For every piece of candy I received for reciting “Trick or treat!” on Halloween, my mom followed with the famous phrase, “What do you say?” 

I can still hear the exact inflection in her voice, I can see myself turning over my shoulder to look back at the strangers standing in their doorway, and I can feel my throat produce the requisite “Thank you!” that I would call out in response to her prompting.

The “What do you say?” ritual taught me how to display thankfulness when I got something I wanted, but it didn’t teach me to feel thankful internally. That wasn’t the point. The point was to prove I was civilized--reared properly--not that I actually experienced the feeling of gratitude.

A Lack of Gratitude

A few years later--about the time when I felt too old to dress up and go out for Halloween--my mom became sick with an autoimmune disease. As I write about this now, she’s been gone from this world for many years, so I’m not able to confirm my present-day interpretation of our shared past, although I think she would agree: her illness was not something any of us felt thankful for. In fact, we felt the exact opposite of thankful. We felt smited by God, punished by the creative force of existence, completely and utterly devastated to have found the serpent of illness within our hand of cards. There was no silver lining. No reframing of the experience. No justice to be found in the pain and confusion that characterized our family life from that point on. As far as we were concerned, there was nothing to be thankful for.

From that point forward, I didn’t think much about my blessings. I was not oriented towards possibility or opportunity. For me, growing up was about surviving one more day in these conditions. It wasn’t just the sickness that curdled my stomach. It was our entire family dynamic. It was the palpable tension between my parents; the feeling of being trapped with a group of people who didn’t like each other very much; the verbal and physical abuse that became normal in the house; the caretaking position I graduated into before hitting my double-digit birthdays; the feeling of isolation that came from not having anyone to talk openly with. Ours was a house full of Eeyores, and dark rain clouds loomed over our roof as my friends played outside in the San Diego sunshine.

Annual Thanksgiving dinners were a continued reminder of my lack of gratitude. As people took turns around the table expressing the things they felt grateful for, my mind pulled an absolute blank. I learned stock phrases that I sputtered out when it was my turn, similar to the unembodied “Thank you!” I said in response to receiving Halloween candy. It was enough of a display to be accepted by the group. And just like the Halloween ritual, it didn’t seem to matter whether I actually felt grateful or not, so long as I expressed it for the benefit of others.

Becoming Grateful

Now in my early 30s, I’ve had lots of opportunities to reflect on my childhood and process the residue in my system. I’ve made huge strides in the realm of forgiveness, understanding, and acceptance. But gratitude has remained somewhat elusive. My kinesthetic response to life challenges is not baked in gratefulness, it’s more characterized by complaint.

I’ve attempted gratitude journaling, gratitude meditations, and gratitude-themed yoga practices and rituals. Writing down a list of five things I’m grateful for everyday has not been successful in moving the needle on my felt experience of gratitude. Moreso, it feels like I’m tricking myself into feeling something I don’t feel, and my brain is too smart to take the bait.

A few years ago, I found myself unemployed, spending gobs of time at home, not really interacting much with the world. My contribution to others was next to nothing, and I was feeling depressed and deflated. One morning I woke up and I had a thought: “What’s the most valuable thing I can do right now?” The answer came as I tiptoed into the kitchen and saw the sink full of dirty dishes I had left for myself the night before. “Well, I guess that’s a start,” I thought to myself. Soon the dishes were done, laundry was started, the bathroom was clean, I had moved my body and done some writing. I felt like I had actually created value in my day, even if it was just for myself.

The interest in creating value sustained the next morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after that. Soon I found myself orienting my daily decisions around what would bring the most value to myself and other people. I became obsessed with contributing, with up-leveling situations, with leaving places better than I found them. 

And then, the darndest thing happened. I actually started to feel grateful. 

When eating out at a restaurant, I savored the meal. I appreciated the effort that went into creating it because I knew what it was like to create and serve. I found myself feeling grateful not because I was practicing gratitude, but because I was working hard to create value, and was subsequently more tuned in to the hard work that other people put in to create value for me. 

How to Feel More Gratitude

Creating value for others essentially means doing things that other people feel thankful for. And soon, other people started expressing gratitude to me for my contributions. This gratitude was deep and heartfelt. I knew they meant it. By this point, I was working diligently for clients, teaching yoga, maintaining my house, and spending every spare moment I had learning how to be a better contributor in my roles. There was never a challenge I would shy away from, because I saw each challenge as an opportunity to improve the quality and quantity of my contribution. The harder I worked, the more gratitude I received, and the easier it was for me to feel grateful in return. 

I did not seek out my gratitude, I stumbled upon it. It was not something I was pursuing with gusto, because I didn’t think that being able to tap into feelings of thankfulness had much use for me. The idea of being able to feel thankful was attractive to me, but it didn’t strike me as having the potential to spark beneficial changes in unrelated areas of my life. As it turned out, feeling grateful correlated with a decrease in my feelings of loneliness and depression. It connected me with other people and with the invisible force that controls life’s moving pieces. I started to feel calmer, to breathe more deeply and slowly, to slow down the pace of my eyeballs darting around the room. Gratitude is a necessary component of a life well lived.

Closing Thoughts

Today, it is easy to tap into the experience of feeling grateful. Even on my worst days, when the stress feels insurmountable and the challenges feel like they might crush me, I can always find something I genuinely feel grateful for. Maybe it’s the enjoyment of our hot tub that I worked hard to afford and maintain. Perhaps it’s the opportunity to learn a new skill that will become an asset I can utilize later. Maybe it’s the cup of coffee Oli brings me in-between my back-to-back 7-call workdays. It can be as small as the remembrance of light hitting a flower in a particular way, or as significant as the ability to take off work and spend the day at Disneyland.

My gratitude is so thoroughly baked into my existence that I can’t imagine being the kid who threw out cavalier “Thank yous” that I didn’t really mean, or not being able to find the silver lining in my mom being sick.

One thing I know for certain: no matter what lemons life brings, there is always something to be grateful for. This was a perspective I didn’t have growing up, and one I’m deeply grateful for encountering as an adult.

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