Macrodosing on gratitude

Hindsight is 20/20 — and so is gratitude

For the past four years I’ve dreaded December.

While I absolutely love the holidays (I am forever a PSL in August girlie), there’s a part of me that hates to see December coming. I get that pin prickly feeling in my arms and feel a dull ache in my stomach. I try to ignore December’s existence like a credit card statement after Black Friday.

December marks when I impulsively walked away from corporate life.

(Without a plan, I might add.)

(I didn’t even tell anyone I was quitting until after I gave my notice because I didn’t want to be talked out of it.)

(It was the most un-eldest-daughter thing I’ve ever done.)

When I quit my job all I knew was that what I was doing wasn’t aligned — and I wanted out.

(I actually knew this job wasn’t the right fit on day 2… but ended up staying for 2.5 years 🫠 Tell me you haven’t done that before!)

I thought I just needed to take a beat for a couple months. Reassess. Recalibrate.

It was the end of 2020 and life felt like one big pause anyway. ⏸️

Quitting without a plan was the definition of “shoot, fire, aim.”

I (naively) thought quitting my job would solve all my problems. That it would be easy to transition to whatever I wanted to do next.

I didn’t think about the consequences, both practical (“How long will my savings last?”) or existential (“Who am I without this job/title/salary?”).

What happened instead, is that I inadvertently turned my world — everything I knew, built, and thought I wanted — upside down.

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I’ve watched time simultaneously fly by and stack up — for four years now. With each passing year I felt like I was getting further and further off The Path I had been on:

🎓 An Ivy League education
💵 A six-figure salary
👩🏻‍💼 A VP or C-level title
🦄 Working at a fancy startup or in big tech
🏡 Owning a home
🚘 Driving a fancy car
…and on and on and on

As high achievers, we’re used to knowing exactly what we want and what to do. We’re used to having a plan and a path that we never waver from because we always follow directions (to get a gold star, obviously! 🌟).

The more that time went on, the more lost and confused I became.

I felt increasingly directionless.

And I began to resent myself.

I resented that I quit my job (which in hindsight would have probably improved had I just had an honest conversation). I resented that I gave up a salary, didn’t have a steady paycheck, employer-sponsored health insurance, or a growing 401k. I resented old colleagues who were growing in their careers while I stagnated. I resented that life felt like it was going backwards instead of forwards. I resented other writers/creators/biz owners who seemed to have it all figured out while I struggled.

But most of all, I resented that I DID THIS TO MYSELF.

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For me, resentment comes in waves and is usually followed by frustration (and lots of rage scrolling).

Fun!

As a sacral generator in Human Design, frustration is a huge red flag 🚩 that I’m out of alignment. Over the past couple weeks my level of frustration has been off. the. charts.

This past weekend, I vowed to schedule a few activities to help me come back to myself, like:

• Baking a “project” type recipe (Claire Saffitz’s Buche de Noel cookies!)

• Making handmade Christmas cards

• Doing a puzzle while catching up on podcasts

• Watching vlogmas eps from my favorite YouTubers (currently obsessed with

  Jessica Rose Williams
  )

As I was listening to

Catherine Zack

and

Clara Artschwager

’s new podcast “Finding Forty,” I had a HUGE aha moment that shifted everything.

The topic of conversation was: What did you think life would be like versus what it actually is? (an excellent journal prompt, btw!)

They both spoke about their winding paths (Catherine is a litigator-turned-meditation teacher, writer, and coach, for example), and how their life became more fulfilling and aligned when they wandered off The Path.

Their lives are totally different than what they thought they would be or had prepared for. And of course they’re not the first ones to say this, but for some reason, hearing it from them — in December no less — hit different.

I was suddenly overcome with this immense feeling of gratitude (for myself!) that I hadn’t felt before. Gratitude for:

💗 Having the courage to leave what didn’t feel right

💗 Continuing to try again and again and again

💗 Building Illuminate, for which I am so, so proud

💗 The love and support I have around me

In that moment, I felt my resentment dissipate in my body and gratitude take its place.

Since then I’ve felt so full of ✨good energy✨. I’m not fighting against myself or keeping score against others. I’m not rage scrolling an old colleague’s Instagram wishing their life was mine; that is huge for me — HUGE!!!

And it’s not just the big stuff either. Without the hum of resentment playing in the background of my life, I find myself feeling gratitude — really feeling it — for the little everyday things that I normally gloss over.

You might say I’ve been macrodosing… on gratitude.

Even though my life is wildly different than what I imagined it would be, I finally feel deep gratitude for the choices I made and the paths I didn’t take.

Years ago,

Cheryl Strayed

famously wrote a potent response to a Dear Sugar reader who asked her about how to make a Big Life Decision. I encourage you to read the full column, but I want to highlight two particular passages below:

In “The Ghost Ship That Didn’t Carry Us” she references a poem by Tomas Tranströmer called “The Blue House.”

“Every life, Tranströmer writes, “has a sister ship,” one that follows “quite another route” than the one we ended up taking. We want it to be otherwise, but it cannot be: the people we might have been live a different, phantom life than the people we are.

…

I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”

And so, this week’s prompt to spark your “aha moment” is:

What are you grateful for now that you weren’t grateful for before?

Something you said no to. Something you said yes to. A path you didn’t take. The life you didn’t choose.

Hindsight is 20/20 — and so is gratitude.