Weekly Oracle: Don't Give Into The Gloom

I love spending time with my Oracle Cards and my many decks. My readings always allow me to see my situation from a different perspective. I love that.

This week's card is from Brian Froud's The Faeries' Oracle and is the Gloominous Doom.

Dun dun duuuuuuun.

This card represents self-defeat, self-pity, self-destruction and moving past all of that to discover the ability to take care of ourselves.

Self-pity is the first step on a slippery and seductive slide down the Path of the Suck. We all experience it and we all go down it. It starts off with that one event, or that one thought, and all we can think is:

Why me?

That's natural when something bad or unpleasant happens isn't it? It starts getting tricky when you begin to believe that the world is against you, that nothing is ever going to go right, that the Universe just absolutely hates you and you must be the absolute suckiest sucky person on the planet because nothing goes right for you EVER.

It's easy to slide into those thoughts. It's easier to accept that there's a mysterious somethingsomething that makes life miserable instead of seeing the real reasons. Maybe you have a habit of making bad choices or surrounding yourself with people you shouldn't, or your attitude needs a little bit of an adjustment or you feel like people pay attention to you when you're sad. Or the worst reason of all: sometimes bad things happen to good people and it just wasn't your fault.

Accountability defeats self-pity.

You can choose to pity yourself and to rail against the Universe for all its unfairness or you can be accountable for what you can do about it. You get to pick yourself up and learn from it. You get to make better choices next time. You get to show the Universe that when it knocks you down, you are gonna get up again.

The sorrier you feel for yourself, the worse your life becomes.

It's not about denying those feelings, pushing them away, or ignoring them. It's about being willing to explore just how awful things feel, how hard things are, and figuring out what has made you feel that way in the first place. You shouldn't let feelings go without working through them, they need to be fully acknowledged and understood first.

That is the lesson of Gloominous Doom. Feeling like the whole world is against you, or that nothing is ever going to go right, we need to feel those things so that we can appreciate the opposite. It makes the good times so much sweeter, it deepens our gratitude and appreciation for the good things.

Do you get stuck in self-pity or are you good at fighting your way out of it?