This year, trade in your victim card for the super powers of gratitude and appreciation!
Day One of 2025...the future awaits, moment by moment. What will you do with it?
Welcome to Wisdom Wednesdays! Each midweek, look for inspiration, hard truths, perseverance, and even joy — in the face of all that life throws our way, because we are here to learn lessons as much as anything else.
Wednesday, January 1st, 2025
“Gratitude and appreciation are super powers. They can change our outlook on anything and everything in a heartbeat, without the participation or agreement of any other natural force on Earth, including other people.
And yet, how often do we use these great life skills? In our own lives, for our own benefit, and as parents, being upfront and speaking openly as we model their use in front of our children? Or with our friends, when they are feeling down and despondent?”
That is the start to my January 2025 article coming to you soon, at The Vashon Loop.
Don’t miss it, or my December 2024 article, at their website. There is no paywall.
January Article Coming Soon — New Year's Resolutions Depend Upon Gratitude, Appreciation, and Attitude
In addition to the upcoming article above, let me propose a truth. To truly appreciate something, we must first experience life without it. No, this is not hyperbole.
We cannot fully appreciate the comfort of a soft blanket and clean clothes in a warm room beside a roaring fire with a full belly — if we have not, at least once, experienced the opposite. We can appreciate it to a degree, of course, but there is a difference between imagining how it would feel to walk in another’s shoes, and actually doing it.
Yes, we can all imagine experiencing a famine, starving for weeks like the blizzard-entrapped Donner Party, or wasting away on a ship caught up in the doldrums of the Pacific Ocean. And we’ll do a semi-good job at that imagining, as we all know food tastes better when one is intensely hungry and nothing is better than a long drink of cool water when one is overheated and terribly thirsty. But, can our hunger after missing a meal or two truly compare to weeks without sustenance, and the churning emptiness that causes a person to eat their shoe leather?
Those who have experienced such lack and want? Well now, they probably spend the rest of their lives with a particular sense of gratitude and appreciation for food and water than the rest of us can barely comprehend.
So! Am I saying that people raised in America with most of their basic needs met over the years are incapable of appreciation and gratitude? Not at all! Our planet, and humanity, provide many opportunities for suffering. To encounter all of them is a literal impossibility, so no. Hear me loud and clear! I am not shaming those who have never been homeless, never stared into an empty pantry, and never shivered through the night (even though, I have done all three). Quite the opposite, in fact.
I am challenging those who have become twisted by martyrdom thinking, victim celebrating, success-shaming, etc. Let me be clear. The goal of suffering is not to shift blame to others in an effort to force others to make up for our unfortunate situation, whether by our own hand or pure accident.
In short, there should be no “power seeking” in victimhood. Rather, suffering is an invitation to an expanded world view, including a greater capacity for gratitude and appreciation. Suffering can also be a catalyst, an inspiration, a reason, and a motivation! Dig yourself out of that hole, by all means!
But, we wary how you do so and what you lose in the process, if you choose a poor pathway forward.
The worst thing about all of the divisive minority groups (in America, at least) is that they are all quite obviously power-seeking. This isn’t bad, in and of itself, but there are two problems found within the Americana version of a “victimhood” route to power.
First — they disguise their own otherwise blatant power-seeking by casting aspersions upon the power-seeking behaviors of their chosen enemies, deriding the pattern of behavior which led to their positions of prominence and success while, at the same time, envying and employing a strategic form of power-seeking behavior themselves.
Second — every single group that leans into “victimhood” as a route to power, abuses the very people it espouses to protect, defend and lift up.
As one of many examples, the abuse of children who are victims of gun violence, and their families, by so-called “anti-gun-violence” advocates is nauseating to witness. Their suffering has so much value, as a weapon or a method of gaining power and influence, that the families enjoy no closure, the communities are intentionally riled up and made to suffer more than is natural, the media keeps the painful narrative alive, and along the way, any and all healing, blessings, new friendships formed, lessons learned, and strengths forged are utterly ignored and discouraged.
All because victimhood advocacy groups are rooted in the “pity party” as a source of power-seeking. For the sake of their power-seeking goals, you must suffer as a martyr forever. How awful! Indeed, how contrary to the healthy, beautiful, empowering, and joyful adventure of learning from life and choosing to experience, seek, find, and live in a place of gratitude and appreciation?
All humans suffer in myriad ways, and competing against one another (or trapping people in what should be a temporary state of suffering) in pursuit of the “who has suffered most” trophy is more than a waste of time. It’s an invitation to miss the great super powers of gratitude and appreciation, in exchange for a weaponized status symbol of victim purity.
Setting aside that twisted dynamic, I invite you to ask yourself a valuable question at the start of your New Year: “Do you use personal moments of struggle and strife to fuel your super powers of gratitude and appreciation?” And if so, is it…
On purpose?
Mindful?
A regular practice?
On the daily?
Many of us do this some of the time. What if we could do it more?
Like you — I am concerned about the whirlwind of public commentary lashing its way through the world of social media.
Like you — I find it very disturbing, the number of people publicly publishing (for endless consumption) the absolute opposite of gratitude and appreciation.
Like you — I’m appalled by the truly toxic content being put forth by people with little to no forethought about the effect they are having on others. What will their flippantly typed out rage and despair do to the handful, dozens, hundreds, or potentially thousands of people who may be listening and reading, consuming and absorbing, mimicking and sharing forward?
And — I speak to this from the perspective of a woman newly freed from a long relationship where gratitude and appreciation were almost entirely absent.
I should say, absent from the other side.
For me, and this is what I’m trying to share with all of you and your friends, family and acquaintances (whom I hope you’ll share this with) — I’ve lived, surrounded by crushing darkness and volatility. Along the way, I honed my skills of self-preservation, foremost of which was my ability to shield and protect my own, never-quenched, internal brightness.
And, I did so with the super powers of Gratitude & Appreciation.
If you’re like to further explore the roots and flaws of the victimhood stratagem, check out the 2019 Anthem Film Festival Winners HERE. #VictorNotVictim