I think there are two ingredients; genuine gratitude and control.
Genuine gratitude is the harder of the two. Every self help book I’ve read talks about cultivating gratitude, but most of it is horse shit. Like being grateful to be alive, in this state? absurd. None of that false happiness BS, it doesn’t work, and you know you’re lying to yourself.
but, with work, you can find things to be grateful for. I’m grateful for my bicycle, it makes me feel less trapped. I’m incredibly grateful for hot showers right now, as well as being able to do dishes and laundry as normal. Going without always seems to generate gratitude when the thing is brought back. The stuff has to be good, which may seem obvious. It has to be something you plausibly couldn’t have.
Then there’s control. Taking some control increases your energy and lifts the mood like nothing else. I was talking about it in another post, but getting some control of my schedule and projects has been key to my recovery. I’m getting back to budgeting my time, which was a hard thing to recover.
Similarly though, it’s about realizing where you aren’t in control. Anger is one of the worst ones, the hormone mixture from anger will shorten your life and make the remainder of it worse. So forgive, but only out of self interest. When you decide to forgive and to shift away from anger, be aware that the other person probably doesn’t deserve it, and will never ask for it. You however, deserve the benefits of forgiving.
I think of it all like some huge pointless war, but a pointless war where losing ground means losing will to live. Like world war 1, some duke got assassinated, that has to be the dumbest reason for millions to die in the history of the world. But we’re in the trenches. Winning the war is surviving. That was a huge act of will though, really huge because I can think of no more depressing environment than a muddy trench. More people died from trench foot than gunshots.
so I keep my feet dry, metaphorically. All the will I have left is going into trying to make surviving less work than it is right now.
Eventually, things will change. They might change for the worse or the better, but they will change. When they do, that changes how you fight and react. How well you keep your head will tend to influence things changing for the better.
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I think there are two ingredients; genuine gratitude and control.
Genuine gratitude is the harder of the two. Every self help book I’ve read talks about cultivating gratitude, but most of it is horse shit. Like being grateful to be alive, in this state? absurd. None of that false happiness BS, it doesn’t work, and you know you’re lying to yourself.
but, with work, you can find things to be grateful for. I’m grateful for my bicycle, it makes me feel less trapped. I’m incredibly grateful for hot showers right now, as well as being able to do dishes and laundry as normal. Going without always seems to generate gratitude when the thing is brought back. The stuff has to be good, which may seem obvious. It has to be something you plausibly couldn’t have.
Then there’s control. Taking some control increases your energy and lifts the mood like nothing else. I was talking about it in another post, but getting some control of my schedule and projects has been key to my recovery. I’m getting back to budgeting my time, which was a hard thing to recover.
Similarly though, it’s about realizing where you aren’t in control. Anger is one of the worst ones, the hormone mixture from anger will shorten your life and make the remainder of it worse. So forgive, but only out of self interest. When you decide to forgive and to shift away from anger, be aware that the other person probably doesn’t deserve it, and will never ask for it. You however, deserve the benefits of forgiving.
I think of it all like some huge pointless war, but a pointless war where losing ground means losing will to live. Like world war 1, some duke got assassinated, that has to be the dumbest reason for millions to die in the history of the world. But we’re in the trenches. Winning the war is surviving. That was a huge act of will though, really huge because I can think of no more depressing environment than a muddy trench. More people died from trench foot than gunshots.
so I keep my feet dry, metaphorically. All the will I have left is going into trying to make surviving less work than it is right now.
Eventually, things will change. They might change for the worse or the better, but they will change. When they do, that changes how you fight and react. How well you keep your head will tend to influence things changing for the better.
I hope any of that helped.