Being Grateful Might Be the One Thing that Pulls You Out of the Dark

Because wallowing isn’t the one.

Photo by Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash

By all accounts, I should be miserable. (Stay with me.)

My non-existent writing career has pulled the covers over its worn-weary head. The last book I published was in 2017 and was read by a sum total of five people. And the idea of finding a new agent makes me want to scream into soft pillows. Instead, I stare at a computer screen, placating myself with the bullshit mantra if you build it they will come (they won’t and never will come).

On LinkedIn I watch my peers prattling on about their new career, their new house, their new pony, etc., while I wonder if I have to resell clothes for the rest of my life to pay basic bills. I haven’t filed my taxes because the last thing I need is an IRS customer service rep giving me a lecture about financial responsibility.

Love? PFFT. Love is this superfine thing I hear people talking about but I’ve yet to experience it. My A1c is a war crime. Though I do find it comic and tragic that both my cat and I have diabetes.

I could be wallowing over the life that passed me by and all the rotten decisions I’ve made (can I hit the restart button effective 2009, inquiring minds would very much like to know) — but I’m not. Because wallowing is that dirty thief that will pull you deeper into the dark. Wallowing will clear everyone in a ten-mile radius. It’s the ticking that is the bomb. It is a hole that is endless and bottomless and if and when you do emerge you wonder why you’ve wasted so much time, time that you can never get back, feeling sorry for yourself.

I think about time a lot because I have fewer years ahead than I’ve behind me. I can hear the clock ticking. I can feel the days march on. I can see the lines creeping on my face. There is no time machine and H.G. Wells and all the magic of a multi-dimensional world where you have a second chance, a do-over, a way to right the wrongs or chart the path you should’ve taken. There is only this moment and the next and so on, and I consider how I want to spend or squander it.

So I hold copies of my two books in my hands and tell myself it’s a beautiful thing to even have published these two. It’s a miraculous thing to have your work out into the world. I sit in the middle of my living room, in the not quiet dark, feeling rooted. Feeling grateful that I have this small, treasured home for as long as I do. That I’ve ceased shuttling myself to one temporary space after another, never fully unpacking, never really settling in because there’s always the next place, always the next none-home to call you home.

I’m grateful I have a space to unpack my books — all two thousand of them.

I could lament about the love not had, but rather I think about the love I was grateful to know. I think about the friends who let me rattle my non-sequiturs. I think about the people who held my hand when I didn’t think I deserve being held. I think about the strangers who type: your writing has made a difference in my life, which is a kind of love.

I could wallow and sometimes I do, but I set limits. I allow myself the sadness, acknowledge it like an old friend coming to visit but then I politely usher its way out the door when it’s worn out its welcome.

I could whine about the career that’s veered off course, into a ditch, never to be found and recovered. But then I consider how wonderful it feels to not be treated as a disposable profit generator. How delightful it feels to not play petty politics or wonder if my job will be cut this quarter because profits took a dip even though I sold myself on the fiction that full-time corporate jobs are safer when they’re not. I consider that I have a home, a refrigerator filled with healthy food and a body that’s still able to move.

Because there was a time when I had none of these things.

I am not a warm and fuzzy person. I have clinical depression and I’m on the spectrum — I have a propensity to vacillate between confusion and misery. I’m a born and raised New Yorker, a pragmatist, a rationalist, a skeptic. But I look at the word grateful and to me it means perspective. Gratitude isn’t a fancy journal I plug my thoughts into. It’s not the candles and woo I practice. It isn’t the $299 course sold on Instagram or chakras repackaged by lithe girls in Ojai on TikTok or five steps to happiness peddled on Medium by those who always want to sell you something in exchange for a feeling.

For me, gratitude is viewing your life with perspective. It’s at least you had this, done this, known this, been this. It’s the realization that you can be all of these things again. It’s the possibility of all the territories not yet navigated or explored. It’s the holy shit I’m still alive and I’ve got another day, another chance, another opportunity to climb my way out of the dark.