Tiny Little Life Preservers

When my friend invited me to join a gratitude list almost two years ago, I had to actively keep my eyes from rolling back into my head.

I heard gratitude practice, but I thought toxic positivity.

I heard gratitude practice, but I thought spiritual bypassing.

I heard gratitude practice, but I thought next thing I know she’ll suggest burning sage and balancing my chakras.

I said yes because I’m a fucking people pleaser. And maybe, just maybe, also because I knew I needed a major attitude adjustment. Back when I was an overly zealous member of the Mormon church, the pressure to develop an “attitude of gratitude” was just another reason to feel guilty. Especially when I first heard the saying: “What if you woke up tomorrow with only the things you were grateful for today?”

I understand the phrase is meant to remind me that I take too many things for granted and that I do actually have a lot to be grateful for. But the reason it doesn’t work for me is that it inspires a perspective of lack. Better say thank you, or I’ll take it away! Better not be so spoiled, because you could lose anything at any moment. That kind of forced gratitude has always conjured dread and panicked urgency in me.

Although I left the church many years ago, my frustration with the idea of gratitude kept coming up in other contexts, too.

The gratitude list my friend invited me to is common in recovery circles, and I often don’t like how they’re being used. Once, in an Al-Anon meeting, a woman who’d lost her only child talked about how she wanted to murder her husband because he suggested a gratitude practice the day their daughter died. I thought, yep, that’s grounds for divorce to ask me to be grateful for anything on the worst day of my life.

It sounded like a feeble attempt at using gratitude to manufacture a silver lining to the unfathomable loss they’d just experienced. And yet, the woman went on to explain that finding something, anything, to be grateful for was the tiny hope she needed to go on for another day, another minute, another second, in a situation that was utterly devastating. She said that gratitude had saved her from plunging into complete darkness.

I was skeptical, and I’m not saying I would hold myself to a gratitude practice if the unimaginable happened to me. But, I also felt like she had more street cred than many other people who wanted to sell me gratitude. It sounded like she used gratitude as a life preserver while she was drowning, rather than as a way to yell, “I’m fine!” while getting pulled under.

So, I decided to try it. The four of us on this gratitude list would email ten things we’re grateful for every single day. I thought 10 was a lot. And I was discouraged from repeating family, house, job, friends over and over. Be specific, she said. I would try. Don’t add petty, superficial things, she said. So, like, don’t say I’m grateful for my favorite pair of jeans that make my ass look great? I would definitely not comply with that one, whether or not she already regretted inviting me to the list.

I walked into the list with raised eyebrows and a condescending smirk, but within the first week, I was holding other people’s treasures, my eyes glassy with tears, my body softening, mouth hanging open at the richness of life and the complex humanity of my friends. Two years later, writing and reading these lists is one of my daily highlights.

Everyone’s lives are so beautiful and heartbreaking. I get to watch my friends go through pain and chaos, sometimes with grace, sometimes dangling over the abyss with one very sweaty hand, but always with the knowledge there was someone else at the other end of that email witnessing it all.

I’m getting to know these friends in an intimate, day-to-day way I don’t share with everyone in my life.

They’re letting me in, ten lines at a time

Ten tiny joys

Ten exhales of relief

Ten holy shits, I’m glad that’s over

Ten delights, surprises, and moments of awe

Ten devastating heartbreaks and life-changing losses

Ten decisions without knowing the outcome

I didn’t think I could love these friends more. And now I do.

In many ways, my life this past year has felt like a dumpster fire shit storm, but the gratitude list reminds me every day how much sweetness and friendship and connection and love I’m surrounded with.

Gratitude has not made me fake positive, but it has thrown tiny life preservers my way, little glimpses of hope, shimmery shards of “there is more, hold on, keep going, you won’t always feel this way.”

There are still puppies with waggy tails in this world and cards from your sister in the mailbox, and unexpected hugs from your teenagers, and fresh bread from your favorite bakery, and sunsets so golden they make you cry and songs you never heard before and the smell of barbecue on the first warm spring Saturday and new friends who feel like old friends, and stumbling on someone else’s words that make you feel known by a stranger.

