My week started off with a parking ticket. A $50 parking ticket to be exact, and it happened simply because I forgot to move my car out of the faculty lot after I parked there for what was supposed to only be a mere hour. Not only that, but I didn’t even realize that I had left my car in an illegal parking spot until I was trying to go to Walmart over 24 hours later and searched my entire dorm parking lot for my missing car. And that’s how my week began.

We all have these weeks. The ones where life is just weird or where you just feel off. Though most of the time we can all deal with the everyday stresses we have to face, sometimes life just shakes us a bit harder than usual until we are crying ourselves to sleep at night or, less dramatically, just eating one too many chocolate brownies in the cafeteria. Sometimes we don’t even know what’s quite wrong with us or why life suddenly feels like a bit too much to handle, and sometimes we know exactly what’s wrong but don’t quite know how to muster up the courage to deal with it.

For many people I know and love, including myself, this just has been one of those weeks. My best friend lost her car and another friend her job. My other friend had exams in every class in a two-day time span, and another one started her week off with a fight with her boyfriend. As for me, I had my parking ticket in one hand and a lot of bottled up emotions in the other.

This is when we have a choice. When we can peer down in the deep, dark, black pit of suffering and despair that our minds are pushing us toward. You know the one. The dark black hole that makes you feel like you’re letting your entire family down, feel like life is hopeless because of how corrupt the systems of the world are, most notably politics of all kinds; feel like you’re completely alone although you’re surrounded by people, and feel like bubbling in the scantrons semester after semester is utterly and entirely purposeless and thousands of dollars scam. It’s the days when all your clothes, your hair and maybe even your face make you feel self-loathing. You start to feel like you are a very insignificant speck of human among other specks of humans in the midst of a giant galaxy.

We can jump down the black hole. We can feel our entire world crashing around us, when we start to question everything from our existence, to our friends, to our career path or why we chose to wear this particular striped shirt today. Or we can pretend we aren’t jumping down the pit of despair but really we are just closing our eyes, eating aforementioned brownies and falling straight down the bottom, all the while saying we are just fine.

These are possible answers (among others) to when we have these weeks of misfortunes, mishaps and miscommunication. But I’m going to propose another solution: one that hopefully doesn’t involve jumping into all your terrible thoughts and viewing life from the wrong side of the tracks. Instead of developing a negative perception of what life is from weeks like this, I’m proposing that we celebrate.

I know that’s the last thing you want to do. I know that because I’m about to watch Netflix, while wearing sweatpants and sipping wine because, well, I’ve just had one of those weeks and don’t feel like celebrating. But I’m not being hypocritical, because what I mean by celebrating is not what you think.

I am celebrating the fact that I am human and sometimes that is just plain hard. Sometimes emotions are a bit wacky for reasons unbeknownst to us, sometimes people do mean things to us (like steal our cars or fire us or hurt our feelings) and sometimes we do stupid things that get us all mad at ourselves and mess up our expectations. Life just isn’t containable, and we just aren’t perfect. But instead of letting that send us down to you-know-where, let’s celebrate the fact that life is still beautiful, because it’s wild, unpredictable, and free, and as Thoreau said, “All good things are wild and free.” Though we let ourselves down, other people let us down, and sometimes stuff just doesn’t go our way, life is still great. It’s still a magnificent miracle that we even exist here, that the sky is blue and can produce literal rainbows; and that the sun is the perfect distance from us as to keep us warm but not burn us into little crisps of toast.

Just take a look at your hands, at the little lines that criss-cross through your palm and up to your fingertips. Those little lines are a brilliant pattern that have never existed before you and will never, ever be copied again. You are a one hundred percent unique and an individual human, and with that comes all the craziness of being a human, but all the beauty too. Remember when you’re having one of those weeks that make you want to hate humanity and wonder why you’re even here, that though you are just one in a billion; you are the only one. The only one of you, which sounds super cliché but should be pretty dang amazing if you take a second to really ponder the implications. You’ll never exist again, and no one like you has ever existed before, so this is your one and only chance to take life for what it is and love every second you possibly can.

The reality is you won’t love every second of your life, because sometimes your weeks will suck, like this one has for me and many others. But the key is to not even approach the black hole anymore, as tempting and oddly comforting as it sometimes is. The key is to celebrate your humanity. Celebrate that you are you and don’t have to (and can’t) be anything else, and that life is a crazy, messy, unpredictable, beautiful, and honestly a miraculous wonder. Not every week is going to be lovely, but we can’t let that shade the rest of our life grey. We can choose to see whatever we want to see in life, in ourselves and in others, so for goodness sakes, let’s choose to see the beauty and simply let ourselves be human. Even in these weeks.