10 Unusual Items of Gratitude for May
Storytelling, work, and vicarious pleasure in music, among others.
As I wrote in my last blog post, May can be a rough month for me, but I’m finding joy and relative peace in some practices that are new or recently unfamiliar to me. So, here are 10 things, in no particular order, that are helping me keep my head up among everything happening in the world.
1. Performing
I come (more) alive when I sing or speak in public, whether it’s singing, storytelling, or radio DJing. This month I did my first open mic, karaoke, and storytelling events in what feels like a very long time—at least two of those categories were off limits with the pandemic for a good couple of years.
Karaoke with friends was very fun, and I even sang with a version of the strange teen pop song that inspired my spiritual recovery work (I heard it as about some kind of Higher Power in the universe). The open mic was a queer-focused (G. L. O. W.: Gay, Lesbian, Or Whatever) event at a sober tea bar in Chicago, and though most of the event was stand-up comedy, I had so much fun playing my song about my autism, “Some People Say,” featured in my TEDx talk. The crowd hollered when it was done, and I couldn’t have been happier to be back on a stage playing that song.
The biggest event to prepare for, however, was my third storytelling show ever—and my first since 2019. All have been with live events for stories for You’re Being Ridiculous in Chicago, as its founder didn’t want to do Zoom storytelling. This past Thursday, May 26, I recited a memorized story at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago that will hopefully be available online soon in a podcast.
The story was about one of the most healing days of my life, when I attended my first ever social event in my hometown, where I had grown up without friends, and it was a concert when I was 25. Performing that for a crowd at one of the most important theatre venues in the U.S. for a sold-out crowd in one of its more intimate theaters—it was a dream come true.
I’ve missed performing, and the response I got was beautiful. People came up to me afterwards, including people living in my hometown, and told me how much my story touched them. I had a metaphorical blast at that show.
I also gave a workshop on incorporating pop culture into personal writing for a Chicago-based storytelling company this month on Zoom, so despite my admitted lack of experience in some areas of workshopping, it was so much fun, and the response was very warm and receptive.
Both storytelling events made me curious about The Moth and other storytelling venues. I enjoyed sharing the stages with Moth regulars and champions like Lily Be and Nestor Gomez. I really hope to do more storytelling of different kinds for audiences soon.
2. My state’s success in a national communications contest
This year I chaired the High School Communications Contest for the Illinois Woman’s Press Association, and it was quite the effort to promote the contest, coordinate judges, and plan the upcoming awards ceremony. We had students from eight schools submit entries, and each First Place winner went on to compete in the communications contest of our parent organization, the National Federation of Press Women. Measured against the best of other states’ submitted work, in the national contest, Illinois students won First Place in FIVE of the twenty-three categories. The Illinois winners at the national level are listed here in a blog I wrote.
In a previous blog entry, I wrote about how much it meant to me to call myself a professional communicator and to chair the Illinois contest. These contests get more competitive every year, and the students’ work more than met the challenges of the current climate, including with the pandemic. It has been a joy to watch high school student communicators tackle all kinds of school, personal, and larger social issues with poised writing, design, and video work, and I am very proud of the work these students did this past year to further the communications fields. These students are going places with their work, and it’s an honor to witness their success.
3. Abstinence from sweets
On April 22, I ate what I hope will be my last dessert. I recognized I couldn’t ever get enough of sweets—like one dessert or other sugary food was too many and a thousand was never enough—and I cut off sweets that day. I felt like my body was reacting very uncomfortably for the next day or two, but I’ve managed to stay away from sugar for over a month now and I am enjoying a smaller gut, fewer headaches, and better sleep. I’ve consumed a couple things that I didn’t realize would be as sweet (e.g., with sauces with some sugar), but as those weren’t intentional, I’m not counting them as breaking my abstinence from sweets. I hope to keep this abstinence up indefinitely, though I will very likely need support.
