How to Feel Gratitude When You Don’t: Make A List Of The Things You Hate

My attempt at being a self-help guru

Last spring, I found my way back into writing by making lists of things I hate.

There were so many things to hate. The pandemic. People who wouldn’t wear masks. The fights I had with daughter. The toxic silence that sometimes filled that house. That I would never find life outside of my house and family again. The angry, selfish, middle-aged person I saw myself becoming.That I hadn’t done the things I had set out to do, that I had lost sight of what those things were.

I hated that I was carrying everything and nothing at all.

Writing my hate lists made me happy. Hate took on a form of subversive delight.

Until one day, I looked down at my list and realized that the whole time my hate list was shadow to all that I loved.

I loved the random people I no longer saw in coffee shops.

I loved having friends over and the joyful chaos of company.

I loved and relied on community, which had vanished.

I was disappearing under the weight of everything else that had disappeared.

There’s a bumper sticker on my desk that I have a love/hate relationship with. It says, simply “Grateful.” It’s both an encouragement and an admonishment to appreciate the world around me.

There is this razor-sharp edge where gratitude and suffering meet.

I have gratitude for my daughter playing Legos at my feet while I type. For the cup of coffee that I’m about to re-fill. For the stunning sunrise that happens every single morning, without input or effort from any human. I have gratitude for the humanitarian efforts to save people from Ukraine.

But there’s a lot I refuse to praise.

The war in Ukraine displacing so many lives. The devastation caused by global climate change. The carelessness of people’s attitudes toward each other over the past two years.

You know how some people say they are SO GRATEFUL for how their lives turned out, that looking back, they can see how it all worked together?

I’m glad for the reader who can feel that level of gratitude.

But, I think it’s too much to ask others to feel grateful for the traumas and disruptions that they spend much of their lives navigating.

I reject the idea that we have to be grateful for everything, that gratitude is the superpower that will save our lives.

Yet…when it’s 3 am, and I can’t sleep (again) I count the things that make life worthwhile: the beautiful ski, the relentless jokes my 8-year-old makes, cream in the fridge, the ability to buy groceries and pay my mortgage, the kids back in school, the bulbs I planted in the fall with my daughter, my writing life, my Zoom friends, my in-person friends, my husband, how life persists in ways we can’t imagine.

Gratitude doesn’t fix our pain, but it makes pain more bearable.

Here’s my stab at being a self-help guru:

Make a list of everything you hate. Honor it, love it, burn it.

Write the list again. Don’t expect gratitude. Just look for the places of longing and affirm to yourself that the grief/dissonance/ambivalence/anger/fury you feel is real.

Somewhere, under your hate, are the things you love and value most.

Don’t hate yourself for hating, celebrate yourself for feeling enough about the world to feel hate.

Yeah, maybe somewhere down the line you’ll cultivate compassion for the things that unravel you. But in the meantime, let hate be the mirror for all you love.

I HATE what’s happening in Ukraine. You probably do too. Here’s a place to make a donation:

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