Gratitude for All I Have

Locating Gratitude in the Midst of the Tumult that is Life

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

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I was going to write a memoir piece about being 19 and stealing two pints of Jim Beam every night for months at the Vons in Ojai where I grew up—in this particular instance getting caught and lugged back into the rear office and having the sheriff called—but then I attended at AA zoom meeting and they were discussing gratitude and I thought, You know how lucky you are, you dumb bastard?

So I decided to write this instead.

Gratitude is not a normal, natural, easy emotion—sensation?—for me. Despite the fact that I grew up class-privileged (read: Upper-middleclass) I spent the vast majority of my life (roughly the first 27 years, before I got sober) being patently ungrateful.

Everything bad in my life was other people’s fault: My parents, rich people, the milieu I’d been born into, Ojai, California, and my all-time favorite: “Society.” America was a horrible capitalist Hellscape. People were all selfish, manipulative and out for themselves. Narcissism was the reigning character trait. There was nothing to celebrate in life; everything was shit.

This feeling is what, in part, drove me to drink, drove me to drop out of college multiple times, drove me to use women like trash, drove me to rebel against my parents, my family, my class. It’s what made me want to die. What made me hate myself with a clear, violent rage. What made me want to break things. What pushed me into hardcore punk rock, the music that nursed my self-hatred and helped me express my inner fear externally. Punk rock agreed: America was shit. Everything was bad. Human beings were awful. Thus my rage was validated. I felt empty, lost and afraid.

Then I hit an emotional, psychological, and spiritual bottom in 2010 and got sober. I was 27. Suddenly I couldn’t nurse the anger inside of me with alcohol. My medicine was snatched away from me in one fell swoop. It was like God—the God I didn’t believe in—had slapped me across the face but had done it with great, true love. It hurt, and I was shocked and embarrassed, but I wanted to change. Needed to change, in fact. I had no other choice. It was jail, suicide or homelessness. One was going to get me, it was just a matter of time. Perhaps the psych-ward.

But I stayed sober; I stayed in the rooms of AA. I’ve been there ever since, coming up on 13 years (September 24^th). Slowly, as I did the 12 steps and went back to college finally achieving my bachelor’s degree, and as I started doing book editing and began getting my fiction published, and as I started dating women in a healthy way for the very first time (far, far from perfect still), something strange bubbled up deep within me for the very first time. It came from my core.

The thing was a feeling. The feeling was gratitude.

I realized I had two parents who’d always loved me and still did. They were far from perfect but what parents aren’t flawed? I realized I’d grown up with class-privilege that 95% of people around the globe don’t have. I realized I’d been given everything I needed to succeed and be safe and happy in life. I realized that despite America’s flaws, there was no question that this nation was an inspiring and wealthy and successful one. Why else would so many immigrants from other, poorer, authoritarian countries desperately seek to always come to the United States? We had a democratic republic, even if imperfect, even if ravished with some nasty history. Slavery, after all, had started in Africa itself and had been going on for millennia, before, during and even after the West, and particularly the United States, had started it and then (historically-speaking) quickly ended it. We had a constitution, checks and balances, freedom of speech. There was more opportunity in America than in any other nation on Earth. And here I’d been: Bitching.

And now? I have a fiancée who I love more than words can describe. I am fatherless, it’s true, but my mother is still alive and well, and we’re close, and she’s always been there for me. Yes, our relationship is complex, but that only serves to give it more color, flavor and depth. My family as a whole—tiny as it is—is rather fractured and fragmented, and yet I do not doubt anyone’s love for me, and they know I love them. I have a gorgeous Tuxedo cat who I love as a son. I am 40, still relatively young, physically healthy, sober close to 13 years, I’m about to go on a cross-country road trip with Britney. We have three cats and a Border Collie. I get to make money doing what I love, book editing and writing. I live in Southern California, a paradise people around the globe would kill to live in. We just recently went backpacking.

What else, really, could I want? I am one lucky man.

I am grateful for all my close friends, for every single one of my Substack readers, paid and free: You all make my day routinely with your thoughtful, insightful, intelligent comments. Life is short. My father’s death five weeks ago taught me that viscerally. Why waste it hating yourself, or others, or the “other political party” or anyone else for any reason?

I have lived a life of darkness and misery in the past. It is not a fun place to be. Hatred runs deep for some people. I know. I’ve been there. I understand what it’s like to feel unloved, abandoned, rejected, hated, shoved away, cursed even. I felt cursed for a long time. I carried a big sack on my shoulder full of self-pity, victimhood, resentment. I see this type of feeling in today’s polarized politics, in racial animus on both the fringe right and the fringe left. It won’t take us anywhere positive. It never does. The only way out is through, as they say. We have to face our inherent inner demons. No person is so bad he or she has zero good. No person is so good he or she has zero bad. We’re all damned complex, nuanced, layered, contradictory individuals.

I embrace the ephemerality of life. I have no other choice. My father died and one day I will, too. That is perfectly fine. This is what we are born into, my friends: This is the hard tough truth. But we don’t have to resist the journey so hard.

We can let go. We can accept things as they are.

We can be grateful for this gift we call life.