experiences are more than we can handle.

What is the antidote to shame? According to world-famous shame and vulnerability researcher Brene Brown, it is empathy. And this is what happened when I looked at my own shameful events from my sucky birthday with humor and sweetness. I softened toward myself and felt empathy for what had just been a bad day, not a sign of my own failure.

And when I wrote all the stupid things that had happened to me in a Facebook post, what did I receive? More empathy from people who care about me. And some comments that were prescribing and judgey. But who cares? I wasn’t scared to look at my experiences head-on so I wasn’t scared to let other people go for it, as well.

Shame and vulnerability, these aren’t things to run from. They will suck our energy dry if we don’t deal with them, and who needs that on top of the inevitable sucky days themselves?

So, everyone my birthday sucked, I made mistakes, and then I laughed at my mistakes and then I shared them with the world.

And I don’t care who knows.

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Editor: Catherine Monkman

Photos: Camilla Soares/Flickr