The Tyranny of Gratitude Journals
The Tyranny of Gratitude Journals
Happy Thanksgiving!
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, the day we are meant to officially give thanks. While the holiday itself is a complicated one historically, I can’t argue with taking a beat to be grateful.
While we’re all thinking about gratitude, I have to confess something. I hate gratitude journals. Don’t tell me I just need to try it. I’ve tried it, repeatedly. And gratitude journals suck.
I’m not sure when gratitude journals surfaced as a thing to add to our list of self-care chores, but I’m gonna guess Oprah had something to do with it. I love Oprah as much as the next Gen X / Millennial cusper. Which is to say I really love Oprah, our supreme goddess of self-actualization.
Oprah famously kept a gratitude journal in which she wrote down five things she was grateful for every day, to cherish “the joy of simple moments.” Oprah’s not alone though. Brené Brown keeps a daily gratitude journal listing three things to be grateful for every day. Gratitude journals, we’re told, will help us be more observant of moments of delight throughout our day, bring us closer to feeling joy, and even counter feelings of anxiety and depression. A vital tool in the wellbeing arsenal.
About four years ago, my anxiety started creeping higher and higher. My therapist was helpful, but served mostly just as an outlet. Running helped keep the anxiety hounds at bay sometimes, but it was starting to become less effective at that and more effective at destroying my knees and achilles tendons. Long soaks in the tub, relaxing with wine or chamomile tea, seeing friends – I did all the things you’re supposed to do. Nothing seemed to work in any meaningful way.
Fine, I thought, I’ll try this stupid gratitude journal thing that I keep reading about.
I bought a new journal (honestly, any excuse to buy a new journal is one I can get down with for a while), and like the type-A, good girl that I am, I diligently wrote down five things every day that I was grateful for. I was too zombified at the end of each day from working and parenting to write anything other than whiny texts to friends in the evenings, so I wrote my gratitude entries first thing every morning, dutifully reflecting on the previous day.
My first entry on October 3, 2019:
Seeing Madonna [I had just seen Madge at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; she did not disappoint]
Coffee
Chilly fall days
My nanny
Avocados
Really going deep there.
For a few days, it felt good. It felt righteous. Wow, look at all these things I have to be grateful for! I can feel myself curing my own anxiety and depression, RIGHT NOW!
After a week or so, I started to run out of things to list. So I went the Brené route (please accept my apologies, Oprah) and started listing three instead of five. It didn’t really help. I found myself listing the same things over and over. Almost every other entry has me showering thanks upon coffee. On some days, I just listed things like “breathing” or “my family,” which seemed like cheating. Duh, of course I’m grateful for breathing.
I kept plugging away though. Surely I would start to feel the benefits of this practice. I’d start to feel JOY – who doesn’t want more joy??
Then the pandemic started, and listing things like “breathing” or “my family” didn’t feel like cheating anymore. In the first few months of the pandemic, I felt helpless as I watched both my son and myself slip into isolated depression. I ripped off one of the pages of the poster-size sticky notes easel thing that I’d ordered to help with Zoom school (hahahahah what a fucking joke) and stuck it on the wall to make a gratitude poster. Brené and Oprah to the rescue! Every morning I asked my son what he was grateful for, and I wrote or drew each of our gratitude entries on this poster.
Soon enough, we ran out of things to list. There are only so many days a kid can be grateful for Transformers or Legos or a mom grateful for coffee (or tequila – not pictured on the poster). And we were still depressed and anxious. Still isolated. Still not feeling that sneaky joy.
I kept it up, though. I am nothing if not a girl who has been conditioned to follow the rules. Even after the first horrible months of the pandemic gave way to just a new dulled way of living and I put the gratitude poster in my bin of keepsakes, I kept going with my own gratitude journal.
Where is the goddamn joy. Give me the joy. I am doing the fucking work. I want my joy, damn it.
I had started down this road in an effort to alleviate my anxiety, and now my gratitude journal seemed intent on becoming a source of anxiety. I kept wondering if I was doing it wrong. Is there something wrong with me? Am I immune to the healing, joy-inducing qualities of articulating in a bulleted list some non-horrible things about my day?
