I remember when I bought this hat last summer. I had just gone through a horrible break up and had never known a pain like that before.
I was kind of surprised at how much it hurt because I had already been through some extremely hard things in life. But this felt like the pinnacle of them all, bringing along with it pieces of grief from many other past experiences, too.
I was out of town at the time and was trying to have a relaxing vacation with myself, but “wherever I go, there I am” (as the sayings goes). So I was still struggling heavily and feeling even more lonely than I was back home.
I tried to enjoy and distract myself by spending time at the lake, exploring downtown, etc., and I realized at one point that I needed a hat. So, I popped into a local clothing shop and this was the ONLY one they had. A hat that read “thankful” across the front during a time in my life when I most definitely didn’t feel thankful for anything. Zero ounces of gratitude.
Sure, I could somewhat acknowledge somewhere in me that there were things to be grateful for, but it wasn’t within reach. My body wouldn’t let me hold onto it. The pain was too heavy to even think about anything else.
The whole choosing to be grateful even when you don’t feel it is something that’s talked a lot about lately in self-healing circles, and was also addressed a lot growing up Christian. On and off in my life, I’ve forced my self to write gratitude lists and say what I’m celebrating and thankful for. It can be helpful. And, there’s even a lot of research about the science of the “vibration of gratitude” and how if you practice it (no matter how you feel), you’ll get certain results where you eventually embody it, bringing a lot of healing. Whether that would have worked for me or not at the time, I don’t know.
But what I see now is that what I had been seeking was a more embodied sense of gratitude. One that I could actually feel in my nervous system. One that stuck for more than 10 seconds. One that wasn’t manufactured. One that was birthed from feeling through the pain, not avoiding it.
So, there I was in my “thankful” hat.
Not thankful.
And every time I looked at it, I was just so mad.
Fast forward to this year. I put that hat on a few months ago and I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t angry at it anymore. And I realized that this summer, I had finally, for the first time in my life, experienced embodied gratitude. The kind that sticks for more than 10 seconds. It even lasted days at times. The kind where you’re so in the moment that nothing in the past or future even matters.
I have put so much work into my inner healing these last few years and I thought I would never have more than a few moments of feeling okay. It has just been so brutal. And sometimes I still feel like I’m getting nowhere. Sometimes still I feel too broken for love and relationships and for accomplishing dreams and all of the things I desire in life.
But all of it is okay.
Life is so multi-faceted.
And I am grateful now that in the many moments where I did not want to live, or the months to years spent depressed and unable to even smile, or the decades where I faked it to appease those around me — something in me kept inching me forward, kept doing the small thing, the baby step.
And I learned this year that all of it counts. There really is no small step. And sometimes (most of the time), the steps are messy. There’s so much I still don’t understand.
I’m just trying to to learn like, ya know: how to handle triggers, how to be an adult, how to eat more than air fryer chicken wings every night, how to apologize and repair relationships even when it feels like it’s the end of the world, how to set boundaries without pushing people away, how to choose friendships wisely, how to be genuine to my own spiritual journey, how to disappoint people and still be okay, how to honor my body’s needs, how to push myself just enough (but not too much), how to be more kind, how to accept my ADHD quirks and work with them (not against them), how to do things like change my oil, how to rest (but not too much, how to, just — do all the things.
Man, being human is hard. Especially when I want to be the best one I can be. But I cannot always be that. Which is okay. No one is perfect. There is so much grace.
And even though I wish the growth could go faster, and I wish that I could rush it, I know that just isn’t an option.
But one thing I do know is that sometimes you can buy a hat that says “thankful” on it, and you can hate it and be angry at it for an entire year, until one day you don’t hate it anymore. And suddenly, many months later, you can put it on and actually feel grateful, you can sport that hat genuinely, and for the first time in your life, feel an embodied sense of gratitude that is unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before.