I consider myself a fairly healthy eater. I stay active, I take care of my body, and I’m conscious about choosing food that fuels the lifestyle I want to enjoy. But whenever I find myself in a particularly heightened state of stress, anxiety, and exhaustion, I start to entertain a self-destructive craving: crappy fast food.
Just a few weeks ago, I was forced to confront this fact as I found myself processing the results of a disturbing national political event with two McDonald’s cheeseburgers and a large order of fries. The meal tasted like sadness, and it brought back vivid memories of a fateful Tuesday evening eight years earlier when a similarly disturbing national political event prompted me to make a similarly dubious decision of seeking out a late-night snack from Burger King. Apparently there’s something about existential dread that makes me want to gorge on calories and cholesterol.
But here’s the thing: Fast food has never made me feel better. For a fleeting moment, I might be able to trick myself into thinking it will. But my body will inevitably make its displeasure known as soon as it has to start digesting all the processed mystery meat and grease-soaked garbage I’ve just assaulted it with. Never have I walked away from a fast food restaurant and thought, “I’m glad I did that.”
Ironically, that seems to be the very reason why I do. In a twisted way I can’t fully explain, there’s a part of me that feels good when I make myself feel awful. I’m sure there’s a bunch of complicated psychological stuff going on behind the scenes, but the simple explanation is that fast food is a toxic coping strategy. When life feels out of control, I regain some measure of autonomy by making my stomach hate me.
In the grand scheme of things, an unhealthy meal once or twice a year isn’t the worst vice a middle-aged man could have. But the more I mature (or try to, anyway), the more I realize that this weirdly harmful form of self-indulgence isn’t limited to my diet.
For most of my late 30s, I’ve struggled with a nasty cocktail of emotions surrounding my departure from a career in church ministry and my coinciding departure from evangelical Christianity. I’ve written extensively about this transition in the past, but the salient points can be reduced to these: I desperately wanted to find a new career that would be productive and fulfilling. Everywhere I turned seemed to result in a dead-end. And after decades of loyalty to an institution that left me empty-handed, I couldn’t help feeling abandoned, adrift, and alone.
So what did I do with those uncomfortable feelings? Something like the emotional equivalent of pounding fast food. I fixated on the injustice of my circumstances and savored every bite of bitterness, resentment, and anger that I could get my hands on. To be honest, it felt satisfying – in the same way that a Whopper value meal can feel satisfying for a brief moment. But over time, the cumulative effect of all those empty emotional calories was starting to take its toll. I wasn’t healthy, and those closest to me were starting to see it.
Finally, I hit a wall. It was exactly one year ago, on November 30, 2023. That’s when I told myself enough was enough. I knew my way of coping with disappointment wasn’t sustainable any longer, and I had to take an intentional step toward a healthier me. So I grabbed a pen, I pulled out a little 5×7 notepad, and I started to write. It was an act of desperation:
Day 1: Despite the evidence to the contrary, life is beautiful. Even mine. No, scratch that. Especially mine. It’s all too easy to focus on the negatives, the losses, the outcomes that aren’t what I envisioned. But behind every disappointment is an army of blessings – if only I can be aware enough to see them. This is my attempt to do just that. To see through my mounting discontentment and focus instead on all that is wonderful about this life. Each day, I am committing to filling a page with gratitude. It’s not just a trivial exercise. It’s a means of survival. An attempt to dig myself out of months (years?) of bitterness and recenter myself in a place of positive self-identity. I am not the shit that surrounds me. I am an abundance of undeserved goodness.
That first gratitude exercise didn’t make me feel instantaneously better. But it gave me something to focus on besides my own frustration, and it seemed like the start of something that perhaps over time could lead me to a healthier frame of mind. So the next day, I turned to a fresh, blank page, and I went at it again:
Day 2: I’m alive. I exist. I’m here. It just as easily could have been otherwise. A billion potential universes could be out there in which there is no me. But in this one, I’m somehow present for the roll call. This morning I woke up and went about my day with a conscious awareness of my surroundings. Food. Music. Conversations. Sensations. Movement. Love. Thoughts. All of it, every single moment, made possible because there is a “me” who is alive to experience it. These days I’m not sure what to believe about the divine. But I can’t help but suppose that this life I’ve been given is just that: a gift. Someone has given it to me for a purpose perhaps I’ll never fully know. Most likely I don’t need to know. It’s enough simply to be – to drink in this wild mystery of being conscious matter, here to participate in the wonder of life.
