When Gratitude Isn’t Rainbows and Unicorns

This year, my family has been going through something that has deepened my understanding of gratitude: how it feels in my body, how I relate to it and especially the nuanced ways I can experience it. Prior to this year, I think that I thought of gratitude as kind of an amorphous but pleasant feeling of thankfulness: uncomplicated but definitely something that people who wanted more good things to come to them should actively be trying to cultivate. I think I can attribute that to the Angry God mentality of our Judeo-Christian society: if you don’t properly nurture a state of gratitude, well, lightning may strike you, some eternally pissy bearded cloud-dude may smite you, or you’ll find out in the worst possible way just what your ingrate self should have been grateful for all along. Because of this, I think my default mode has been to be reactively, superficially grateful at times and feeling undeserving when anything less than sunshine, rainbows and a sustained feeling of warm, grateful good vibes flowed from me when I felt it should. In short, most of the time, my gratitude was infused with judgement based on how I scored my performance of it. And I almost always fell short.

This time of year especially, you might be feeling that extra pressure to “be grateful” — whatever that even means — and beating yourself up for having complicated feelings that are not perfectly…