I have only just realized that I’ve been paying an extra three months for a service that I don’t want.
Have you ever done that?
It’s always annoying. This streaming service, that subscription, the small donation that you thought was a one-off…sigh. Or, you know, a service that isn’t very good, that I’ve been looking forward to concluding when my contract was up.
And this time around, it was a chunk of money that made me blink a little. How could I forget to cancel it?
I keep giving myself the pep talk: well, of course you forgot. The company didn’t send you any kind of reminder, any kind of thanks for doing business with us at the end of your contract. No upcoming bill notice. And I’m back to work full-time, still madly studying for two intense courses, finding my way through the daily life threads that tangle and knot all of us sometimes, and dealing with an injury. (Well, two injuries since I managed to fall skating and made the first injury quite annoyed with me again.)
Oh, and there’s a pandemic going on.
The pep talk isn’t working. I can try to get a refund for part of it. You never know. I don’t have the energy to pursue it very far though. That’s why I hired the company to begin with! (Oh, and here’s a tip I should have followed: buy local.)
There I go again. I don’t want to feel this way. Trapped, helpless, letting that negative self-talk monster out to play, becoming so tangled in those daily-life threads that my energy is all about escape instead of peace, simply being, gratitude and happiness, and allowing life to be what it is.
Allowing! Thank you.
I’d forgotten that gem,
as I forget it nearly every day
until something taps me
on the shoulder
and asks for space in my life.
And gratitude.
That’s a tough one to practice in the dark times, but it’s tough on the dark murkiness too. Gratitude is a mop and broom, a scrubbing brush and a jug of disinfectant to murk and discouragement. I remind myself: there was a time, a most-of-my-life time, when this blink-inducing amount of money would have taken me over, filled me with instant, stomach-grinding, paralyzing fear.
Now, things are different, and so is my acquaintance with fear.
(Fear is, in fact, weak.
And I am strong!
So are you.)
I don’t want to forget about that money.
But I am so grateful that I can choose to forget about it. I can choose to let it go. I am grateful that at this place in my life, I’ll still be able to buy my groceries, take an Uber, order pizza now and then, and enjoy my lovely little riverside apartment if I choose to. I am grateful that if I notice my energy draining away into a prolonged fight for a refund, I can stop. I am grateful that I don’t even have to start that fight if I don’t want to!
I can choose to pay the piper and enjoy the tune or walk away with earplugs in and make my own tune.
And I am grateful that I have learned to recognize these knotty experiences as just things that happen, things that float by and unravel, things that have consequences and effects but that do not control my feelings and actions. I used to see them as enormous boulders made of all the knots and threads, petrified knots that would crush me if I did not resist, fight back, and obey fear.
I won’t ever try to tell you that your experience is the same as mine, that your condition is your problem or your fault and you can fix it all with gratitude. That is not true. The world can be hard and cold, and we are not meant to be bearing the burden of the cruel things that came our way as children, that come our way now as we navigate the treacherous ways of healing from trauma.
I only want you to know that gratitude, if you can find it, can help you make it through. And I see you, I hear you, I love you, I am grateful for you.
(And–I should just point out that the shysters in the featured image at the top are some kind of relatives, uncles perhaps, Irish or Italian, New Jersey, quite probably Barnums. My family is not unacquainted with scam creative business people.)