Gratitude and Grieving
My thanksgiving is perpetual. ~Henry David Thoreau
Right before I started to fall into this deepest of depressions, I was leading a Gratitude challenge for November.
It was a picture prompt thing with a Facebook group and was really pretty cool.
Then, I decided to offer a deeper dive into gratitude as a paid small-group offering.
And beautiful souls signed up.
I was stoked, feeling really excited and blessed.
Then I got a second part time job at a church with a male pastor and everything in my life began to unravel.
…
That male pastor was not a man of a loving God. He made me scared. He invaded my space, touched my body and crossed lines that shouldn’t be crossed. It was incredibly, breathtakingly, upsetting.
I cancelled and refunded my paid offering as soon as I got the job offer because I wanted to wait and get settled — it wouldn’t sit well to be absent from an offering like that and I knew that living with chronic illness means taking things slowly. … I’m so glad I postponed that group now because it was, apparently, too much for me — someone who has experienced fetal and childhood trauma, was married to two different type of abusive husbands and was sexually assaulted in 2013.
So, I began to break apart…
I quit that job the day I drove home, sobbing all the way, after he’d gotten particularly ‘cozy’ one day.
My husband came home, heard about my day and 100% supported my never, ever going back there again. (I remain eternally grateful this happened while married to him and not to my 2nd husband, the lazy, narcissistic piece of shit user/abuser I was lucky enough to break free of in 2011 — that asshole would have pressured me to stay in the job because *money… that kind of monster doesn’t care about people, they only care about their own comfort).
The next month a dear, dear friend died much too, too soon from colon cancer (and that is a story for another day my friend).
This is when I began to unfurl … feeling myself crushed down and battered by the events and heartaches of December and January.
I struggled on…
Life went on…
We bought a home, our first together.
…Then, in the summer of 2018, everything truly imploded (and that is a story I don’t know when/if I’ll ever be able to share, but I hope).
Everything. Truly. Imploded.
I lost track of every single one of my spiritual gratitude practices.
I lost track of every single everything that matters.
I almost lost track of my own life…
…(thank god for Prozac)…
and therein lies how I first glimpsed I might just possibly make it out of this event alive… I found myself reconnecting with my gratitude practices.
And, very recently, I’ve decided to attempt to integrate my gratitude practices with my ptsd healing work like mentioned here.
Thank you for gratitude.
Thank you for the miracle of staying alive.
Thank you for my blessed fighting spirit.
May gratitude guide my way.
May gratitude guide your way.
May gratitude guide us deeper into loving —
loving each other, loving our ‘enemies’, loving ourselves.
Thank you.
And thank you for reading.❤
Wanna read more stories like this? Join Medium today and unlimited access to all my articles and thousands of other writers. If you sign up using my link, I’ll earn a small commission which I truly appreciate.
