‘Yet this was indeed a most intelligent and gifted man, a man of science, so to speak, though in science… well, in short, in science he accomplished not so much and, it seems, nothing at all. But then, with men of science in our Russia, this happens all the time.’
From ‘Demons’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The title of this post is misleading. Gratitude is a positive emotion but this post might get a little dark because gratitude is tricky.
It requires an understanding of the flip side.
It doesn’t develop from happy things is what I mean to say.
I’ll be thirty five this year and as thirty five approaches I’m facing many things I have to be grateful for and yet also many things I have the potential for.
The gratitude is to the things I have survived.
The potential is to the things I have left to survive. Those things can be very frightening.
For example I still have the potential to get married and have kids. But there’s a lot to face with it.
I have the potential to have a writing career.
I have the potential to do more acting.
I have the potential to make a good income from a career I haven’t even thought of yet.
All of these potentials can be overwhelming because what I’m trying to avoid is regret. I’m trying to find more gratitude in my future.
Sometimes I meet people that have all their ingredients in the same order I have mine in and I know I’m only just a pinch off of them.
I have one little pinch more of something than they have or they have one more little pinch of something than I have. That’s all. Just a little pinch.
And with that pinch of whatever they have or are missing I watch them incinerate everything in their lives. And I know I’m lucky. And I feel a great deal of gratitude for my tiny pinch or lack there of.
I see it with young women especially. Young women are very sweet. They’re very altruistic. They have a high desire to be helpful.
They’re very caring. They go to a lot of effort to be accepted. They’re very capable of being entirely selfless.
These are all nice ingredients but they are so easy to corrupt.
One extra pinch. Or even just the wrong oven, a slight miscalculation and everything dissolves everything else.
And today’s environment is pretty harsh on all the things that make a woman very sweet.
Most of them get incinerated.
I didn’t get incinerated. That is my gratitude and because it’s my gratitude it’s what I want desperately to give to someone.
To anyone.
Anyone that will take it.
Just so my gratitude can feel fulfilled.
When sorting through potentials there’s one particular thing I try to sort that is surprisingly hard to sort.
I try to sort fear from disinterest.
These things can get very easily tangled together so that it’s hard to tell the difference between them.
It’s hard for the mind to approach something that is particularly frightening.
For example I really like writing. But it’s also quite safe for me. I’ve done it all my life, I’ve identified with it all my life. I’ve spent a lot of time processing my potential failures so my feelings, my body and my mind are quite acclimated and aren’t all that afraid of any of it.
I have my own foundation with writing. Which is great, foundations are good.
But.
And I have a very big butt. (Haha.)
There are many other potentials in my life that I have no foundation for. And because I have no foundation they are too terrifying for my mind to consider, so my mind will move past them so fast that it will feel like disinterest.
Acting is one of them.
Ever since I did Mektoub almost a decade ago people have been telling me I should be an actor.
I always skated past it instantly. No. Instant no.
It’s not for me.
I even got an attitude about it, like I was above it. In fairness lots of actors can be quite unpleasant in the sense of their desperation to be accepted. A portion of them place acceptance above all else, which is something I’m pretty passionately against.
I have this whole honor system that I’d rather go down in ridicule than debase basic truths for acceptance.
But I did let such a high and mighty attitude take over because I was afraid.
Fear sees in black and white and things are never black and white.
Acting was so frightening to me because of the implications. And the implications were that I had to kiss ass to do well. And then even if I did do well, everyone would jump up my ass.
It’s all a lot of ass.
But I missed out on the opportunities because of this black and white thinking. When really I was in a fabulous position.
I could have done what I wanted, ignored the rest and not even cared if I totally failed because of the type of attitude I bore at that age.
I’m not saying I should have pursued acting, I’m using it as an illustration for what the mind does when it’s afraid, and most importantly why the mind is afraid.
It’s afraid of what it can’t imagine having to process.
I couldn’t imagine the horror of having to kiss the ass of some of those people. It was my greatest fear.
But now I’m a server and in all honesty I’ve gotten quite good at kissing ass and I got paid a lot less to do it.
So I’d advise anyone to spend just a little time and effort trying to identify fear from disinterest.
Make sure you’re not simply afraid before you skate past a viable potential.
And isn’t my haircut adorable!!
It gets quite wavy when it’s shorter.
Jess lanai 