Thanksgiving Thoughts: Gratitude amidst Horrors
Why 2022 has been kinda great for me, all things considered.
I’m ambivalent about Thanksgiving. As a holiday, it is an atrocious whitewashing of history, but as a time for my family to get together, it is comforting and useful. For Indigenous Americans, it is a National Day of Mourning, so I admit that my privilege as white can preclude my participation today in doing anything about decolonization and giving U.S. land back to its rightful owners.
That said, I have had some good memories of Thanksgiving. I do take it as an opportunity for gratitude, as it is often constructed. I remember in 2018, going around the table at an extended family gathering, I said, “I’m grateful I made it to 30.” I had turned 30 that year, and I couldn’t forget how much progress I had made to a point where I was not only still alive, but also thriving.
Thanksgiving can be a good opportunity to reconnect with those who love me and those whom I love. Still, there are painful memories I have of Thanksgiving, too, like seeing my grandmother in pain a week before her death from pancreatic cancer in 2017. I miss her every day, but I’m grateful her death was not prolonged and that she’s no longer suffering.
So, while I recognize the problems in using this holiday as only a site of gratitude, I have been thinking about what’s made the last year noteworthy for me. There are sites of horror in the U.S., including mass shootings and the panic around, and banning of books about, marginalized cultures, especially the intersectional groups of people of color and LGBTQ people.
Still, part of me wants to “focus on the positive”—not ignoring what is happening in U.S. culture and around the world—the embodiment of what’s called toxic positivity—but rather centering what is worth celebrating. In that spirit, I wanted to write about what I’m grateful for in my life in 2022.