It’s that time of the year again, when teachers ask their students to go around the room saying what they’re thankful for and everyone says friends or family. I was the kid who, when it was my turn, would dramatically pause to come up with a thoughtful answer, but ended up saying my mom like everyone else. The truth is that gratitude can be a vulnerable subject, and without reading too far into some tedious ice breaker activity, I think the relationship between people and their blessings is often unspoken.
A while ago, I realized that in my own life, I assume there are things to be thankful for, but don’t really specify to myself what they are. Obviously I appreciated my loved ones and my good health and whatnot, but I never took the time to think deeply about it. I made it a goal for myself in 2020 to change that. I started off by buying a new notebook (a great motivator) and eventually developed a habit of jotting down a few things I was grateful for every day. Now, 11 months later, that was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
As a self-proclaimed “glass-half-empty” kind of person, I’ve always tended to focus on the negative parts of life. Before all of this, I would always find something to complain about, whether it was stress, sleep deprivation or the long line outside Rende. Consequently, I blamed my bad moods on external factors and would let random, superficial inconveniences ruin my entire day. Even at the beginning of my gratitude journaling, I doubted that anything would come of it.
I shed that uncertainty almost immediately when I realized that I had been self-sabotaging myself. I was starting to see how I was creating a negative environment by constantly picking out the things that made me unhappy. I was so consumed with thoughts of my shortcomings and the powers above working against me that I internalized all of that bad energy.