I am very excited to be moving forward. I have about ten pounds since I quit sugar over a month ago; I already walk a lot, but my sugar consumption got in the way of a healthier weight for a long time. My next steps are to keep working on abstaining from sweets, with exercise, and to seek support to help me stay that way.
4. Country drinking and party songs
I don’t drink by choice, but I can sure appreciate a good-time country song. My good times these days usually involve quiet days at coffeeshops writing, but I love me some nighttime party music. I live in a “gayborhood,” where there are plenty of bars—I just don’t like to drink or dance. So, the closest I get is blasting country party songs in my headphones: Thomas Rhett featuring Rhett Akins’s “Drink a Little Beer,” Cole Swindell’s recent “She Had Me at Heads Carolina” (based off the Jo Dee Messina 1996 country classic, “Heads Carolina, Tails California”), and Ty Herndon’s “That Kind of Night” make me smile and maybe get a vicarious thrill, or at least feel like I’m soaring with the songs.
I can feel very isolated in a pandemic, and earworm choruses and communal singalongs on a song can make me feel like I’m vicariously part of a different community. Maybe I’ll sing a country song at a gay bar’s karaoke night sometime, but I’m not sure if it would be a drinking song. Either way, I can still appreciate most of the feeling in a song that goes, “Drink a little beer, play a little music/ Have a big time tonight.”
I should note that the Indigo Girls’ single from a couple years ago, “Country Radio,” shows the other side of this dynamic, as they sing about “a gay kid from a small town who loves country radio” who gets to feel in love and enjoy party songs, but in a very limited way, I can relate to that sometimes: I live in a gayborhood, but not going to bars and staying in my apartment and at coffeeshops wearing headphones can make the pandemic isolation feel still strong. Like the Indigo Girls’ character, maybe I’m using these songs to “party” in my head, while living in a very different context, but it works in the moment.
5. Country songs about fatherhood
I have no interest in becoming a dad—at this point. I also never had any interest in getting a graduate degree in English, but here we are—I earned one in 2016—so I won’t rule out the possibility entirely. Nevertheless, the idea of responsibility for another human being, adopted or otherwise, does not appeal to me. Nonetheless, recently I’ve been especially moved by multiple country songs about fatherhood.
Brad Paisley’s “He Didn’t Have to Be” from 1999 was the first. I don’t think any ‘90s country song ever made me cry that hard on first listen—no disrespect to Garth Brooks’s “The Dance” (though technically that was released on album in 1989) or Vince Gill’s “Go Rest High on That Mountain”—even though Paisley’s song is emphatically not my story. By the end of the first chorus, I had lost it. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, but suffice it to say, that scholar Nadine Hubbs calling this song a “potent tearjerker” is a very apt description indeed. And the way Paisley sings the song doesn’t sound sentimental to me at all—it’s easy to not pay attention to the lyrics, but then you’ll miss one of the best story songs I’ve ever heard.
Elvie Shane’s 2020 song, “My Boy,” is another that “hit me like a train,” as the song says. I heard of it on Twitter from a stepparent, who also had mentioned another country song I love, Kenny Chesney’s “There Goes My Life” as the best song ever about parenting. Conway Twitty’s classic “That’s My Job” is another tearjerker about a great father, and the way Twitty sings it knocks me out with its level of feeling.
These are all stunning songs and records that knocked me out when I listened to them. Several of them fall into the category of what Hubbs calls the “Three-Verse Life Cycle Song” as a working-class tradition, and there are others that I haven’t been listening to as much, including George Strait’s “Love Without End, Amen,” that could fit this topic and description as well.
6. Essay milestones
I’ve never been paid for my writing for online publications, excepting paid subscribers to this blog, so it comes as a welcome surprise that I am getting paid for an essay that I am writing and finishing a draft of it within the next week. The piece is about a folk music cover of a classic Bob Dylan tune and how it reflects my experience in the pandemic and has provided me with comfort. The essay is a personal piece that involves reflection, bitterness, irony, and gratitude, and I look forward to it coming out hopefully soon.
