Digging to find the brown gopher of gratitude

I read today that writing gratitude lists sometimes can make us feel worse rather than better. I find that news a great relief. Now I don't have to feel guilty about (a) not writing a list and (b) not feeling grateful. 

Gratitude means judging. We need to figure out what's worth being grateful about before we can decide to feel gratitude, am I right? Maybe you have a clear sense of good and bad, but the older I get, the more I fail to grasp the eithor/or-ness of the whole idea. I get stuck on the judgy part, trying to parse good from bad, and getting lost in the space between. My Jungian friend would call that the liminal space. I call it a mild form of hell. Life would be so much easier if I could clearly differentiate good from bad. 

It's a continuum, bla bla bla. I'm not going to debate whether it is bad to commit murder, for example, or steal a lint roller from Walmart. Those cases are not under consideration when I might be contemplating being grateful for something. I'm grateful I haven't committed murder, is that a thing to put on the list? I'm grateful I don't care if my clothes have lint on them, so a lint roller holds no appeal. 

I've maundered far and wide in this blog on the topics of creativity, success, and bad decisions, so I won't bore you with all that again. I can't remember what I've written before, but I know a few of you actually have functional memories, and I don't want to annoy. Ha. As if it were possible. But I can seek to minimize the annoyance. You are welcome.

I'm reporting today that it is possible I've made a bad decision. Oh, I've made a lot of bad decisions, and I've told you all about them, but this one might be right up there near the top of stupid things I've decided to do, worse maybe than the decision to move to Tucson. 

I decided to see if I could write a story a day. For a year. 

Not only that, I decided to publish daily on my personal website. For a year. 

I must be nuts. After eleven posts, I'm beginning to realize I might have bitten off something that is going to break all my teeth and choke me on my own spit. Not that it isn't fun writing, but writing for an audience as if no one is reading? That gets the heart rate going. Lucky for me, my heart can take it. My stomach is in knots, though. 

I think my ego is getting in the way. I just realized posting as if no one is reading isn't all that much of a challenge when no one is actually reading. 

Oh, poor me. I'm adopting a woe-is-me posture, claiming the pressure of writing and posting daily is so intense, I can hardly stand it. Truth, I don't have a subscribe option on my website. Nobody can sign up to get notified of my daily contribution to the infinite pile of stupid, poorly written stories. Whew, that's a relief. And with my mom now dead, there goes one-fifth of my readership, which was spotty even on a good day, a good day being when she could remember how to turn on her computer. What's more, my one timid foray posting on social media was like a grain of sand dropped into the Grand Canyon. My vague post was more of a practice run, really, just in case someday in the far future, when I feel like I might want to pop my head out of my isolation hole and sniff the air. 

You might ask, why put yourself out there like that, Carol? Aren't you afraid of what people will think? Friends (if that is what you are), I am not longer a perfectionist, as you will surely see if you are one of the lucky half-dozen who know who I am and can find my website. Typos, repetitive dialog, missing punctuation . . .  it's all there, like cakes that failed to rise in the Betty Crocker test kitchen, except these cakes, I mean, stories, are on full display. 

I am not a quitter. I signed myself up for the long haul. Only I will know if I failed to meet my goal. We'll see, I guess. I will try to keep you posted. 

All I can hope for is that the internet goes out.