Gratitude

hi there everyone (I started this yesterday and got a little bit in to writing but had to go and now I’m back finishing up to post it )


it’s been a long time since I’ve been on the site. Mostly it’s because I’ve been really struggling. A lot has been happening over the last few months and I’ve gone through several stages of struggling to manage it all, struggling in evolving ways... I also had some ups and some stages of feeling strong and positive. Anyway where I am right now is that I’m really needing a way to pull myself back into positivity, so I’ve decided what i probably need is to refresh my sense of gratitude. I literally *just* had this thought about 20 min ago, and I decided to share with you all.

Instead of giving a lengthy background, I’ll use the exercise of gratitude to sort of explain the background as I go along.

If anybody wants to try this out with their stuff please do, it will give me a chance to catch up with you guys all too .


1/ I’m grateful for my daughter, grateful she has such a great bond with her dad. And grateful that I have as many opportunities as I want to be present and focused and energised with her.

I have had some struggle being present lately. And I feel it in my daughter’s behaviour and in the way I feel around her and in the way our relationship feels right now. It has been hard to be present because I’ve been dealing with so many difficult emotions, but I’m recognising right now just how lucky I am that we have this open playing field to do whatever we want, to play together, make things together, giggle together. I’m going to spend as much time as I can making her giggle today. That’s my goal today.

2/ I’m grateful that I’ve broken up with my most current girlfriend, let’s call her A, and that we had a really wonderful supportive loving fun silly and amazingly good sexual relationship.

The reason I’m grateful that we broke up, it’s the right decision for one thing. She’s such a wonderful person and she treated me so wonderfully. But we just aren’t right for each other in ways that matter to both of us deeply so breaking up means we have the opportunity to move forward and find different things for our life paths. In terms of the breakup with her, I’m not struggling, I’m actually already looking forward to seeing where my life takes me next. I have no idea what I’m looking for with women right now, I just want to date and see where my instincts take me. I’m kind of maybe developing a sort of small crush for someone, well it’s not that strong yet, it’s like a spark at the moment. She’s such a genuine lovely person, she’s strong and a bit unsure of certain things about herself and her sexuality, but everything about her makes her more endearing to me. Anyway, not sure if that’s going anywhere but...

I’m happy for this breakup as well because it refreshes my opportunity to look at what I want for my life for myself and my daughter, it gives me a chance to shake some stuff away that had been clouding my head and be more present with my daughter too.

3/ I’m grateful that I managed to escape my ex just before her, H, the person I was building a future with, living with and who turned out to be emotionally wbusuve and eventually kicked me and my daughter out of what I thought of as our home, but was clearly her home. I’m so so grateful that, as morevtime passes and I learn just what a cruel abusive person she is, that my daughter and I narrowly escaped so much worse from a life with her.

So this one has been really plaguing me lately. H has been continuing to throw abuse at us and it’s become infuriating. We were still in touch for a bit for practical stuff, and there were small things she was doing... but recently she has started again with worse things. It started because I told my coming out story at pride, and my colleague posted it on our work website, because it’s relevant to the organisation. In that story, 3 pages of loads of vulnerable stuff about me and my journey, and then one sentence where I very purposely made it quite vague, I also included and then I fell in love and they relationship become emotionally abusive and that partner made decisions in the end that destabilised my daughter. She was of course never named or identified in any way, this was just my life story.

H in response has gotten in touch with my boss at work, I think her goal was to get me fired, has posted on Facebook that I’ve “slandered” her, named me, and has been enlisting people to verbally harass and physically assault me. I don’t understand how she can be such an abusive monster, honestly.

I have been struggling with this one a lot, trying to work out what to do to feel safe and to get her out of my and my dsughter’s life. But also feeling lots of things I want to get out on paper. About being silent, about being mistreated after giving so much and care and support to someone, about being free of someone’s control and power.

It’s only just now I’m seeing though - we are so lucky, so lucky we got out of there before things got really bad. We could have been in an even worse position, could have had even worse things happen. I’m just so grateful that my daughter and I are in our own path doing our own thing, and that it’s us and her dad, and that’s it.

3/ I’m grateful for the trouble with the visa because of what it’s indirectky helped me learn. I’m not happy about the trouble ya causing in our lives but we will with whatever comes our way in terms of where we live and how we go forwards. And we are lucky to have a viable life in either place we live. But indirectly, it’s uncovered things that have been hard to learn, about my workplace (their response to it was not ok and I don’t feel good at all about our management), it’s indirectly brought up lots of thoughts for me about the institutions that I feel have so many flaws and fonso much wrong.

It has really put me in a place of vulnerability, anger and defensiveness. None of these are good things but I think that process leads me to a more nuanced understanding of how I see my workplace (which keeps growing as new difficult things keep happening there at work!), how I see my desires to make a difference in the queer community and in the world st large. Its kind of lit a new fire under me, and I want to turn that into positive energy that pushes me forward to make positive impact.


I don’t mean for any of these things I’ve mentioned to be vague, I just wanted to give the short version of things to save on reading. I’m happy to expand in any of these things.


What I’m feeling right now I think, is a need to take a fresh look at these things that have been causing lots of angst, and come back to them with gratitude. So I’m working on that for each thing. It’s already helping because (as mentioned I started this post yesterday), since I’ve started writing, I’ve felt like I had a lighter feeling and I’ve bern able to be more present. I think I need to keep going through these different areas in my life and remind myself about what makes me feel grateful as a response to them.

Does anybody have stuff they want to share here too?