thank you notes 8/24

i'm thankful for the way that my coworker got choked up when he told me that another coworker's brother had died unexpectedly. i'm thankful that my coworker is such an empathetic person, because I know that kind of empathy, which I don't generally have and can only pretend at, is meaningful and powerful. i'm thankful to hope that i mirrored his emotions well enough that he doesn't think i am a psychopath. i'm thankful that he is watching the other coworker's dog this week while the other coworker is out of town for the funeral and to be with his family. i'm thankful for the other coworker, who is such a nice and fun person to be around and am thankful to hope that having to suffer such a difficult loss doesn't dim his spirit forever. i'm thankful that my brother is not dead and that though he doesn't live the healthiest of lives, am thankful to hope that he will live a long time. i'm thankful to hope that he is still not smoking cigarettes.

i'm thankful to remember the OCD prayers that i said before bed from the age of 14/15 until a year or two after college. i'm thankful for the string of commands that developed over time, as i prayed over and over again that the people in my family would be "happy, healthy, safe, alive, and unhurt." i'm thankful for the legalistic ass-covering of this combination (is it good enough for them to be happy if they have a traumatic brain injury? good enough to be healthy if my parents are angry with each other and might divorce? good enough to be happy and healthy if they are being held hostage by a criminal (i.e. not safe), good enough to be technically happy, healthy, and safe but not alive (since a dead person, depending on your view of the afterlife, could be described as all those things), good enough to be all of those things, but not unhurt (i.e. a bad thing had happened to you but you had recovered, but you had had to recover from the bad thing in order to then recover). i'm thankful for the legalistic magical thinking of all of this, as well as the dim view of the benevolence of a higher power that it evinces. i'm thankful that i am less obsessive and compulsive than when i was younger.

i'm thankful that we watched the season premiere of the walking dead, which made d very sad. i'm thankful for d's capacity for sadness, which i find very beautiful. i'm thankful to have given her my t-shirt, which i had taken off because i was warmer than expected, to use to wipe off her copious tears. i'm thankful that the show did not make me sad, i think, because it was, even more than usual, purely relentlessly grim, in a way that i found manipulative and offensive. i'm thankful to know that catharsis is historically one of the most important functions of art, but also to know that i don't like art where the sole purpose/emotional register seems to be to make me feel shitty about the world, which i don't find particularly cathartic. i'm thankful that is especially clear for fictional shows set in vague post-apocalyptic futures: i'm thankful to grant that art that makes us feel shitty about the particular shittness of the world today can be valuable, as can art that extrapolates that shittiness into a hypothetical future dystopia (which black mirror can do sometimes, though not all the time), but am thankful to realize that the walking dead's season premiere did neither of these things and in sum did very little besides make me feel detached and irritated. i'm thankful that after the episode to have helped d feel better by watching a web series about social media eating.

i'm thankful to have gotten through a difficult monday. i'm thankful that my manager scheduled a check-in meeting with me for yesterday afternoon and am thankful that she lives locally (though outside of town) so that we could both come into the office and have it in person. i'm thankful, since i love praise, that she praised my work ethic and how quickly i've gotten up to speed. i'm thankful, when she praised the custom apps that i made to help our team be more efficient, that i said that i love making them and would love to work on more, but had only been able to do so by working on them at nights and on weekends, which i felt was bad for me and which i didn't want to do anymore. i'm thankful, even though my tendency in a meeting like this is always to be positive and downplay problems, to have been directly and repeatedly honest about how totally stressed out and overwhelmed i feel all the time and how totally stressed out and overwhelmed i think everyone else on our team feels all the time. 

i'm thankful to hope that this sunk in for her in a way that maybe it hasn't otherwise, because at times she seems somewhat detached from our daily struggles and like she doesn't totally get how totally burned out we all are, but i'm thankful that even if it didn't sink in, i was still honest about it, even though that was difficult, since i would feel two-faced and like i hadn't done anything to try to make things change if i wasn't honest about those things with her, if i pretended that it was okay when it isn't at all. i'm thankful that the coworker with whom i have the closest friendship is back this week and am thankful for the stream of dms we send each other to help get through the day. i'm thankful that i got through the day yesterday and that i know that i will get through it today, too. i'm thankful that i am dreading it, thinking of it, but am thankful to know that all i can do is my best and i can't let myself feel bad for not doing more than that. i'm thankful to know that i always do my best and am thankful that i can be proud of that.