by Jeanette R. Harrison, MPH
This is a rewrite. Not because I am retracting anything I said in my earlier post, but because after rereading it, I realized I had completely missed the point. Today's gratitude practice was supposed to be about being grateful for myself. Instead, I spent almost the entire post talking about other people. That realization, in and of itself, taught me something.
Today's lesson is this: we often have a much easier time seeing the good in other people than we do in ourselves.
Over the past several years, I have spent a great deal of time trying to understand why certain people have treated me the way they have. Some of those relationships go back decades because I continued attending the church that sponsored the college I attended, and many of those same people continued to intersect throughout my adult life. Whether people agree with my interpretation of those experiences really isn't the point. The point is that I have spent years trying to understand other people's behavior while giving very little thought to extending that same grace and understanding to myself.
What brought all of this back to the surface was something that happened this week. An acquaintance from college told me to "go away" after I posted about a friend of mine who is a respected basketball coach and school administrator. I had simply pointed out that I knew many of these men knew each other because their professional and personal lives had crossed paths over the years. Instead of having a conversation, I was dismissed. While it was frustrating, I realized it wasn't really about that one interaction. It reopened questions I have wrestled with for years about why some people seem determined to define me by rumors or assumptions rather than by their own experiences with me.
Ironically, my friend has never done that. Before becoming a school administrator, he built an outstanding reputation as a basketball coach. As an administrator, he became known for turning around struggling schools. Literacy rates improved dramatically under his leadership, and college readiness increased as more students successfully prepared for life after high school. Those are remarkable accomplishments, and I have never had any difficulty recognizing them. I have always been able to see the good he has done and appreciate the impact he has had on other people's lives. More importantly, he was a good friend to me during a season of my life when I often felt misunderstood. He got to know me for himself instead of relying on someone else's opinion, and that is a gift I don't take for granted.
As I reflected on that friendship, something unexpected occurred to me. I have no trouble recognizing the gifts, accomplishments, and strengths of the people I care about. I can celebrate their successes without hesitation. I can point to the lives they have changed and the good they have done in the world. Yet when I look at myself, I don't naturally do the same thing. Instead, I remember the criticism. I remember the rejection. I remember the people who questioned my motives or tried to convince me I wasn't enough. Somewhere along the way, I became much better at remembering the voices that hurt me than the voices that encouraged me.
Then I looked back at the post I had written. I had written pages about the people who had criticized me and only a few sentences about the people who had shown me kindness. Even worse, I had written almost nothing about the woman this gratitude exercise was supposed to be about. That stopped me in my tracks because I realized I had unintentionally allowed other people's opinions to occupy far more space in my life than they deserved.
If I looked at my own life the way I looked at my friend's, I think I would tell a very different story. I would see someone who survived foster care, earned a master's degree, built a career in healthcare, taught at the university level, wrote books, started a business, and rebuilt her life more times than she ever should have had to. I would see someone who has made mistakes, certainly, but who has also spent her life trying to help other people. I would see someone who continues to create, continues to learn, and continues to hope, even after disappointment.
Watching Elle this weekend reminded me that some people try to make others so uncomfortable that they leave. Looking back over my own life, I realized how many times I have done exactly that. I have moved from state to state and city to city, believing that a fresh start might finally bring peace. Sometimes moving was the healthiest decision I could make, but it also meant I spent much of my life focused on escaping pain instead of recognizing the resilience it took to begin each time again.
Maybe that is what today's gratitude practice has really been trying to teach me.
Being grateful for myself doesn't mean pretending difficult things never happened. It doesn't mean ignoring the people who hurt me or rewriting my past into something it wasn't. It means refusing to let those experiences become the only lens through which I see myself. It means recognizing that just as I can appreciate the goodness, resilience, and accomplishments of someone I admire, I should be willing to acknowledge those things in myself as well.
I have spent a lifetime seeing the best in other people. Maybe it is finally time to see it in myself.
Inspired by The Magic by Rhonda Byrne, this gratitude practice has been adapted into a self-paced 28 Days of Gratitude course for readers who want a simple structure without pressure. An optional guided journal, Bragging About You, is available for deeper reflection.
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