#35 A different kind of gratitude practice

It's weird, it works.

One thing about me: I don’t like gratitude lists.

That changed when I found Melody Beattie’s book, Make Miracles in 40 Days: Turning What You Have Into What You Want, in 2018. While I think the book is worth reading, the basic practice it outlines can be spelled out just a few sentences: For forty days you write a daily gratitude list, but instead of saying just the good stuff you’re grateful for (like kittens and lavender candles and pumpkin spiced lattes and your child’s little warm hand), you increase the scope of your gratitudes to include both the wanted and unwanted. Every day for forty consecutive days you are to write at the top of a blank page “Today I’m grateful and thankful…” and below it list out everything that is happening to you, good and bad and wonderful and awful. One might be thankful for the raise they got at work or the flower that blossomed in their garden. One might be grateful they went bankrupt, that their partner cheated, for their bulimia.

I’ve done this practice multiple times now, and I started doing it again 20 days ago. It’s a wild ride and what makes it so genuinely appealing and effective is that it allows me to work directly with my resistance. In QLAW I wrote that (in retrospect) addiction was one of the best things that’s ever happened to me; last week I wrote about how painful and terrible things can make sense after the fact, become valuable events we wouldn’t change in retrospect. All that still leaves the present moment, and how much drama I can make over what I think shouldn’t be happening, or how much I ride the ups and downs of what I deem good and bad. This practice, simple as it is, has a way of smoothing all that out. Two weeks ago on Day 8 I wrote I was grateful for going to the Met with Sarah, for french onion soup, for a sweet exchange with a guard, for a random conversation with a waiter, for the rain. That day I also wrote I was grateful for feeling like I was absolutely directionless in my life.

It’s hard to explain something that only comes through the direct experience of this practice, but applying the same nodding acceptance—even gratitude—to a bowl of soup as you do to your core wound flaring up or your existential dread is practicing a kind of peace. I write out the good stuff and I feel overwhelmed with gratitude; I write out what feels hateful. Over time, seeing those lists and how some days they are exploding with life and some days contradictory and on others still brimming with dark reminds me of how fast it all moves and changes, helps me to not concretize, reminds me that good can be terrible and terrible can be good.

I didn’t start doing the list a few weeks ago because of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, or even plan to write about this today; it has nothing to do with a forced idea of thankfulness or a highlight reel of gratitude. Just the opposite, I love this practice the most because it invites everything to the table.

Ten Things Right Now

Playlists, good fiction recs, drinking milk resurfaces as the ultimate power move, the audiobook that holds me up through all time, a very good and kind of judgy thread on whether to Botox, the hype of a fentanyl vaccine, the World Cup goes teetotal, the USPS once fucked around with an Alcoholism stamp, the Season Finale of Twitter

1. Good fiction I read over the last few weeks: The First Bad Man, Chemistry, Wolf in White Van

2. I started listening to a playlist on Spotify called Really Nice Songs and because most of the songs are favorites, and because the playlist was made by Holly Whitaker, I thought it was something I made even though I could not remember making it. Then I realized: there is another Holly Whitaker with my same taste in music

3. The audio-book I listen to on repeat, that returns me to sanity every time

4. Do we really need a fentanyl vaccine that’s been tested on 29 rats, or do we just need basic, proven harm reduction tactics that already exist. It’s very interesting to read about how a vaccine against fentanyl is some kind of game changing device, when we already know what works and don’t deploy it

5. A lively thread on whether to “get work done”

6. New York issues 36 licenses to sell weed to “mostly people previously convicted of cannabis-related offenses or their close relatives, as well as a few nonprofits that serve people with histories of arrest or incarceration”, and Barbara Lee rightly asks whether or not those most harmed by the War on Drugs will find capital to actually run these businesses

7. No booze for Andy Cohen on NYE, all the soccer fans in Qatar. Budweiser is still ok

   Stephen King @StephenKing

   If you can’t go to a World Cup game without a beer, you might have a problem.

8. Milk is still an extremely controversial beverage choice and I’m tempted to order a glass of it on a first date or something equally shocking

9. Can algorithms end addiction can addiction therapy wolves end addiction

10. Art my friend Caroline Burdett makes. I want it all.

    

    What I bought from Caroline

11. An interesting take on whether Diet Coke is addictive

12. Even though she’s Black and a woman and queer I’m still shocked by how little attention their is on Brittney Griner or how little appears to be happening on her behalf

13. Season Finale of Twitter

14. The ill-fated Alcoholic stamp

    

15. A joint letter to decriminalize drugs

16. One of my closest people who wrote this article about being the only Black woman at Cheryl Strayed’s and Elizabeth Gilbert’s writing workshop (out of 600 people) turned it into a TedX and it is so very good and I am so very proud

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