Gratitude when you are already at the bottom

Gratitude helped. Then it became another thing you had failed to do.

Gratitude is the one I actually reached for. Gratitude recordings helped sometimes. At night, when the creditors, lawyers, liquidators, and court appointments would not stop going around in my head, I needed something to interrupt it. I was having panic attacks.

You say: I am grateful for the air I breathe. I am grateful that I am alive. I am grateful that I made it through today. Sometimes that helped. Sometimes it did not. The sentences were fine. Sometimes it worked.

The problem was remembering it before things got that bad. When you are already at the bottom, you do not naturally think: I should practise gratitude now. You reach for it when you are already trying to force a reset.

Then gratitude was not a practice. It was another thing I had failed to do until things were already really bad.

If gratitude lands for you, keep it. I am not against it. I am against turning it into a task with a score. The gratitude recording can stay.

Wins are not another gratitude task you can fail at. You do not have to feel grateful for the creditors, the court appointments, the panic attacks, or the fact that lunch was the best part of your day. You only have to notice that lunch happened too.

What I needed was smaller, and later. At the end of the day I tried to find three things I had won at. Some days the win was: woke up. Some days it was: had time to eat lunch. Sometimes it was: played with my daughter. Writing those lines down did not close the businesses in a cleaner way. It did not make the creditors disappear. The day could still be awful. It just stopped the awful parts from erasing everything else.

3 Wins is that notebook. Private. Things that already went right. One line, or three, or twenty. You write after the day. Nothing happens if you miss.