Today I’m grateful for an awesome start to my day, damnit.

11.1.2023

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I wasn’t going to do this. I’d resigned myself to taking a year’s hiatus on my November daily gratitude posts. I’ve honestly been stewing over this the past couple of days, knowing that November was about to begin, and I decided 2023 was a no-go. I had a lot of reasons. None of them were especially good reasons, but I had a lot of them.

So when I woke up today and still had this whole journaling thing on my mind, I had to reconvince myself that this was a bad idea. This morning’s justifications: it takes too much time, nobody really cares if I’m grateful for something or not, and my favorite of them all … I probably can’t even come up with 30 new things to be grateful for this month. Now the first two are probably pretty true, but let’s be real … that third reason was a total cop-out.

But it worked. I got out of bed convinced that today was going to be a rough day with nothing to be grateful for. I mean, Halloween Hangover Day in Kindergarten is definitely not one I look forward to, so I might as well just accept that today was going to bite. No gratitude for this girl.

Then I did WORDLE. And I solved it in 2 tries. I was pretty pumped, until I remembered that today was going to be a bad day. Oops. Nothing to be grateful for here. Nope.

I got ready for work and decided that a Starbucks stop was in order. An extra caffeine boost might help me face the inevitable sugar-high/sugar-crash rollercoaster ride that would likely be happening in my classroom today. Yes, Starbucks was a must. And, guess what…to my surprise, I had earned enough stars that my drink was free.

As I was driving down the road on my way to work, sipping my free iced latte with my windows open, I almost, just for a minute, forgot that today was going to be a bad day. In this momentary lapse, I decided that I needed some driving music, so I told my phone to play a Christmas playlist on random. Now don’t come at me on this … I know Christmas music before Thanksgiving is kinda controversial, but I’ve literally been fighting off the urge to listen to Christmas music and put up my tree for 2 months now, and I just couldn’t hold out anymore.

The first song that played was Tracy Chapman’s version of Oh Holy Night. It’s one of my all-time favorites. And before I knew it, I was singing along. Loudly. Then came Pentatonix’s Oh Come All Ye Faithful and I found myself in a full-on car concert. As I was jamming out (and yes, the windows were still open), I couldn’t help but laugh at myself, realizing that my ‘nothing to be grateful for’ claim had lasted a measly 1 hour and 15 minutes. I mean, between WORDLE and free Starbucks and now two back-to-back favorites on my random Christmas playlist, it was actually shaping up to be a pretty awesome start to the day. This was not my plan. Damnit.

Now, my day wasn’t perfect by any means. Far from it. But I did successfully shake my bad attitude and found plenty of things to be grateful for throughout the day. I mean, who was I really kidding anyway– declaring a day to be a bad one before it had even begun, and convincing myself that there would be not a single blessing to be had?? That’s not really how I roll. And so, by the time I got home tonight, I knew I was all in. #30daysofthankfulness, here I come. I really didn’t intend to do this, but here I am anyway, and I’m pretty sure I’m excited about it too.