This fall, I am supposed to see my first peer reviewed journal article come out. It’s a substantial revision of an essay I got published last year about James Baldwin and American music at PopMatters. I am also scheduled to present at the paper at a pop culture conference in October.
7. Clarity around dating and rejection
In April, I had the best first date I’ve ever had. There was a real, vulnerable connection between me and a guy; we talked for nearly two hours, and I felt heard and understood. The guy told me this month that he’s not ready to date. I didn’t feel outright rejected; I was mildly disappointed, but grateful for the clarity.
I’m becoming more accepting of being turned down in different areas of my life. Maybe I’m used to it, but I’m grateful when I get accepted for something. It may be a good thing that I don’t expect acceptance and affirmation for everything, though I suppose rejection and poor treatment aren’t the same as far as the opposite goes. Still, I am grateful that I am learning greater acceptance of the occurrence of things I don’t want to happen. I don’t believe “everything happens for a reason”—or at least a good or godly reason—but I do feel that I’m learning to treat such events as lessons, rather than as mistakes.
8. Writing morning pages
In the perennially popular book The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, Julia Cameron writes about the practice of morning pages as a way of liberating and unblocking one’s creative self. I haven’t completed the entire book and its course of activities, but I’ve heard glowing remarks about it from multiple friends who are writers and artists. I wanted to call them “multiple creative friends,” but one of Cameron’s biggest points is that we are all creative, capable of generating creative work.
One of the biggest points of resistance for me, however, in reading and using the book is around what are called the morning pages, which are what Cameron calls “an apparently pointless process . . . three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness.” It was a point of resistance in trying morning pages because I don’t know how to get my brain to shut up and just write—without worrying about how it sounds, looks, and reads on the page.
In the last couple weeks, I’ve written three pages by hand, almost daily. The morning pages are an exercise in letting go of my filters, and to be fair, though Cameron says there isn’t a wrong way to do them, I may be doing them in a less than ideal way: I don’t do them first thing when I wake up. At the very least, I usually eat breakfast and shower, rather than ignoring my hunger and writing about it for three pages, but nonetheless, it is still helping me significantly to get out my frustrations, fears, secrets, disappointments, resentments, achievements, items of gratitude, or anything else, and it helps me to get out all the junk in my brain on the page. I sometimes have trouble writing without stopping—my writing hand gets cramped and sometimes I stop to think—but I’m getting better at just writing without thinking (so much).
In the past, I couldn’t write more than a page of morning pages because I treated it more as a diary, with plenty of stopping to think, and it was taking too much damn time. I am grateful for the opportunity to let go of my perfectionism—imperfectly—and to work on writing, just writing, every day. I enjoy writing, but I’m not used to writing with no clear outcome in mind, like an essay or article. Writing morning pages has helped me let go of holding on to the outcome for the time being.
9. Consistent summer work in higher education
I’ve worked at colleges and universities for years, but this summer is the first one where I’ve worked at a university for consistent work for the whole summer—not just during the significantly condensed summer semester. I am excited to be creating workshops to give different tools for success in writing and reading to students. Getting students to come to the workshops on Zoom is a challenge, but so far, they are still successful, even if very few students show up.
10. A successful semester despite hiccups
And lastly, I wrapped up a successful, though rough, semester working in multiple schools. I finished my second semester as an embedded tutor, like a teaching assistant, in an ESL (English as a Second Language) class with the same professor at one of the schools where I’ve worked. I worked hard to help students without doing work for them, in and out of the classroom. This semester I had students with unique challenges, but they passed with my help. I am excited to continue this role this summer and maybe beyond.
This semester I also came back to a school and an office from which I was laid off in 2017. I returned in a different position, as a Faculty Coach, primarily coaching students in writing, though I also help with study habits, reading, and other relevant skills. I’ve really enjoyed and am grateful to be back working at this organization.
Thanks for sharing Josh! My wife has been doing morning pages for a few years now. I am jealous of her bookshelf of notebooks. I started a 5-year journal last year and enjoy reaping the benefits this year of reading my entries from last year.