My therapist likes to stress the importance of thinking about what I am grateful for to help climb out of a depressive episode. Of course I am aware of how fortunate I am to not be living as a spinster in my mother's house, with no friends and little contact with the outside world. Of course I'm grateful. Every breath is a blessing for someone who has planned their own death many times.
So, making lists of what I am grateful for seems like a good idea, right? Let's post those suckers on Facebook and share the love! But what my therapist does not understand is that "grateful" can backfire. Horribly. I will explain it in a single sentence:
"I have a wonderful life and people love me, but I'm still depressed, so there must be something terribly wrong with me."
Or, even worse- "I have a wonderful life and people who love me, but I'm still depressed, so I must not deserve to be happy."
I've said this before, but I'll say it again: My mother told me, when I was a small child, that there was no such thing as happiness, and that all we could ever hope for in this life is to be less unhappy.
So this bullshit is hard-wired deep in my brain. On okay-to-good days, I can circumvent that thinking, but on bad days, I just can't. What I am starting to learn is that my goal should not be to be happy all the time, but rather, just to have fewer bad days.
But there are days when nothing is going to work. Nothing is going to bring back my friend Valerie, who died of cancer this week on the anniversary of my grandmother's death. Valerie was only 29. I have already lived in this world eight more years than she got to. We never got to be super-close friends, but we were at each other's weddings, which were only a few months apart. She had just graduated with her Master's. When Matt told me she had died, I felt physically ill.
It wasn't just because she died that my stomach lurched. It was because the asshole part of my brain started telling me that life is precious and I could die tomorrow and I have accomplished exactly nothing despite accumulating enough random college credits to add up to a degree, if they had been focused on a single subject. I can't even say, "Oh, well, she didn't have the medical issues you do, blah blah blah." She did all of this with fucking cancer, and she made art and published a children's book, through all her treatments and everything that goes with it, and she knew she was dying.
I have no excuse for having done so little with the mind I was gifted with. Yet, I hide under the covers instead of trying harder.
It would have made more sense for me to have died, instead of her. But that's just the way it is.
So what am I most grateful for? All of the things I think I haven't earned.