In the days and weeks that followed, I dutifully repeated the exercise, finding no shortage of reasons to assume a posture of gratitude. Sometimes the reasons were deeply personal and existentially profound (like existence itself). Other times the reasons were relatively superficial and seemingly mundane (like new office furniture). For example:
Day 10: It’s impossible to dive into gratitude without acknowledging how lucky I am to have been given such a stable, supportive childhood…
Day 13: I’m thankful for the sun. A dreary day with heavy clouds certainly has a special place in my heart. But to walk outside beneath a canopy of brilliant blue is a unique sort of joy…
Day 20: Here’s something profound: I love bed. In my old age, I’ve acquired a deep appreciation for the simple joy of climbing into bed after a long day…
Day 36: Maybe it’s a sad reflection on the current state of my life, but I got a new desk chair at school this morning, and it completely made my day. Yes, that’s right. A desk chair….
Day 42: I’m not sure why it’s taken me this long to document my gratitude for this particular aspect of life, but boy am I thankful for sex….
Day 54: Today was a reminder that I’m lucky to have people around me who support me, believe in me, and are willing to help me succeed…
On and on it went, day after day after day. The more I wrote, the more momentum I felt toward a less toxic relationship with my pain. But despite the mounting positivity in my life, it wasn’t always easy to put myself in a thankful frame of mind. There were still plenty of bad days, and sitting down to fill a page with gratitude wasn’t exactly an appealing prospect:
Day 27: Been in a funk. Blame it on the post-holiday blues. Or the stress over current family challenges. Or the anxiety about my vocational future. I’m just feeling very down, and it’s hard to be grateful. But then again, this is probably the most important time to lean into gratitude. So here goes…
Day 75: What is there to be thankful for on a shitty Monday following a night of too little sleep? That’s what I spent most of the day asking myself – and coming up with very little in the way of answers…
Even on those bad days, even when it felt like a stretch, even when I wondered if I was all out of ideas – I forced myself to write. For 118 days, I filled a page with gratitude, believing somewhere deep down within my soul, that this regular discipline would somehow pay off in time. And it did – in a few ways I expected, and in one way I definitely did not.
Less than a week into my journey of gratitude, I wrote this:
Day 5: Something good happened today. I got some positive news. But it’s the sort of good thing that can only lead to one of two outcomes: either something even better that will produce great joy and celebration, or something quite the opposite that will bring disappointment and heartbreak. There’s no middle ground. In some ways, this is psychological torture. Do I get my hopes up and wish for the best? Or do I immunize myself against being let down and prepare for the worst? Meditating on gratitude today has suggested a third option: neither. Instead of orienting my attention to the future and where this recent good thing might lead, I can root myself in the present and appreciate it for what it is. The next part of the story doesn’t have to overshadow my gratitude for the goodness of this current moment. Let tomorrow worry about itself. Today I’m thankful.
The news was an unexpected invitation to interview for an ideal job opportunity. Which would eventually lead to a second interview. Which would eventually lead to a third interview. Which would eventually lead to an offer. Which would eventually lead to the long-awaited discovery of my new vocational niche. Just when I had decided to stop putting all my energy into bitterness over the lack of circumstantial change in my life, that change came knocking on my door.
It led me to ask some deeply existential questions:
Day 57: Does the universe somehow reward gratitude and positivity? Is there some sort of karmic principle at work, such that goodness begets more goodness? Literally five days into my journey of choosing to be thankful in spite of life’s setbacks, I got an email from a job I had long since given up on. Five days. Is that a coincidence? Or was someone out there waiting for me to get my head out of my own ass so they could send something positive my way? It sounds like the prosperity gospel…or else some hippy-dippy bullshit. But I can’t avoid asking these questions. I’m not saying I somehow earned my way into a new job. I’m just saying maybe a more gratitude-oriented outlook unlocked an energy within me or around me that ultimately led to an opportunity I otherwise might have missed. Who knows. I don’t.
I still don’t know the answer to those questions, and something tells me I never will. But after four months of consciously choosing gratitude on a daily basis and another eight months of reflecting on the transformational impact of that habit, I’ve become convinced that there are few forces in this world more powerful than gratitude.
My experience is admittedly subjective – a scientifically questionable study with a sample size of only one – but I have 118 pages of evidence to back it up. In the last year, I’ve seen gratitude reframe my relationship with grief. I’ve seen it disrupt a lethal cycle of bitterness. I’ve seen it instigate a series of changes that sheer willpower and desire were unable to bring about on their own. And I know that I’ve only just scratched the surface. There are still plenty of areas in my life that gratitude is yet to transform.
Maybe it’s no coincidence that at the heart of nearly every religious expression throughout human history is a core principle of thankfulness. It can easily get buried beneath endless detritus of man-made nonsense. But deep down, beneath the accumulated layers of dogma and doctrine, hierarchy and control, judgmentalism and exclusivity, there exists a pure form of spirituality that orients us beyond ourselves and invites us to see the world with a disposition of awe and wonder.
Isn’t that all we really need? Forget all the -isms and -ologies. Forget the shalts and the shalt-nots. Maybe true religion is simply the practice of looking up – or around, or across, or even within – and uttering those two revolutionary words: “thank you.”
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Drew Thomas Humphrey 