Happy Thanksgiving 2019! Last year I wrote that I thought that year was the oddest year of my life. I was wrong. This year. 100%. Odd isn’t bad, though.
I have a lot to be thankful for. There’s all the usual, but there are some things I’m especially, newly thankful for this year. An odd year makes an odd list, I guess.
Starting with this will probably help the rest of my list make sense: I’m thankful for therapy. Life is weird. Different ones of us have more weird, less weird, different weird, fun weird, scary weird, exhausting weird, scarring weird, confusing weird, or just plain weird weird. I should probably have started seeing a therapist way back when I was an unusually anxious little kid. I should probably have started seeing a therapist as a young adult when I felt so much loneliness and hurt that I hated and hurt myself. I should probably have started seeing a therapist as a little-less-young adult who finally learned to keep my balance surfing the waves of life by pretending like I didn’t need anything. But I didn’t. I waited until I had a concussion last year that knocked all the “okay” out of me and I could hardly make it through each day because everyone and everything scared and hurt me. Shortly after starting with him, my therapist teased me (a little bit honestly, though) that hitting my head was probably going to turn out to be one of the best things to happen to me, because it shook my feelings back into view. Turned out I still had lots of feelings. Like . . . think a long, confusing, lonely, depressing childhood’s worth of feelings, but with ten additional years for the mess to simmer while I added more hurt to my life by using the crutches I learned to get through said childhood. Moral of the story, I needed a therapist. Thank goodness that I have one, and thank goodness for the one I found. Therapy has ended up being absolutely the healthiest thing in my life. It has changed so much in this last year. It has helped with so much healing. It has given me so much more hope and freedom. It has made so much more sense of the world. It has made life safer. It has made me more confident. It has given me permission to be myself. It has explained so many scary things. It has helped me know myself, finally. And it has helped me to take care of myself, in a way I never thought I was allowed.
Hey, you, person-reading-this: If you are having a tough time deep down inside, feeling depressed or anxious, or even if you’re “totally fine” but know that actually something’s not quite right and you’re a year or two away from having to stop playing strong . . . please know that talking about it is okay. There is nothing weak about seeing a therapist. Actually, I hate that sentence. It doesn’t matter if there is anything weak or strong about seeing a therapist. “Weak” isn’t bad. “Strong” isn’t good. You have a real heart. Your heart is the same exact heart you had as an emotional little 3-year-old, an adventurous little 7-year-old, a confused little 12-year-old, an angst little 16-year-old, and as a lost little 21-year-old. It doesn’t matter if you’re a female or a male. It doesn’t matter if you grew up poor or wealthy. It doesn’t matter if you have a cushy life or scrape by week to week. It doesn’t matter if your big feelings and scars come from getting physically abused, bullied, emotionally neglected, molested or assaulted, or from going through a terrible experience that left you with PTSD. Or from none of the above, so you feel like you have no right to be struggling. Please know that you are not silly or dramatic for having feelings. Sure, some of your feelings may have a little silliness or a lot of drama-ness, but hurting, being scared, feeling weak, feeling helpless or hopeless, confused, sad, angry–all those big feelings are okay to have. And if you need help with how to navigate them and how to take care of yourself at this point in your life, therapy is just a really good idea. It’s like a doctor or a personal trainer but for your feelings. You have those. That’s good! Please don’t feel any shame in taking care of them. Therapy is GOOD.
Being open with your people is good, too. Being real about your humanness. We’re all in this together. A lot of us think we’re alone, but if we talked about all this weird stuff more, we’d all discover that we’re very much not alone. It’s amazing what it does for your heart and for your life to allow yourself to stop being alone about who you are and what you think and how you feel.
So I’m thankful for therapy. And thanks to therapy I’m thankful for . . .
Myself. Weird, right?
Tears. Healing. Even though tears don’t feel like healing. Healing apparently doesn’t feel like healing either. Nobody warned me on that one, what the heck. But for real, tears are good. No matter how strong or adult or male you think you are. You’re just a person. People need to cry sometimes. Sometimes a lot.
Imperfection. I’m thankful for imperfection. I guess the okayness of imperfection or the freedom to be imperfect.
Guilt-free pleasure. I grew up feeling guilty about fun. Guilty about anything that felt good for me. Hobby stuff, social stuff, body stuff, braggy stuff, self-care stuff, freedom stuff, me stuff. Everything had to be “worthwhile” or “productive,” and I existed to serve others. I’m thankful for the freedom I’ve found as an adult to just love and enjoy stuff, without having to wonder if it’s “selfish” or if I’m “wasting time” or if it’s “too indulgent.” Life has good stuff. Have it!
