being grateful out loud

on struggling to celebrate publicly during fascism and genocide

My gratitude for today is that if I ever went missing, people would notice immediately. Immediately. My best friend would probably notice first, then all my coworkers after not hearing from me for 48 hours. The rest of my friends would all have heard by then, and between people from my bars, my neighborhood, my family, and others who love me, my search party would be massive. Last month I woke up two hours after my shift was supposed to start, and my whole workplace was convinced I was dead. Last week during an unusual afternoon nap that had me in a particularly deep sleep, my best friend called me half a dozen times and was looking online for car crashes I could have been in. I really am lucky.

It’d be difficult to abduct me since I'm so visually distinctive, marked in more than 30 tattoos with bright red curly hair. I post on some form of social media at least once a day; people who care about me always know where I am, and I take extra precautions when going on dates. I essentially deliver my friends and my sister a dossier on the name, license plate, and address of the person I’m meeting up with and a curt “hey, if I don’t text you back by midnight, call the cops because he definitely murdered me”.

Generally speaking, I am fit and physically capable, mindful of my surroundings, and take measures to protect myself with weaponry I feel confident using. Even on nights like tonight, when I was concerned that the strange man from the bar would follow me home or do something stupid, there were a couple dozen witnesses who would attest to the time I left, as well several who witnessed the elbow I jabbed at the guy’s arm when he tried wrapping his hand around my waist. If, upon walking home, there were to be an altercation of any kind, someone from the many apartment buildings between the bar and my front door would have seen or heard something happen. Because I don’t go quietly.

From a relatively young age, in all of the fight or flight situations I have been in, I have come out fighting. I’m lucky for having a highly pragmatic nervous system, and experience the payoff from training my mind and body to respond how it needs to. I also know people, and I know how the male ones tend to think, especially when drinking, and I felt his dagger stare in my peripheral vision all night long. So when the creep touched me, without having to think, I sent my elbow back into him which made him profusely apologize for invading my space. I made no scene, and planned not to so long as this was his only infraction. While staring at a girl is objectively creepy, I can’t really fault people for it. I am pretty, after all. And funny, and talented and smart and interesting. But the touch was too far. I don’t let strange men touch me.

Thanks to my former teaching career, I know I have the instinct catch a child before they hit their head, the instinct to dive in between two kids when one is going in to bite the other. I act quickly and with discernment, and the ability to assess and triage without losing valuable time. I have the instinct for when a man is going to do or say something stupid, shitty, or both. My mom has it, too. I get my looks from her, so we have similar adaptations in terms of our spidey sense for dangerous male behavior. Once on a neighborhood walk at golden hour, after a dozen or so cars had already passed, one vehicle in particular set off Mom’s intuition. She moved me to the inside of the sidewalk while it was still 50 meters away which had me confused initially, only for her skittishness to be proven right as a car full of boys my age honked and screamed out the windows and revved loudly as they passed. In a grocery store produce section once, I was picking out apples while my mom stationed herself by the peppers with hawk eyes trained on a man in a hoodie who was apparently looking at me too intently. He nearly approached me when he caught a glimpse of Mom leering close by, and ran off once he realized he was being watched. Both of these instances were when I was a teenager, probably 15 or 16 at most. I’m grateful for the lessons my mom taught me about how to spot, how to sense a predator before they have the chance to strike.

It's difficult for me to talk about what I appreciate in my personality. I almost want to call it taboo for me to do what may equate to bragging or being conceited in such a public forum. One of the critical voices that has developed in the back of my head is the snarky copy paste TikTok comment beneath oversharing videos that just says, “people used to have diaries,”.

Why must I keep my gratitudes private? Why do I feel wrong for counting my blessings out loud? The cult of misery that clouds so many of our interactions, so many of our interpretations of daily occurrences or major life themes makes it so much easier to talk about the bad and the evil. It makes sense why this happens; we have a craving for others in our community to share our pain and frustration.

A woman at the bar who works for a major hospital in the area validated the frustration and anger I felt due the fact that Medicaid denied me a tonsillectomy surgery that is severely overdue. My tonsils are the size of walnuts nestled in the back of my throat and they suffocate me in my sleep. My doctor has done everything she can do to prove the procedure’s necessity, using sleep studies and camera footage and her assessment of other sleep apnea factors again that again pointed to my tonsils as the root of my problems. My tonsils are an uncomfortable part of my daily life and I want them gone. Gone! They cause me to get sick more frequently, my sleep suffers because of them, and I deserve to live a life where I can breathe even when I'm not awake.

My new bar friend listened to me rant, nodding along, reassuring me that it isn't fair they denied my procedure and it fucking sucks. But she also gave me insight and hope by encouraging me to call Medicaid and tell them, prove to them that it is essential to my quality of life, that my most glaring health issue could be resolved with a tonsillectomy that multiple medical professionals insist would benefit me. It was so easy for me to share my pain because it is a burden to me. It is a weight on my back that she lifted off of me for a moment. The burden of resolving the weight and the pain and the frustration that comes with having a health problem is still my weight to carry at the end of the day, but her words provided me with the relief that I needed to have resolve towards action. When that burden was mine alone, I couldn't think straight as to what my next move would be. That rejection letter my insurance served me with destroyed my hope because I allowed it to, and the weight overwhelmed me. Encouragement from a sympathetic and empathetic woman in my community made my focus return on my well-being and not the sting of being rejected.

