Feeling wrong
Feeling Wrong, © 2000-2026 by Beth Mende Conny
I woke up this morning feeling wrong. Do you know what I mean?
You wake up and even before you’ve turned back the covers, you get sucker-punched into thinking you’ve done nothing with your life and likely never will.
You look around your messy house and think: Yes! Today! I will toss the vestiges of my old life and dusty thinking. I will go through old papers and create space, my future. I might even find the receipt for the wrong printer cartridge I bought last week. Or was it last month? Last year?! The ink’s probably drier than jerky at this point, so what’s the point?
There is no point, of course. But should you, against ridiculous odds, find the receipt, you’ll likely refile it in the paper mound on your desk, as surely as you’ll refile your freshman paper on Buddha’s Four Noble Truths because, well, you never know when the topic might arise in conversation. Besides, you got an “A.”
You woke up this morning feeling wrong, still you got out of bed, splashed water on your face, brushed your teeth. You looked in the mirror — mistake — and discovered that your gums receded four inches overnight. And your wrinkles? They’ve deepened by a foot, even though you’ve dropped big bucks on an anti-wrinkle cream. Better to have purchased spackle from Home Depot to fill in the grooves.
You work up this morning feeling wrong, still you went for your usual walk along your usual route accompanied by your usual thought: I am not enough. And then, as usual, you chastise yourself. Stop thinking about yourself. There is more to life than you. The goddamn sun is out, the sky is clear. There is a sweet, soft breeze filtering through the trees. And the birds! They’re calling to you. Converse, you ingrate.
But here’s what happens when you’re feeling wrong:
You don’t know what to say, how to say it, how to go off-script. Is there even a script? And it makes no difference if it is a sunny, breezy day and that the birds are singing. You’re feeling wrong, and wrong is wrong.
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