Weirdness. My weirdness, your weirdness, people’s weirdness. Weirdness is something I’ve really come to appreciate this year. Weirdness is like cooking with salt and pepper and thyme and rosemary and cilantro and chili powder and maybe a dash of ketchup for those weird-people who put ketchup on everything because it makes them happy. Being normal, doing everything the “right” way, is bland if it’s not you. So embrace the spice of weird in your life. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as confident or thankful for my weirdness as I do this year.
Freedom. Freedom. Just freedom. Freedom to choose, freedom to be, freedom to talk, freedom to be silent, freedom to feel, freedom to be angry, freedom to be happy, freedom to be sad, freedom to be tired, freedom to be bored, freedom to not feel a thing. Freedom to be who I want to be. Or just freedom to be who I am sometimes without having to want to be something else. Freedom from things that I used to think I had to serve or protect or acknowledge or care for or fix. Just freedom to do life and not look back and not spend every day handing out band-aids to everyone and everything that might not like me.
Friendships. Thank you to my friends. I have never realized the value of friendships as I have this year. Friends are good. Friends are needed.
And emotions. One of the most helpful of all my sessions with a therapist was when he taught me the little chart-of-emotions that little kids learn: Happy, Sad, Angry, Fearful. These are normal. These feelings are okay. You should have them. I should have them. I didn’t know that. Especially, especially, especially anger. I didn’t think I was supposed to have anger. I thought that if I felt any anger I had to real quick stop it, put it away, take responsibility for it, solve it, protect everyone else from it. I thought that anger meant that I wasn’t being a good enough person. I learned how to be angry this year. I learned that it is okay. Like, I won’t be an ass hole about anger. But I can actually say when I’m upset now. I can express anger. That’s a new thing and boy is it life-changing. Do you know that it’s okay to be angry? To be sad? To be happy? Or to be afraid? Or even to have multiple emotions at the same time, like being happy AND mad? You can do those emotion-things without recklessly and viciously taking them all out on the people around you, but you absolutely can do those emotions. You have to have emotions. You do have emotions. Let yourself be you. So this year, for the first time in my life, I’m really thankful for all the emotions.
Therapy has done so much for me this year. I recently wrote a letter to my younger self, an experiment I highly recommend, and I’ll link to it here because I hope that you can find a little encouragement and hope in a few of the words and if they resonate a lot with you, I hope you’ll take care of yourself and see a therapist, too, if you also have weird stuff you need help with and if you don’t already see one.
If I could send a message to 18-year-old me
Thank you therapy.
I’m so thankful for all the good things in my life. I’m thankful for evenings laughing with friends. I’m thankful for interesting things to learn about the world. I’m thankful for languages. I’m thankful for cheese. I’m thankful for piano. I’m thankful for music. I’m thankful for an absolutely amazing SYML concert. I’m thankful for travel. I’m thankful for for a body that can move. I’m thankful for people like chiropractors and massage therapists who can help when your body’s not moving quite right. I’m thankful for the Canadian Rockies and road trips. I’m thankful for poetry that says what other things can’t. I’m thankful for books to read, especially books by Neil Gaiman and Ray Bradbury. I’m thankful for Iron Man, which is a painful subject. I’m thankful for adventures. I’m so thankful for cooking and food and especially food. I’m thankful that I got to go to my first Yankees game and then book tickets for the next night which turned out to be a past-midnight nail-biter with the wildest ending. I’m still thankful for cheese and just want you to know that hasn’t changed since the beginning of this paragraph. I’m thankful for really good movies to watch and really great buddies to go see movies with. I’m thankful for quiet time. I’m thankful for Toastmasters, a place where I have felt myself come alive and felt connected and engaged and passionate, learning to help people through words, and helping people find their own words. I’m thankful for Santa Barbara, even though Psych wasn’t actually filmed there, for its waves to play in, its nearby winding mountain-top-roads, and for its little taquerias. I’m thankful for coffee, which is weird because I never was before. And, as always, I’m thankful for The Office.
I’m thankful for this blog. At the beginning of the year, I committed to write five blog posts every month, because blogging, writing, and helping and inspiring people is a dream I’ve had for a long, long time. And my experience blogging this year has taught me that consistent action builds good stuff. I’ve been so honored that some of the things I have written have deeply resonated with lots of people, helping them feel understood and like they’re not alone, helping them find the right words for their own experiences they want to share, helping inspire them with big life stuff or the little day to day odds and ends. Thank you all for being with me on this journey. If one little thing I write helps you with one little thing, that is all the motivation I need to keep writing.
I’m thankful for my friend Lyssi. I’m thankful to have a person who really likes me and wants to be my friend and is on my team and supports me so much.
I’m thankful for a life of adventures.
Happy Thanksgiving! I hope your life is weird and full of zest!
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