On the eve of Thanksgiving 2020 I am alone and feeling as though I need to share what I have learned about gratitude. For me learning things takes a little longer than most. It is hard to stay focused and then when I am riding bi-polar waves up and down my mind is trying to get balanced, so I am thinking of myself, going inward. For many parts of my past I can remember some people saying how selfish I was. I admit, I can see where it would look like that. It made me sad though. I truly care about many things and care deeply. Having a mental illness and waking up every day having to blend with society is exhausting and requires me to look inward and focus and stay as balanced as possible. Right now, in my life I am finally at a point where I can stay focused. I can fully listen to stories and respond with connecting words and emotions. I can actually sit and read an entire book. Not in one sitting but I am saying that I am able to stay focused on the story I am reading and read the entire book. This is such a simple thing yet for me being diagnosed late in life at 38 with ‘hyperactivity’ and then the psychiatrist calling it ADHD and putting me on the proper meds, a whole new world opened. It gave me time to slow down and focus on exactly how I was feeling and to be able to express the feeling or feelings with the correct words and description. A lot of my past therapy I was never able to specifically say what was going on with me or to find the right words. I could be hot and cold all in one sentence quite often. I could laugh and cry all in one story quite often. Taking ADHD medication has truly allowed me to see and fully experience life around me.
I have become more empathetic. This is something that in my past I knew this word and wanted to show empathy, but it would come out in ways that circled back to me and my experiences and that word selfish could be used. Now when someone shares a story for me to show empathy, I relate it to how that would make me feel if it happened and then pour my emotion to that person. I do not share a story of my past that is similar, I simply listen and share how deeply I want to understand and see what I can do to help. This has been years in the making and I still would not say that I am naturally empathetic, but my 25-year-old self would be proud.
With this newfound life and understanding and feeling other people’s hardships and experiences it has made me be able to look inward in a new way. I have been able to see how fucking lucky I have been. How much of my life as I was going through tremendous inner turmoil, I was doing that with family and friends constantly around me. I have a support system that has watched me break, struggle, live it up, and through all those experiences and waves my true family and friends stayed around me. So many people go through inner/outer so much horrible pain and have no one. So many people have a mental illness, and they cannot share anything with anyone because they have no one. So many people do not have the resources that I have and cannot get the proper medications and therapy to get better. One thing that always stuck out to me, especially in my darkest days, was when the therapy people, the friends and family, the doctors, things I would read, would suggest for me to feel better is to, “think about how so many people have it 10 times worse than me.” This was pressed on me a lot and I was supposed to think of all the horrible things in the world that people are struggling with that is so much worse than what I was going through. I could not wrap my head around this theory during my dark days because selfishly I thought that this is my reality, this is my daily and these are my struggles. Believe me when I say the voices in your head pulling you down or wild behavior with a magnitude of consequences are pretty damn hard to deal with, that is a true struggle. That was my thinking. That is where I could never step back and see the bigger picture. I see now how that can really help someone feel better. To think of so many other people suffering and then to take the act further and not just think of someone worse off but to do something about it and help. WOW. I mean that is something that now I have fully wrapped my head and heart around at 42. It does not make me feel better to think of other people suffering, I now understand what the therapist and doctors and friends were saying. They were not just saying to think of the people that have it worse, they were bringing my attention to them and then focusing on how to help them. Focus your attention on the less fortunate or the people struggling and what you can do to help. Focus on the things that you do have, and others could only hope for. Focus on how you can help them.
The way I learned how to show empathy more and serve the people that are in need, no matter how big or small the service, is by being able to focus and digest the entire lesson. I can now digest and understand so much more clearly. I did not mean for this piece to be about ADHD but being on the medication for ADHD is how I am able to learn so much more. Learning how express feelings of gratitude is something I work on daily now. I had a friend give me this wonderful journal and it is called, I Am Journal. I highly recommend it! The ‘I Am Journal’ has parts that allow you to write what you are grateful for among other things. I remember in the past there were therapist telling me to end my day with what I was grateful for and it was hard for me because I would be so exhausted that I thought, I made it through the day- that’s what I am thankful for! Haha, don’t get me wrong, I still have those days of, ‘thankfully I made it through the day’ but I can also share even more details of the big and small experiences that happened to me that made me be able to see how much I have to be grateful for.
I am grateful for having the means to see a psychiatrist and therapist and take multiple medications daily. I am grateful for the people that have always been with me when I had no way of knowing I was worth anything to be with. I am grateful for the fact that I only have mental illnesses. I am grateful I do not have addictions and that I did not have to fight addiction and self-medicating with my mental illness like so many people do. I am grateful I am physically healthy. I am grateful I have the means to go to my primary physician and make sure I am physically healthy. I am grateful for the roof over my head and clean drinking water and being able to take hot showers. I am grateful my dog loves me so much even though he must ride my waves sometimes too. I am grateful that I have new neighbors that are so loving and watchful of the people in their community. I am grateful for having the ability and means to find charity and organizations that I can donate my time and money to. I am so grateful that I am alive. Knocking on death’s door by my own hand and surviving in 2006 has made me grateful for Life. I know that I am needed to share my mental illness experiences with others to hopefully help. I am grateful for the lesson to live your life, do not just live. I am grateful for all of the 2020 platforms like WordPress and Medium where this can happen. I am grateful for so many other things that I could go on and on.
The beauty on this eve of Thanksgiving 2020 is that I have learned so much and I am healthy and able to share. Gratefulness does not come easy to a mentally ill human but when you work at finding things to be thankful for, it makes a world of difference. I want nothing more than to be able to help someone in their dark hours to understand that finding things you are grateful for does help. That what ‘they’ say can help! What are you grateful for? Who can you share your gratitude with and spread this simple joy?
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