Does Weather give us the Blues?

It rained today. It's been raining off and on all week, and I'd be lying if I said I hadn't noticed a shift in my mood to match it.

But is it really the rain? Or is it the weight of responsibilities and tasks quietly piling up in the background? Maybe both. Maybe neither. What I do know is that something has felt off — a low-grade irritability, a flatness I can't quite shake. The "mehs," as I've come to call it.

Here's what I've been trying to do: not sit in the sadness. Reframe. Use coping skills. Journal. All the things I know work. And they do help — but they don't always fix the feeling entirely, and that's been frustrating in its own way.

What I keep coming back to is this question: what if the meh has a purpose?

We naturally yearn for something better — joy, bliss, happiness. We treat the absence of those things like a problem to solve. But what if the flatness is asking something of us rather than just taking something from us?

And then there's the tension I've been sitting with most: is it even possible to do the work of the day and cultivate joy at the same time? Because right now, it feels like trying to do both is the very thing making me stumble. Maybe joy isn't something to chase alongside everything else. Maybe it's a one-thing-at-a-time invitation — a gentle reminder that you can't force the bloom while you're still tending the soil.

I don't have a clean answer today. But I'm learning that naming the meh might be the first step through it.

When you're in a season of "meh," do you find yourself trying to work your way out of it — and does that effort ever make it worse?