Spending December remembering — Notes on five years of gratitude journaling

Two years ago, I wrote about my gratitude journaling practice — a practice I originally began the day after ending a relationship in my late twenties. My mental health was perhaps the worst it had ever been, and the thought of spiraling into a deeper depression scared me. During that time, I figured if I could find at least three things I was grateful for each day, I could keep myself somewhat afloat.

The practice worked. By the end of that year, I decided to make it a ritual to spend at least one day in December somewhere in nature, carrying all my journals, and re-reading all my gratitude entries for the year. For the last five years, this ritual has forced me to devote time to remembering, to make remembering feel as crucial and productive and worthy as any other task that usually takes up my time at the end of any year.

For the last two years, I also began documenting separately whatever new (and more specific) pleasures I’ve discovered through the practice. Some highlights from this year:  

• Dancing at concerts alone with my eyes closed.
• Watching cold Bay Area sunsets with a weighted blanket. 
• ​Drag King shows.
• Visiting the same exact place in nature during two different seasons.
• Pants with pockets on the sides.
• Snacking on a shrimp cocktail platter while cooking a lavish meal.
• Listening to a Joni Mitchell album on a California road trip.
• Getting brunch on a Wednesday.
• Cooking at midnight.
• Listening to audio messages from long-distance friends, while doing nothing else but drinking a cup of tea on my porch. 

By reading these gratitude entries documenting all the ways I have noticed myself happy, this ritual has become a way of learning how to better love myself, take care of myself, give myself pleasure or safety or peace. 

Another key difference I noticed this year: I wrote so many entries simply feeling gratitude for myself, entries where I privately celebrated my own life — often in moments when a collective celebration didn’t feel possible. 

I found this one from October about building my own sense of home in the Bay Area:

“For the magic sunset on the drive back from the park: the intense orange and pink, the fog rolling over San Francisco like a gentle wave, like the posters I used to see of this city in the movies.

I live here now. I’ve created a home. Those words still don’t feel entirely believable, like they couldn’t apply to me. But this practice is helping it feel true.”

Sometime in the summer, I wrote an entry about slowly crawling my way back into happiness after months of pandemic depression:

“For the reassurance today that I am not broken beyond repair, the reassurance that I haven’t abandoned my body too long, that it still knows very well how to access its own happiness, how to bring itself back to life.”

In the book Healing Sex by somatic psychologist Staci Haines, she notes that disassociation not only happens during moments of trauma, but also moments of extreme joy (Brene Brown also referred to this as “foreboding joy”). We tend to find it difficult to stay in present in our bodies not only when we’re triggered by sadness, but also by pleasure, gratitude, and happiness. To counter this phenomenon, she offers an exercise where you imagine an activity or memory that is pleasurable, notice how pleasure physically inhabits your body, and STAY with that physical sensation for at least thirty seconds, letting it overtake your entire body as much as you can allow it to. With this exercise, she asks a question I have been thinking about all year:

“How much pleasure can you really take in?”

Every time I do this exercise, I am stunned that my answer is, relatively, “very little.” I am stunned by how scary it somehow feels; to stay with the pleasure in so many ways feels just as nerve wracking as staying with the pain. It turns out the scary part may not only be the sensation itself, but the staying —  the inhabiting of my body in full presence, no matter what was happening to it. 

In October, I did this exercise after finishing a speaking event with the Seattle Public Library on my work in travel and the outdoors. While sitting in my car that night, parked outside my house, I allowed myself three minutes, sitting in the driver’s seat, to just fully inhabit my own joy. I thought of myself ten years ago — living in the Bay Area and yearning to be someone who would one day travel the world. And then I fully allowed myself to sit in the truth that I just got paid to speak entirely about those adventures, all the moments that I once had desired and now had experienced and loved, all the moments I had to risk so much to obtain.

Carvell Wallace recently wrote about remembering beautiful things “not because it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen but because it was one beautiful thing and any beautiful thing that manages to survive and make itself visible in a world like this deserves, at the very least, to be remembered.” I think my gratitude ritual, and Staci Haines’ practice, are about this, about allowing myself to fully inhabit and acknowledge every beautiful thing, to make it more visible in my body, to allow my body to take in all its pleasure, regardless of what will happen next.

Truthfully, I didn’t end this year in the state of euphoria I usually do from rereading everything I’ve been grateful for all year. I didn’t necessarily end with a renewed sense of hopefulness and excitement. After these last few weeks of COVID surge, honestly, so much of pandemic depression feels close again. But if there’s anything this ritual has taught me, it’s that even in the darkest years, when there is little hope and excitement, what is always still reliable is pleasure and beauty — never as much as I want, but always, somehow, enough. Every single year, I forget this. And every December, with this ritual, I remember again.