Stickies and Gratitude

The other day, I read that most people experience a large amount of insecurity in their early twenties. Mind you, it was just one of many tidbits on a rather unscholarly ‘advice’ website for the college set, but it immediately made sense to me. After all, the first few years of your third decade are when you are supposed to start figuring it all out. You should, according to general wisdom, be landing your first job, first apartment, first mortgage - and so it goes. But for many of us, this means navigating a world that our run-of-the-mill post-secondary education never really prepared us for, leaving us unsure as to whether or not we are on the right path. Worse yet, insecurity tends to breed more insecurity. You start out with something along the lines of “No-one wants to give me a job!” and before you know it, you’re on a feel-sorry-for-yourself-spiral, starting with the aforementioned lack of a job and all the way down onto ‘I have no money, no friends, no life, nothing.”

When you’re a limbo dweller, it’s par for the course to feel you have little to offer, and I think that it’s pretty much a given that at some point or another you will feel this way. Acknowledging our dissatisfaction with our lives is vital to changing the things that make us so dissatisfied in the first place. But equally important, however, is to recognize what you still have in your life. I mean, let’s be painfully honest with ourselves. You know that it is a ridiculous, arrogant thing to say that you have nothing. If you’re reading this, you have access to the internet, presumably your own computer - and more likely than not you’re not worrying about where your next meal is going to come from. And despite what your insecurities are telling you, you know that you do still have friends in your life. You (may) have family in your life. You have some sort of higher education, a privilege which I am extremely embarrassed to admit I thought was more common than it actually is. You have a lot of good, no, great things going for you, even if they aren’t the particular goals that you want to end up with. You are extremely, extremely lucky when compared to the vast majority of people who live on this planet. Your life, quite frankly, is pretty  amazing. You already have all the tools you need to be successful.

Don’t I sound just like your parents? You know, when they used to tell you that plenty of children didn’t have anything to eat so you’d better be grateful for your broccoli even though you had asked over and over again for mac and cheese? Ha! No, I’m not saying that you should be ashamed of yourself for feeling depressed about your life. I completely understand that when you’re in the midst of that insecurity spiral, it’s hard to remember those great things, or assign much value to them. However, I know that for me, dipping further and further down the insecurity spiral without focussing on the myriad of wonderful things in my life has led to many of my murkiest, darkest moments in limbo. What has helped me is saying, out loud, all of the things I am grateful for, even if I don’t quite believe myself at that moment in time. So, here’s a quick exercise that has helped me when I wasn’t feeling so great. Grab a pack of sticky notes, and start writing. Write down things as they occur to you, whether they be little things or big things, but write down everything that you are grateful for, and put them up on a place (or places) where you can see them often. And I can promise you this much; that no matter how upset you are with the way things have turned out for you, you’ll soon run out of places to put those stickies.

Shall I get us started? Here are a few of my own, in no particular order.

I have enough money to pay my own bills.
I have parents that encouraged me to save, rather than spend, allowing me to pay for the important things even when I was no longer working.
I have an extremely loving and supportive family that don’t let me get away with not keeping in touch!
I have three of the most wonderful best friends anyone could ask for.
I am a university educated young woman in a stable country where I can practice the religion of my choice, vote for the candidate of my choice and marry whom I please.
I have lots and lots of shoes. (I said the little things as well!)
I can walk to a local farmer’s market to buy organic vegetables.

And so on! This can go on forever - but isn’t that the point?

P.S. Yeah, my privilege is showing. So think of a great side-effect of this exercise as helping you to realize all the numerous ways in which sheer luck, not how wonderfully special and precious you intrinsically are(n’t), has contributed to the circumstances of your life. It certainly makes me think about our society’s current ‘meritocracy’. But that’s another post entirely.