Gratitude, Adoption, and Feeling the Impossible
Amiee Sones told me that today was our sixth day in our gratitude experiment. Sixth? I thought it was more like the twentieth.
Time flies when you are feeling good.
(I don’t feel like going over what I’ve already written, so read my July 26th post to get caught up on Aimee and our experiment if you want.) (The great thing about writing a blog post compared to writing a paper for school is that you are the boss of you.) (You can also write the word fuck.)
Oh! See, it’s working. I wrote “You can also write the word fuck” and the gratitude wash went through my body, like tingling water from head to toe. Like a carwash but an Annewash for my internal self and, by proxy, my external self as well.
By “it’s working” I mean that the coach Joe Hudson had said that this 6-minute experiment had changed his life for the better, and since I am basically in love with that guy, I’ll try almost anything he does in the hopes that I’ll run into him and get to burst into tears and say thank you thank you thank you for being alive. His wife, too. The whole package of Joe Hudson’s world.
“It’s working” means that look, twice already in this post I’ve felt gratitude: I’ve washed myself clean externally and internally without getting off my butt.
I did get off my butt earlier in the day when I went for a walk in the woods before my call with Aimee this morning, and as I was walking I had a revelation about gratitude. (Want to have a revelation: go for a walk. Right?) I was in a place I go to often twice a day for the way it makes me feel—connected to myself and to nature and lucky to be alive so that I can feel these things. I was thinking about how I like going to this place because I don’t have to try to feel gratitude when walking down to the stream that cuts through the redwoods. The good feelings come into my body with my breath. Nature doesn’t ask anything of me. Nature doesn’t tell me I should feel any way. Nature is itself, and in it, I feel like myself.
I was thinking that the physical sensations (a tingling of alivesness, a lightness, a spaciousness) of gratitude feel so natural—a natural response to a stimulus. In the woods, I’m in a place where I feel safe to be myself because I am part of something (the natural world), and this leads to a feeling of belonging both in my body and in the larger world. No woodpecker is telling me I’m different. I don’t compare myself to a tree and feel bad about myself because my bark could be thinner. We share space, me and nature. We are a fabric with beating hearts, running sap, and god knows what else that moves through plants and mycelium and bugs and banana slugs and rocks and dirt and spiderwebs.
Out in the world when I tell someone I’m adopted and they tell me I must be grateful, something else entirely happens. It’s like my cells are bumper cars and they start crashing into each other. If the feeling of gratitude parallels the feeling of being myself, how, technically, can I feel gratitude when I am told I can not be my authentic self because no conversations of family of origin, for example, or the desire to search for biological family brings discomfort or silence or punishment are allowed in my “home”?
To feel grateful and to not feel like your authentic self at the same time may be like trying to drive with both the gas and the brake pressed equally hard. It may actually really fuck up your nervous system.
What if the person said, instead of, “You should be grateful,” “You should take good care of yourself”? Perhaps then, instead of going into bumper-car mode, our cells would inflate with breath, feel seen, and sigh.
It’s hard to find a sage or saint or holy figure or really smart person who doesn’t, on some level, advocate for the power of gratitude. The loss of the ability to have this superpower flood your system is dangerous to ones well-being and therefor a tragedy.
I’m not saying you should feel gratitude.
I’m saying create a life for yourself where you do.
You deserve to feel like yourself because that is called being born.
