How do you react to bad times?

People are always at the best when life is good, and that don't have to worry excessively. The life of a person can be emotionally dictated by the things that they feel, and that's why some people become chronically sad, lose their "happy self" and all that, because of some traumatic or difficulty that's happened to them.

I have experience hard times, still experiencing one, and a lot of times, I can tell you that I sometimes forget how it felt to be happy. Not smiling, not laughing or anything, just the feeling of ease without constant sadness or worry.

It's a combination of a lot of things currently going on in my life, things I'm not longer comfortable sharing, but they've been there and caused chronic sadness.

Now this sadness doesn't mean I don't smile or laugh.

However these days, I realize that whenever I laugh or smile, it's probably because I'm reacting to a situation, like it's a sort of expected behavioral tendency, and not because of genuine happiness.

I think this is the reality of many people.

Facial expressions like smiling or smirking is a reaction and not truly an expression for them.

For example, a person attending to someone or selling stuff to them is expected to smile, the smile is an expectation, a recommendation that gives clients the feeling that they're welcome, it's not an emotional that's supposed to be real, it's just business.

This is why we cannot judge people based on their facial expressions, in most work places, a huge percentage of the facial expressions are just fake, and some of these people are different entities in their homes.

Forgive for meandering, the question I'm asking today is "how do you react to bad times?" I mean, difficult times that just steals every positive energy within you? Do you throw your hands in the air? Feel sad at the situation, and just get angry? Do you get depressed or just self-isolate?

A feeling you recognize

A few weeks back, someone I know, lost their newly wedded wife, and after I texted him to empathize with him, I seriously never expected him to reply, because he must've been in a really bad mental state of mind, and rightly so. He replied after a while though.

This guy was always a jolly guy. He was always happy and posted a lot of memes, and I remembered sharing my story of a lot of problems in my life, but he simply didn't understand what I was trying to talk about.

For someone who has lost a lot of people, experience suffering, deprivation, illnesses, pain, mockery, isolation and discrimination, I understand perfectly what it means to lose someone, and because of that I can exactly process what he felt after losing that woman.

Nowadays he hardly posts memes or even do a lot of Internet thing, he may be scarred for a while, and his orientation of reality will definitely change. This is what pain does do people and honestly people who haven't seen that pain may not really understand it.

I've lost a lot of "supposed" friends, simply because they probably didn't understand a lot of my pain, and probably felt my reactions were extreme. I've been people experience the type of pain that they never predicted and a lot of times, their reaction is not so different from when I was in a lot of dark place.

Pain is the same, so why discriminate it?

People react the same way when they're in a pain or when they've experienced bad times. Some others will react more extremely.... others well, not so much.

The idea is that pain is the same, people only discriminate the display of pain they see from others because they themselves may have not experienced that level of pain, and that's why people has to, most of the times experience what other's have experienced to truly understand reacts like silence, isolation, change in attitude, or lifestyle.

The people who do not understand this might just quietly "unfriend" you, simply because they've not been in that place, and they cannot understand or accommodate what you're feeling. This is the same with when people go broke, their reactions are always experience, and even having a chronic health condition is another horrible thing entirely.