Grateful

I’ve been struggling for a few weeks about gratitude and sadness. When I practice gratitude, I also feel a nice side helping of sadness right along with it.

I had a friend tell me that was a little odd and we laughed about it.

But it really doesn’t feel right. I was reflecting a bit on it today and then, of course, I started doing research and reading some interesting articles.

What am I grateful for today?

• I’m grateful I got to volunteer with a really nice gal who I have a good connection with and I probably haven’t sat down and chatted with her for almost a year now. We had an hour together and we got to laugh at how incredibly terrible we are at math but also catch up on college talk and DMV woes.
• I’m really grateful for my picture taking abilities and organizational skills because I spent over 3 hours creating a video of my daughter and I that has made me tear up multiple times watching it back from super old photos and videos.
• I had a nice talk with a friend and was happy and grateful they called me to give me an update about their life.
• I’m grateful that I got to go pick up G from singing lessons and have him get some practice time driving.
• I’m grateful I was able to pick up birthday presents for my son, that I didn’t have to worry about what I was spending, that I had the time to actually go pick them up, and that it would make his bday brighter when he saw them.
• I’m always grateful I get to spend 30-60 minutes working out every day because I feel so strong from doing it.

In so many of those things, I feel grateful but I have a side feeling of guilt. I was calling it sadness. Is it sadness? Is it guilt? It just kinda feels bad.

I feel grateful that I volunteered but also feel guilty that I took the easy job and haven’t been present to more board meetings.

I feel grateful about spending 3 hours to create a video but also feel pretty bad that I ignored work almost the whole day and didn’t get anything done.

I feel grateful with talking to friends but in one of the instances, I felt bad for not supporting them properly and felt I made things a little worse.

So grateful that I get to celebrate my sons birthday but waiting until the very last day to get something for him… worrying if it was good enough, feeling bad I didn’t try harder…

Now I feel like I’m hunting down things that I am guilty or upset over. I never feel bad about working out every day. I always appreciate the time I set aside for that! The bad feelings are not always happening but there are other things in my life where I want to be grateful and appreciative but I have a lot of more complicated feelings right along with it. I end up wondering why I don’t feel more happiness from being “grateful” when I feel like I want more than I actually have, or feel like I can’t accept the way things are.

Of course I look at some of the tragedies happening around me and I am grateful for what I have.

But some of my feelings of unfulfillment (I won’t say unhappiness) or dissatisfaction with some aspects of my life, you can’t just gloss over by writing a daily list of things you are grateful for. At least that’s the way it seems to me.

Feeling grateful or practicing gratefulness sometimes feels like I’m doing it to minimize other feelings and experiences.

How authentic are my feelings in the moment versus me avoiding some of the darker things?

I want to find the fun in looking around my day and find the bright spot. And maybe it’s the word gratitude or gratefulness that triggers me. Maybe I need to replace it with what I appreciate instead, or something that I found value in.

If I’m trying to stop having these other feelings of discontent, it sometimes seems like it makes them worse because I start to dwell on them more.

In terms of acceptance, I’m going to try acknowledging some of my less desirable feelings first, and then move to what I am appreciating. I really did like how I wrote down 5 things I’m grateful for every morning but I stopped months ago and never got back into it. It morphed into 1) what I’m grateful for; 2) what I will let go of and; 3) what I will focus on.

I struggled a bit of what I wanted to let go of. It was hard to pinpoint it.

I also don’t want to use it to distract myself from problems I need to address. This keeps me stuck and going around in circles. I don’t want to suppress any other uncomfortable feelings… or actually I DO want to suppress them but it doesn’t seem to be helping me much!

I want to try practicing adding “and” to my vocabulary. I have a lot to appreciate in my life and I also feel dissatisfaction.

I want to appreciate all my feelings and that is a hard thing to do.

I am appreciating the time I took to write this out… 🙂