A post shared by Shonda Rhimes (@shondarhimes)

Shonda Rhimes has a new essay on her website, Shondaland, about the importance of gratitude and how it helped her make sense of this last year. Since I am a cynical bitch who gets angry encountering people without masks at the store (which seems to be every time I go out), I needed to read this. Shonda isn’t all sunshine, affirmations and rainbows either, which I appreciate. She writes that it took her a long time to come up with things to be grateful for, but once she thought of one nice thing it started flowing. She understands the skepticism about it and this practice of gratitude has really helped her feel better and more positive overall. Here are some excerpts, but if you’re interested I recommend reading this at the source. Shonda is such a good writer that it’s well worth it. Plus it convinced me that I should find more things to be grateful for.

Gratitude can sometimes be hard to find. Many times in the past year, I’ve had a very hard time locating gratitude. It’s not simple to get yourself to reach the space inside to be grateful. But that space? That gratitude space?

If you open yourself to it, that space can feel like a hit of clean sweet oxygen from a mountain top. It can renew you. If you can find gratitude in your angriest moments, your saddest moments, your most hurt moments, you can rise out of the pain and into something better. The muck of life can be washed clean. If you can say yes to gratitude, you can step out of your darkest places and find a little light.

You are maybe rolling your eyes. Raising a not-so-nice finger. I hear you. But I don’t say this trying to give you some kind of mushy, self-help, heal-y, woo-woo guru talk. I say this as a practical matter…

I say this because now I know gratitude and gratitude knows me and it has fundamentally rearranged the way my brain works.

My point is, I understand that these days, reaching that gratitude space for you might feel harder than it’s ever felt before.

At my lowest moments, I have found a way to locate gratitude. The first time I did it, I was sure I was doing something futile and crazy. Woo-woo and stupid. A waste of my time.

It’s turned out to be one of the best things I’ve ever done…

Thinking of good things, finding things that I am grateful for is essential. Yes, I know it takes time. But you know what takes about the same amount of time? Complaining. So does whining and negativity. So does self-shaming. So does listing all the things that are wrong and not going your way, griping about all the reasons you can’t accomplish something, detailing all the excuses you have for not striving to be someone better than you were yesterday.

No one wants to be the person who drags herself and all the people around her down. The goal is to always be a person who is rising and lifting other people up along with us.

[From Shondaland]

I love what she wrote about how it takes just as much time to be negative as it does to be positive. I don’t ever want to discount people mourning or being understandably frustrated and depressed at where we are now. Being sad and upset is perfectly reasonable, and Shonda acknowledges that while focusing on how gratitude has helped her.

About a month ago, around the holidays, I got myself a new notebook from Dollar Tree and did something similar to this. I wrote “Good Things about 2020? on one page and “What I’m looking forward to in 2021? on the next page. I put stickers on it to motivate myself more. It’s been sitting on my desk, but I haven’t looked at it since, so this is a good reminder. At the very top of my list is “learned to bake,” because I don’t remember baking anything before last year and now I love making bread. After that were things like “got to spend more time with my son” and “made new friends.” Plus I took so many cool classes over Zoom that I wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise. This year, hopefully by the fall, I look forward to meeting some of my new friends. I’m also so looking forward to getting vaccinated! Whenever I start to think about how mad I am that terrible people can ruin things, I will try to think of this list. I even came up with some new things today!

I saw this tweet below because this is a nurse who was tweeting about the importance of wearing masks. She had this pinned to her profile and I thought it was perfect.

there is a battle between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil;is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, inferiority, lies and ego. The other is Good; joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness and truth.”“Grandfather, which wolf wins?” The Grandfather replied: “The one you feed.”

— RN MotherF’er CEN,CCRN (@Meidas_Kelly) December 30, 2020

A post shared by Shonda Rhimes (@shondarhimes)

A post shared by Shonda Rhimes (@shondarhimes)

Photos via Instagram and the picture on the frontpage is a screen shot from this video