Gratitude Journal: November 2021
The other day, an apricot tree stopped me in my tracks. As the sun set, its boughs were shrouded in a warm, ocherous, scintillating light, and I was struck speechless. I'd passed this same tree many times before, yet tonight I felt as though I was seeing it for the first time. I tasted salt and realized that I'd been moved to tears.
An apricot tree. A setting sun. I felt suddenly submerged in the understanding that life, breath, memory, is an incredible and vast miracle. To know that something of this earth can grow and take shape before me; to know that life is tangible...
"Wow," I whispered to myself and the dog paused and looked back at me, nonplussed that he'd walked so far ahead.
November was full of these breathtaking realizations.
I felt constantly bowled over — the cat's soft snores, the moon's glow, a group's ebullient happy birthday song ringing in the far distance, walking the streets of Mexico in-stride with Jeremiah — all of it made me feel so grateful and free and alive. I felt creatively renewed, abundantly inspired. "My cup runneth over," you know? I was overflowing. I wrote more — filling my journal's pages with gratitude and dreams and conversations and memories and blessings and joys.
But the journey toward authenticity and freedom doesn't come without its hurdles.
This November, I struggled a lot with shame. A lot. I didn't know it was shame and therapy was the first time I'd heard it named. It was the first time I'd named it myself. My whole life, I'd just considered it the voice in my head that kept me in-line and humble and safe; an innate and necessary barb that sliced me to shreds any time my ego grew too big.
You will always be a sobbing child, writhing and thrashing, shoulders pinned down by adult knees, eyedrops poised above you like a knife. You will always be the 12-year old with the baby voice, your peers laughing, your teachers complaining, and no one hearing, beneath the babble, your cries to just be a child. You will always be the teenager with hair stiff as a board, everyone liking you enough to kiss you, no one liking you enough to love you. You will always be the 24-year old, tucked away in a room with closed window shades and stale air and a tight, aching chest and sobs that never seem to escape quite fully. You are and will always be the sum of your many (many) sins. You are beyond redemption. Did you think for a moment that anyone sees you as more? You have no idea of just how stupid everyone thinks you look.
I'm learning that shame is a sick, insidious thing — it's more than just a feeling. It becomes a part of you. You get so used to shame that sometimes it feels impossible to distinguish from your regular, rational thoughts. And while I'd been working on identifying and releasing limiting beliefs, what I hadn't yet realized was that I'd so fully accepted shame and its narratives as true that I didn't even recognize them as false beliefs. My next healing challenge was revealed:
Learn to recognize and identify shame, what sparks it, and how it feels in the body.
It won't be an easy journey, but I felt grateful for it. I feel grateful that I want to heal. I feel grateful that my eyes are opening, that I'm seeing that who I am — without external validation — is enough. It's a concept that I understand logically, but that I'm not quite able to feel in my body (yet). But I'm trying to get there. I'm going to get there. And I'm so grateful for my willingness to try. Trying to heal myself means that I'm trying to love myself. What better gift?
