I wrote in it every day, listing five things I loved. But my entries seemed limited by the word "love." It's a word I've only recently learned to say without cringing, and I still do it with a lot of hesitation. So saying that I "loved" a low-fat caramel latte was a stretch. Thus, the title of the journal morphed into "Things I'm Grateful For."
Writing in that journal helped me focus on the good things in my life when I was spending far too much time obsessing over the bad things. The beginning of my senior year of college, I stopped writing my lists. I was focused on my depression and my stress and hiding my anorexia, and I identified myself as a victim and broken. On my best days, I was feigning happiness in an attempt to feel it for real. On my worst days, I was contemplating ending it all. So I packed my bags, moved across and the country and started over, in a sense.
I lost the journal when I moved from Tacoma, Washington to Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas. I'm sure it's somewhere in the boxes that I put in storage. But I figure it's time to start focusing on the good again, to stop identifying myself by what's wrong with me and my life. Because my life has a lot of good parts to it, and so do I.
I started this because I wanted and needed a place to look back on and document all the things that I'm grateful for in life. It's a very personal act to me. I am both flattered and grateful that Lauren, Clare, Amy and Kelli have asked to join me in this practice.
This will be a good life. This day will be a good day.
Today, I am grateful for:
- random texts.
- my unlimited text messaging plan that makes random texting possible. (Well, it's unlimited within Verizon, but I have 500 all for my friends outside "the network.")
- the friends who haven't let the distance change our friendship.
- fresh flowers in a vase on the kitchen window.
- my floating lounge chair that lets me float on the lake in my back yard.
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