I fear that attempts to celebrate myself and spread a sense of optimism will be rejected during disastrously horrid and evils times; I fear seeming that I’m unable to “read the room", to gauge the general emotional state of our peers before participating that feels necessary even in online society. My TikTok is a feed filled with fundraising videos for children who are starving and dying and bombed into oblivion. I participate in these videos so that the revenue garnered can get a toddler the medicine they need. Migrants are being sent to concentration camps, the US healthcare system is bankrupting and killing people, prisons are filled with slave laborers and a disproportionate number of people of color, and on and on and on with atrocities and war crimes and hatred and ignorance and stupidity. It feels so fucking tone deaf to celebrate anything in the dire state of affairs that this country and the globe seems to be in.

But that is exactly what has to happen. I need to be loud with my joy and my advocacy for others and intimate with my suffering. I want people to share and celebrate because that is the light at the end of the dark tunnel of injustice. Everybody in the working class is constantly getting fucked in every single direction, and the aristocracy decides who should get fucked the hardest. I’ve got it better than a lot of people. Someone like me who is socially supported, educated and physically capable is not going to be nearly as affected and impacted by injustices in comparison to people who don’t have a safety net, people who haven’t had access to education, or people with disabilities.

I also feel my privileges are another factor in my reluctance to spread my happiness and other people's faces. It’s a critical voice in the back of my head that says nobody wants to hear it, nobody cares. This is fully fiction made up in my brain, because when others share their good news with me, I listen, smile, and applaud, and if appropriate, I'll share this good news to whoever would benefit from hearing it. Guess who got into grad school! Guess who's having a baby! Guess who's moving back to Portland! It's fun to share good news, even if it’s not yours. Yes, it's hard to share bad news, but strain creates strength. What's the point of pioneering a revolution if we can't see there being joy on the other side of it? We need to make joy, we have to party, we need to go to the club, we need to go to community events and support local libraries. Hold the door open for people, ask people about their day and mean it, make an effort to remember the names of regulars, generate a feeling of levity that can shield you from the misery that people want to inflict on you. Please, share your gratitude.

I want to be grateful loudly because that shows the universe how much I want it. I tell the universe in my heart and mind, on my personal journal pages everything I’ve ever wanted, I whisper it and scribble it and create sigils to crystallize my desires in physical form. I tell strangers and loved ones about the ways I’m blessed by karmic forces or by my own hard work. I'm showing the universe how open and ready I am to receive more of the many things I've been blessed with.

I've been blessed with a quaint home that I can afford and I’ve made it into a haven unto my own. I have jobs that I genuinely enjoy and provide me with a sense of belonging. I have an able body thanks to my regular gym attendance, access to food at stores and local businesses whose values I align with, along with hoards of information readily available on the internet. I have a brain that works quickly and is adaptable and resilient, I have all of the medicine that I need, a car that runs and has taken me everywhere I've ever needed to go, supportive family and friends who genuinely love me, a kind heart and extroverted nature, and a natural writing ability that I have had the privilege to hone thanks to the high quality public education that I was given.

I have so much to be grateful for, and so much to fight for and defend. I enjoy my life and I want others to enjoy their lives, too. I want children to be able to grow up and be astronauts and parents and park rangers and doctors and leaders, I want women who are trapped in abusive and unfulfilling relationships to escape and build a life for themselves safely. I want people who have lived good, quiet lives to reside in their homes without violence and artillery and military occupation invading their every waking moment. I want people to feel peace and tranquility.

There’s several lotteries that I won on day one, but I also worked my ass off. Two thoughts can coexist, and both can be true at once: yes, I’m incredibly lucky for all I was born with, and I labored tirelessly to get to where I am today. That being said, I think moments of happiness can be created from nothing. I want those moments to proliferate in every interaction for every person on the planet. Except for billionaires. I think it's time for guillotines to make a comeback, and I am grateful that I live in a time in history with the internet where like-minded people by the thousands can attest to their condoning of such a message. I live in a time in history where fan edits of Luigi Mangione exist, and that is a beautiful thing.

My sister and I are the first generation of our entire lineage to live completely independent lives without a husband or kids. She lives alone, as do I. We have our own bank accounts, we have access to birth control, we choose the states and cities that we live in, the cars that we drive, the content that we post, the people that we date. That is phenomenal. I never want to take my privileges for granted, because they were all fought for tooth and nail, and one day, any of them could vanish. Vanish. There’s so much at stake, and I have a lot to lose. And that's the hard thing about having had the rug pulled out from under me so many times, is rebuilding can feel like adding more shit to your future to-do list when you need to up and move again. It's an adjustment to realize that planting roots isn’t impossible for me the way I thought it was. I had a fear of putting art up on walls in most apartments that I inhabited because I wasn't sure how long I would live anywhere. Or if I would live. I'm grateful that I'm alive and that I had the strength to make it here, and my mission is to make myself proud above anybody else.

Because I'm the same girl who snuck out of the house to go to a March for Our Lives rally while I was in high school and skipped church to do it. I'm a nice person who helps people and tries to exert positive influence and humor into the lives of others. I'm grateful for the many influences, authors, media, and personal support that I've had from teachers, family and friends. I have been helped by brilliant and devoted individuals who I want to make proud as well. I'm grateful that I'm courageous in nature and kind to myself. I'm grateful for anybody who has read this far, because this is my life's work. I want to be an author, and a good one. I want to be a weird and different kind of woman that has never been done before, because I have a beautiful soul that is meant to be shared. The universe didn't gift me with so much privilege and talent without the expectation that I perform. A sense of duty fills my chest when I contemplate all of the ideas I have in my possession that I have yet to execute. I have the time, the drive, and the ability to make everything that I set my mind to. All I've got to do is get more words on paper every single day for the rest of my life and I'll have met my every goal and more. I love myself enough to do that.