thank you notes 8/18

i'm thankful that yesterday at work i did two complicated things that i had been afraid of trying to do up until now and they both went (relatively) well. i'm thankful not to be afraid of those things so much anymore and thankful that i'm going to try another difficult thing today. i'm thankful that though a difficult ticket was kicking my ass at the end of the day, i was mostly able to let it go when i left work and am thankful to start fresh on it today. i'm thankful that a new employee is shadowing me today and thankful that i have tried and will continue to try to make him feel comfortable and welcomed and let him know that it's okay to not know everything all the time and that this is a hard job. i'm thankful for another coworker who asked, because i "clearly have good taste," where i buy my eyeglasses. i'm thankful for our commiseration about the terrible campus optometry clinic.

i'm thankful for this essay about anxiety and breathing. i'm thankful, especially, for the part about how "managing something is different than treating it" and about how the author made her life smaller and smaller to try to avoid or prevent her anxiety until she realized she was "on the verge of shrinking [her] life down so small that pretty soon there might not be room left for [her] in it anymore." i'm thankful to have felt that same thing, that by removing everything from my life to manage anxiety, i was closing off the world and getting rid of things that might cause anxiety but might also give me feelings of connection and satisfaction and joy. i'm thankful to feel that my life has become bigger again and thankful to be expressing this in writing, which i stopped doing for years and thought i might have to stop doing for the rest of my life. i'm thankful, even though it was painful to not be able to do it for so long, that its long absence and the scars that left have made me grateful for my current practice. i'm thankful to think of writing as that, as practice, both in the yoga class sense of the word and in the sense that essay in french means "to try."

i'm thankful for tender points by amy berkowitz, which i thought was going to be a certain kind of book but then was a different kind of book in a way that i really appreciated. i'm thankful to think of rob zombie having a peanut allergy, which makes me laugh too. i'm thankful for the most recent of montreal album, innocence reaches, which i really like even if i understand and don't necessarily disagree with the critiques here. i'm thankful to have gotten to go to several of their shows when i was in college and to have been blown away. i'm thankful for cherry peel, which was the first of the albums that i loved and which has so many great silly garage love songs (i'm thankful for this feeling, for when you're loved like you are). i'm thankful last night to have walked into the darkened living room where d was sitting at her computer and to have sung her an improvised parody of "the sound of silence" about this situation.

i'm thankful to feel excitement for the fall to come—i'm thankful to have always thought of myself as a summer lover and thankful for the lovely things about summer, but i'm thankful that i also enjoy the cold now. i'm thankful that winter was one of the things that made me apprehensive about moving here but am thankful that now i love it. i'm thankful that even if we think we know ourselves, we can't always predict how our feelings about things will change over time, influenced by our experiences. i'm thankful for that, since a perfectly predictable life might be comfortable but would lack in richness. i'm thankful for mr. rogers drawing a house poorly but that not mattering.