These beautiful, joyful, peaceful, and surprising moments don’t cancel out the bad shit, don’t numb the pain, don’t offer an escape from the terror, the suffering, the overwhelm, the “ohmygod-I-can’t-do-this-anymore.”

But they are just as real. And I now understand that being grateful was never the problem. Thinking I had to choose was the problem. Not allowing complex feelings and combinations of contradictory emotions was the problem.

Feeling terribly weak when I was sick and being grateful I could take off work, get relief with medicine, and go to sleep in a comfortable bed in a cozy house.

Snot bubble crying in desperation at a recovery meeting and being grateful for feeling two people on either side put their arms around me with no advice, only love.

Grieving the loss of a person, a relationship, a lifelong dream and being grateful for the ability to love deeply, for the profound moments I’ve experienced, and the space for something new to grow.

I realized that my contempt for the people peddling toxic positivity and spiritual bypassing wasn’t just about my need to allow my “negative” feelings without fear of judgment from others. I was expected to be cheery and compliant and have my shit together for so long that I truly needed to overcompensate and immerse myself in the sadness and anger that I never acknowledged before. And yet, there was a small part that thought I had to be sad to be deep, and serious to be smart. And that was such bullshit.

I now sink deeper into the embrace, and don’t let go first. I’m in no rush to get up off the couch when I drink coffee in the morning. Instead, the steam rises in curls, and I stay still. I lie in bed the extra ten minutes, listening to the birds through the open window and watching the gradient of pink and peach turn to blue.

Gratitude has given me ease and delicious slowness and contentment with tiny things. Gratitude has given me extra-strength pain relief without numbing the pain, but by existing alongside it. It has given me a new focus for my attention. It has given me hope when I felt like I would never get up off the bathroom floor. It has given me resolve to face another day after sleepless nights. It has given me comfort after screaming in the car.

I don’t have to earn beauty and ease and playfulness. I can create those moments and I can notice them all around me and I get to enjoy them and revel in them and be deeply grateful for them.

Ten things I’m grateful for today:

1. The knowledge that I’m not a temple. Temples can be devastated, desecrated, and destroyed. I’m a forest that will grow back after each burning, again and again.
2. The first holy sip of hot coffee this morning when I was the only one awake.
3. That moment Jennette McCurdy’s voice broke in the audio recording of her memoir, which made me realize this is a real person. We’re not alone even at our loneliest.
4. Going on a rainy walk with a new friend who trusted me enough to open up about some painful past events.
5. My green shirt that fits perfectly and makes me feel confident.
6. Setting a new personal record for deadlifting at the gym with good form, so I didn’t fuck up my back. I felt strong and proud of my progress from a year and a half ago when I couldn’t pull half that weight.
7. The medical professionals in this small community, who deeply care about my children’s wellbeing and offer support and resources well beyond their job descriptions.
8. Wearing the moon necklace my sister gave me for my birthday, which always reminds me how very lucky I am to do life with her.
9. Looking out at my backyard with the grass growing bright green and wild thanks to the spring snow and how soon it will be time for my favorite “chore”—mowing the lawn! Smelling fresh-cut grass means memories of summer mornings in Germany and my Opa in his ridiculous Hawaiian shirts.
10. Hearing my son play his new piano so beautifully it made me smile and cry at the same time, before he turned back to look at me and said: “I’m so happy right now.”

Originally wrote this on May 2nd, 2024. I've been slacking on this daily practice for a few months, and this is my way to recommit to it. Not because I feel guilty and need a public self-shaming, but because yesterday I had a lovely conversation with one of my very good friends who's on that list with me, and she mentioned that she missed it, which made me realize that I, too, missed it. And now I want to get back into doing something sweet and lovely for myself.

Coming up!

Two experimental classes that I'm excited about :) If summer is the time for you when all things go haywire with strange schedules and vacations, and you want to set a couple of dates with yourself to write, I hope you join us! Click on the images to get all the details about each class (yes, I always use the same Canva design with different colors, but sometimes I do change the squigglies):