Bad gratitude
It’s that time of year. Endings are everywhere. Spotify Wrapped will drop in a few days, and to no one’s surprise, my top artist will be Bright Eyes. There’s a lot to be grateful for even as tragedies continue to happen. Living is its own wound, but I’m grateful to feel anything because that means I’m alive. I feel like a very lucky person. Sometimes it’s hard to acknowledge blessings rather than complain about inconveniences. That said, I am trying to be grateful for all my experiences, both good and bad. Which is where the idea for this post came from.
I want to say my working definition of bad here is not bad as in condemnable, but bad as in, a crack in the idealized, a rupture in the mundane, an absence rather than a presence that makes you grateful for whatever its opposite is. So here’s a list of a few bad things I’m grateful for, including some bad dates, the latter of which you will have to upgrade your subscription to read about ;)
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HAIRCUTS
This summer I decided to give myself a haircut because I was going to move to New York and be a New Person. The back of it, unintentionally, was in the shape of a V, with a little tail to accent its asymmetry.
On the drive up to New York, we stopped to see relatives in Pennsylvania. I snuck away to the Mid-Atlantic equivalent of Great Clips to have the haircut corrected. The stylist did what she could, but also took two more inches off than I asked for. The result was a haircut that left me looking like Princess Diana on some days, Justin Bieber on most days. The morning after my first party in the city, I looked at myself in the mirror and cried over what I saw. I think I actually asked God why he was so determined to punish me. At the time of writing, my hair looks mostly the way I want it to, but the months long growth process took patience I don’t exactly have.
The haircut really did deepen my appreciation for beauty. As in, it humbled me to be a little ugly for a few months.
an ok day of the bad haircut that now kind of disqualifies the above paragraph???
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HEALTH
After several years of no exacerbations caused by my chronic illness, a bacteria appeared in my lungs this summer. I had to do inhaled antibiotics to eradicate it. It was a major blow to remember that the gene therapy I am on doesn’t actually make me invincible, despite feeling that way most of the time. Earnestly, I am grateful for the hard reset. Almost every year at Thanksgiving, when my family goes around saying what they’re grateful for, someone says good health. Good health is a myth. I have long been suspicious of the medical industry’s obsession with cures, as if a cure is not a temporary fix against mortality. Maybe I’m not grateful for good or bad health, but imperfect health. For the reminder I need to work hard for the body I often take for granted.
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SLEEP
I have spent most of my adulthood living in fear of not sleeping well. I’ve started to let go of that. There are times when you’ll have to sacrifice sleep for fun, work, or long conversations with someone you love or are beginning to love. Some nights I sleep eleven hours and feel horrible the next day. Some nights I sleep four and I’m told that I’m glowing.
i like it when you sleep
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BEHAVIOR
Eating standing up, free to defy convention in the privacy of your own home. Returning texts days later after coming out of a bout of self-induced personal drama. A little petty theft from the refreshment table at a boring party. Chips for dinner. Ubering when it’s too late despite the wealth of public transit options. Diet Coke in the late afternoon.
Being a little bad is good for you. I encourage you as you finish out the year to be a little bad. I’m not saying you should wreck every good thing in your life. Please don’t. Actually, please work hard not to do that. But if you deny your bad impulses all the time, you might lose sight of what you actually want.
I’ve spent the year thinking about goodness. And the more I’ve thought about what it means to be a good person, the less I’m sure it matters. Someone, who I thought to be a not-nice person, told me all she wanted to be was a good person. You can want to be one, but wanting to be one means very little. We’re all too variable to be one thing or the other. I’m still not sure what we owe other people and what others owe us (if anything), but the least you can do is take the pressure off yourself to be good all the time. I don’t need to quote Mary Oliver to you. I just want you to be a little bad sometimes.
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DATES
New York is a place that has no shortage of bad dates waiting to happen. I’m not a big believer in learning a lesson, and tend to repeat the same mistake until it gets through to me that something should change. I’ve been this way since I was a kid. But, despite my resistance, I have learned a lot of lessons from dates.
Before you read on, I want to acknowledge that I, too, am, have been, and will continue to be a bad date. Some people aren’t compatible! This is ok. And actually, incompatibility is often more useful to think about than being a perfect fit with someone. So here’s a list of lessons I’ve learned from all the bad fits:
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