Dammit, It’s Hard to Be Grateful Sometimes

I live in what is considered by many to be one of the most romantic countries in the world: France. I live in a city characterized by half-timbered homes, cobblestone streets, and gorgeous canals. All of which are presided over, naturally, by an enormous Cathedral that glows such an ethereal, hazy orange at sunset that for just a moment, I too believe in God.

And yet. Strasbourg is a lovely city that I do genuinely prefer to the swept-away rush of Paris, but I don’t feel myself sparking here the way I did in other places in the world. The problem isn’t that I know where I need to go, the problem is that I know how it feels to feel fully present in one place, paradoxically grounded in an existence rendered happy purely by chance. It’s a beautiful feeling that, much like falling in love, we don’t really have control over.

Before coming here, part of the problem was that I needed a place to just touch down, a place where I could stop flapping like a duck in a bad headwind for a little while. I have that place now. It’s a quaint one-bedroom flat with an interior decor that testifies to compromise as the foundation for successful cohabitation. I have my very own writer’s desk tucked into the corner of our kitchen and I feel the way “real” writers always describe the sense of wholeness they get when they sit down in their work space. 

So many things are objectively going well right now, and in my hyper-analytical mind, that’s the problem.

I feel urgently that things could be—should be—going better than they are. I know it’s irrational in the same way I know if I get lazy and don’t wash my hair for two days, it’s going to be greasy and unsalvageable on day three. The thing about mental health is that it’s completely possible to comprehend the technicalities of your relative fineness while still feeling like you need to scream into a pillow at the most inopportune times of the day. This unfair coexistence has been my daily reality, for likely no other reason than today was the first time in recent memory I can remember seeing the sun. Perhaps that’s why, today, I finally feel moved to write in my preferred style, one that I liken to an inhale followed by a long, extended exhale.

I’ve posted a lot recently about encouraging people to get out of their comfort zone and travel, to challenge themselves and realize that there’s more to their mettle than they thought. I stand by those posts, but I also am acutely aware, in trying to build my space in the blogging world and advance my professional writing career, of how easy it is to slip into the liminal space that exists between my eyeballs and the computer screen and pretend that everything is hunky dory, all the time.

The truth is, one of the hardest things about choosing to live outside my home country is the obligation I feel to be grateful for everything, all the time.

I am doing something that millions of people around the world don’t get to do, and everything is expedited and simplified in ways I’ll never fully appreciate because I have the good fortune to hold a powerful passport. The dualities of the world’s unfairness are all around us, and this is an awareness that living abroad and travel in general heighten exponentially. But there is another, more nuanced difficulty. And that is the difficulty in doling out my ungratefulness.

Living far away from my closest friends and family, I find it exceedingly difficult to reach out to them when something is amiss. It sort of ruins the rhythm of a routine check-in if you break script and launch into a full-scale, multi-paragraph meltdown. And anyway, they won’t say anything that I don’t already know, that I haven’t worked out for myself already in my journals. The issue, when I think about it, when I silently walk over to the wonderful human I cohabitate with and lean my forehead against his chest, isn’t that I need someone to talk to so much as I need to learn to locate the hole in my self-perception and repair it. But how?

Until I figure that out, I have to conclude that sometimes, I just have to be okay with being pissy about my own morose ungratefulness. I guess what this post is really about is giving myself permission to just be acutely “meh” sometimes and hoping that other people will read this and give themselves permission to be so, too.