Cliché gratitude

 

High: I saw Moana 2! (it was lowkey mid though)
Low: The amount of tests and quizzes I have to take this week…

A couple of weeks ago, right before Thanksgiving break, we had Friendsgiving in my 2nd hour, colorguard. Although I ate lots of good food, that’s not very important. What’s more important is something more simple that actually caught my attention. That day, we all went in a circle and expressed what we were most grateful for. For the first time in my 17 years on Earth, I actually thought about this question. What am I actually grateful for? Obviously during Friendsgiving, I said something along the lines of, “friends, family, blah blah blah.” But, since I’m a senior and also becoming an adult soon, there’s a lot more I realized I’m grateful for that I have mostly taken for granted much of my life.

I’m grateful that my biggest problem today was whether I should make myself a second cup of coffee or just reheat the cup of coffee I’ve been sipping for the past hour. I’m grateful that I never have to worry about where my next meal comes from, and instead, I can run to my pantry every 30 minutes to get myself “a little sweet treat.”

I’m grateful that I’m lucky enough to have access to Wi-Fi everywhere, which means I can spend hours on TikTok instead of, I don’t know, reading my SBC novel? I’m grateful for the endless choices I have—like choosing between doomscrolling for another few hours or finding a new show to hyper-fixate on.

I’m also grateful for being able to explore so many extracurriculars. Will I show you my google calendar and complain incessantly about my schedule everyday? Yes. Will I be ecstatic that I get the chance to explore my passions and collaborate with other people everyday? Also yes. These little add-ons I’ve gained throughout high school, like forensics and dance, were initially just for my resume but have ended up shaping so much of who I am. It’s hard not to feel thankful when I think about how many resources I actually get access to.

Most of all, I’m grateful that my life is full of such first-world problems, like whether I should switch from iced coffee to hot coffee for winter mornings. (Can you tell I like coffee?) As cliché as this blog post is, with everything going on in the world at this time, just watching the news everyday reminds me how incredibly privileged I am to even have time to worry about such mundane, trivial choices. It’s insane, really, how I can spend 20 minutes deciding whether I should upgrade my phone when there are people out there who don’t even have a phone, or if they do, they’re praying it holds up for another day so they can ask the world for help from their terrible living conditions. If you know me, you probably knew I would’ve taken this route and started talking about current world issues but, it’s beyond just that. Really, I’m grateful that I don’t have to worry about going to bed and not waking up the next morning because for lots of people, that is what they have to worry about.


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