I tried a few weeks focusing just on the “simple” moments of joy, like Oprah:
Morning runs in the park
Chocolate cinnamon ice cream
Roast chicken [a rather shocking number of entries are related to food or modern appliances like washing machines and dishwashers]
Nope. Okay, let’s try some more “meaningful” things to be grateful for:
My resilience
The way my child looks when he’s sleeping
The rule of law [that one was from January 7, 2021]
Still nope.
I began to resent my gratitude journal, like it was a living being. Every morning I’d stare at that page, and I’d hate it. It stared at me back, daring me to tell it how grateful I was. I felt the opposite of gratitude. I felt like the gratitude journal was saying to me “how dare you ask for joy, or for anything really, just shut up and be grateful for what you have.”
Writing that I was grateful for a long walk with my dog on a spring morning or for the spontaneous hug from my son or for a catch-up phone call with an old friend didn’t erase the actual bad things happening in the world. It didn’t erase my bad feelings about those bad things. It started to feel like it was actually trivializing those things. It felt forced.
My gratitude journal started to feel like one big experiment in telling myself “It could be worse,” which is exactly what you’re not supposed to say to someone to empathize with them. Yes, of course, it could be worse. It could always be worse. I’m not advocating for a “journal of shitty things about your life and the world” – we have the media for that already thank you very much. But the toxic positivity of this forced gratitude journaling started to rankle. Reminding myself every day of 3-5 things I should be grateful for wasn’t making me feel better. It just made me feel like I should shut up and stop whining.
“Gratitude turns what we have into enough, and more,” Melody Beattie said. I mean, maybe, sure. But what if what we have isn’t enough? What if we need more? What if, dare I say, we want more? Like so many other self-care hacks, gratitude journals seem like just that – a hack. In this case, a workaround designed to make us feel like lack is enough.
And by “us,” I mean women. Because that’s what we’re talking about here, right? Women are the ones told to journal their gratitude, to physically write down in a list the things they’re grateful for in order to make it enough. Women are the ones who are told to be thankful. I’m sure many men are grateful for all they have; in fact, I know many good men who are extraordinarily grateful for the small and not so small things in their life. But they’re not exhorted to prostrate themselves by listing them out on a daily basis. Hahaha, can you imagine that?!
Last year, I said “no thank you” to my gratitude journal. (Forgive me, Oprah.) This has impacted my levels of joy and feelings of gratitude … not at all. I still search for that elusive joy that can be hard, but not impossible!, to find in 2023 at the age of 47, and I still feel unbelievably fortunate and grateful, for a myriad number of people and things, big and small, in this short beautiful life I have somehow been lucky enough to live so far.
See, that’s the thing – I’m not opposed to gratitude, just to forced, performative gratitude. Actual gratitude is beautiful and necessary, and can feel like a cathartic release. But the tyranny of journaling a list every day as a magical elixir to bring me happiness and mental wellbeing is one I can do without. Maybe it works for other people, and if you’re one of them, by all means, please keep doing it. I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, keep doing whatever it is that works for you. If standing on one foot while singing “Islands in the Stream” helps you feel better and get through the day, DO IT. For me, I’m going to double down on the time I would have been gratitude journaling by actually doing some of those things I’m truly grateful to get to do with people I’m astoundingly grateful I get to have in my life, and trying to figure out how to change the things that aren’t enough instead of accepting them.
On that note, Happy Thanksgiving! I’m grateful to all of you who read this and hope you are finding the joy we all need and deserve.
I’m starting a few new sections this week. They won’t always center around one thing, but this week they do.
What’s got my attention this week
Speaking of things I’m grateful for, Jezebel was a mainstay in my daily internet reading from the time it launched. Others have written more eloquently about the recent shuttering of this feminist beacon than I could, but a couple of my faves:
This gave me hope: passing the torch to the next generation. The medium evolves, but the basic struggle remains. Go raise some hell, girlies.
WAL woman of the week
A woman out there in the world, being A Lot
Jezebel founder Anna Holmes had a piece in the New Yorker, published before the closing of Jezebel was announced, that’s worth reading.
Out of the mouths of babes
From Anna Holmes in that New Yorker piece:
“Anger can be explosive. It can ignite social movements and chip away at calcified ideas about sex, gender, class, and race. It’s also fair to say that when women express it – or are accused of expressing it – they’re easily, sometimes viciously, mocked and derided.”
Preach.
RIP, Jezebel. And thank you.