I’m not going to get all new-age spiritual self care on you and preach about mindfulness and compassion and gratitude and blah blah bullshit we’ll never actually do. I’m just gonna tell you about one little thing I do that could fall under mindfulness or taking time for gratitude or self care or whatever.
I’ve started (again) writing in a gratitude journal app. So, it’s called a gratitude journal but it could be any journal type app or even just a note on your phone. This app I got shows an inspirational quote everyday and gives you gratitude prompts for your entries. But I just take a minute before I go to sleep write down what happened today. I don’t feel the need to phrase every entry as “I’m grateful for…” because, like, I’m alive and living and grateful for that, so writing anything I did implies gratitude, I feel like.
The only thing that makes this a gratitude journal and not just a journal is that I only write down the positive things and/or write down a positive perspective to maybe not so great things. This is not the place to dwell on negativity and feel sorry for myself and complain about how life just isn’t fair. Because no matter how bad my day, I can still write down “went to work” or “watched a TV show I like” because I am always grateful that I have a job and a home and things in this world that bring me joy.
I’m never going to look back on these entries, so I don’t feel that focusing on only good stuff or putting a positive spin on everything is, like, misrepresenting my life. This isn’t for posterity. This is for that day in that moment that I am writing it down. It’s to end my day remembering that I have good things in my life. It’s to remember every little nice thing that happened during the day that I would usually forget about, but I bring it back to my mind so I go to sleep feeling like today was a good day.
I am an over-thinker, to put it lightly. I am obsessive, to put it strongly. Sometimes I get fixated on something positive that I’m excited about, but it’s more likely that I’ve found something that makes me upset to obsess over, which makes me spiral, bringing every other little imperfect thing in my life down into a depression hole. So, writing about my day only in a positive way is a little way to combat spiraling. Of course, as I am writing what happened today, I will think about how bad that one bad part was, but I don’t give it any more brain space by taking the time to write it down. Writing something really gets it in your head even more. Which is great when you’re studying for a test; not what you want to do with negative thoughts. So I write down every tiny little nice thing that happened; from “chatted with coworker. She’s nice” to “omg had an amazing time on a boat with Juliana”. But then I’ll write down “Hung out with this person” but not “and they said this thing that really bothered me and now I am rethinking my entire personality” because that’s not what I want my brain to focus on.
I don’t know about meditating or trying to reframe my thinking at every given moment of the day; I’m not attempting to “fix” my depressive anxious brain. I just found one easy practice to make me feel a little better even on crappy days. And sharing is caring, so now you know and you might want to try it.
And speaking of focusing on the positive, I am writing about this instead of one of the five things I started writing this weekend because they were all variations of “boo hoo no one likes me but I refuse to change” So. Positivity! Life is not completely terrible great!
Dear Diary, Today I wrote about gratitude for Tuesdays with Tish. I’m so proud of myself for keeping this up for so long. Love, Tish
Sharing is Caring: I saw Late Night and it is funny and full of things like shutting down straight white man privilege and women supporting women and honesty about depression and it’s great and funny so go see it and you too can be a woman (or not) supporting women (in film)!
See you next Tuesday, hopefully.