What. A. Year.

I was telling a friend recently that whenever I wind up at my parents house between tours, it always feels like time is frozen. This is kind of delightful for two to three weeks, and tolerable for a month or two with visits to friends and other family crammed in there too.

Currently, the time is frozen feeling is so very, very weird and I’m not loving it. I moved back in with my dad in July since my lease was up on my apartment and I was unemployed and while I’ve recently found my way back into the land of the employed, the time is frozen feeling is still 100% what things feel like this year.

And the depressing realization that time never really freezes and this is kind of time lost.

If I let myself look at it that way. Which, let’s be honest, too many some days I do.

But this hasn’t been an entirely bad year and one of the best things I did during it was take The Science of Well-Being course back when this horror started.

And from March-July I did a decent job of doing the things I learned in that course, and then… not so much. But in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I’m reviving the easiest and the one I found most effective – practicing gratitude.

The goal was to write down 5 things I was grateful for every day (it also taught us to try to savor something every day). Some days it was a stretch, but I really think it made a difference in how I thought about things when I was practicing this more.

So, here are some things I’m grateful for in 2020:

• I am healthy.
• My dad, brother, and future sister-in-law are all healthy.
• My dog is healthy (and adorable and insane).
• My best friends are all healthy and employed and their families are safe.
• I get to spend a lot of time with my dad (which I take for granted, but know if I actually succeed in buying a house someday, just being around each other so much won’t likely happen again).
• New Year’s Eve/day 2020 was actually a lot of fun.
• I got to go to England, Scotland and Brazil before this COVID hell took over.
• I got to spend a week in the woods with my closest cousin in September.
• I have found that Zoom game nights are actually a lot of fun.
• I worked on a two theatre productions with some friends from college that I never would’ve been able to do in normal circumstances.
• I got to work with a friend who lives in another country on one of those productions – another thing that probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise (except maybe we just would’ve been working together at our other job in some foreign country if there was no COVID… ugh… disregard this addendum).
• I’m grateful for the people I got to meet working on those two productions who I likely never would’ve met otherwise.
• I got my actual dream job since I was 19 in January.
• I got to live not far from the beach for a while.
• I got to get coffee regularly with two friends from college when we all worked together for a hot second from January-March.
• I learned that I really love teaching stage management.
• I learned that I really don’t love teaching anything else.
• I’m grateful I got to meet the students in the theater department where I was teaching because they were a pretty awesome little group and they gave me a lot of hope for the future.
• I managed to put together a whole alumni event series at my university and it was really cool and a lot of fun.
• There was a lot of kayaking this summer.
• I managed to find a job that uses a bunch of my stage management skills in the corporate world that pays well enough and assuming nothing happens to the job, I will be fine until theaters reopen.
• I am financially stable.
• I actually get to work as a stagehand once in a while at one of the theaters near me, since they are letting us do maintenance and when the weather was nicer, they were doing outdoor shows.
• This crazy little blog continues to chug along.
• There have been so many free webinars and courses to do.
• It feels like there is more time than there has been in years.
• I’m grateful for the internet because I have no idea how those folks did the Spanish Flu without it.
• I’m grateful for Ticket to Ride, the numerous map options in the app, and a best friend who is as obsessed with it as I am, as well as another friend who is sometimes willing to play too.
• I’m grateful for the opportunity to catch up with some many friends this year online – especially so many friends from old shows where there was usually no way all our schedules would be free but for a while there this spring, they 100% were, so we were able to do a bunch of mini-reunions.
• I’m grateful for good books.
• I’m grateful I’ve learned to appreciate the little things a little better.

So, while this year is largely garbage… not everything is. I very much hope that by Thanksgiving 2021, life is back to normal and it doesn’t feel like such a monumental mountain to climb to find things I’m grateful for.

But that is actually a lot up there to be thankful for.

I hope you have a few things too. Feel free to leave them in the comments! We can all use a little more positivity and happiness, I think.

And, for my American readers, Happy Thanksgiving!