Gratitude when you are already at the bottom

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.

So I would listen to a recording and try to reset.

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 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 your head is completely fucked and you are trying to drag it somewhere else.

That was why I started writing down wins.

Not because gratitude was wrong.

I just needed something smaller and more concrete.

Woke up.

Had time to eat lunch.

Played with my daughter.

Those were not attempts to make a terrible day sound good.

The creditors were still there.

The lawyers were still there.

The businesses were still closing.

Writing down lunch did not change any of that.

It just meant the worst parts of the day did not get to erase lunch as well.

At first, I put the wins on a random Twitter account that was not connected to my name.

Nobody really knew who I was.

I was not trying to build an audience. I needed somewhere to leave a record.

Some days I could only find one win.

That counted.

Three was never a rule.

It was just somewhere to start.

Years later, I needed the same record for almost the opposite reason.

I was productive again.

Then AI came along and I was building things, testing ideas, burning through tokens and quotas, and finishing a ridiculous amount of work.

I would still get to the end of the day and think:

What did I actually do?

My head had already moved on to everything unfinished.

The shit year and the productive year looked completely different.

But my head did the same thing in both.

It lost what had happened.

When things were awful, the bad news swallowed the whole day.

When things were busy, the next ten tasks swallowed everything I had already finished.

Wins gave those things somewhere to stay.

Not a score.

Not points or badges.

Not another routine that turns against you the moment you miss it.

You can write one win.

You can write ten.

You can skip a day or disappear for two weeks.

Nothing happens.

It is private.

It is just a record.

Gratitude can help. It helped me sometimes.

But 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.