I have you on automatic upvote, so often you’ll see my upvote when I haven’t actually read your post yet. It seems you’ve actually been posting at times I’m not online lately, so this is my first post of yours I’m coming across in a while, and I actually had to deliberately navigate to your blog through your profile page to find it. Well I’m so glad I made the extra effort!

I just couldn’t agree more with what you’ve said here. I’d elaborate, truly making peace with our own perfect imperfection is probably the most important thing we can do if we want a happy life. We have to take a default stance of “yes” toward ourselves, even as we continue to grow and change. If we can do that, then things just keep getting better. If we reject ourselves just because we aren’t perfect yet, because we make mistakes and don’t know everything, then it all just keeps getting worse.

I too have faced some decades of true suffering and despair. I wasn’t able to turn it around with gratitude for what was, because I just couldn’t see it. But the good news is, our minds can’t actually tell the difference between what is real and what we’re just imagining!

Without even realizing what I was doing until just now as I read your post, I was practicing gratitude through imagining scenarios as I wanted them to play out, then letting myself feel the joy of them. Sometimes I’d add in a little ritual I’d found somewhere that was supposed to create improved situations, but mostly I just wrote poems, or stories, or just daydreamed uplifting scenarios.

Now sometimes that can make things worse, because as you say, people want to meditate on everything that’s wrong, as if that’s going to help anything. And I did have some of that going on. But thankfully I had just a bit more focus on the joy of my imagination, and the gratitude that naturally arose in response, than I had focus on my difficult life situations. So often time, I left enough of an opening that things could start changing. And as I stand here today, it’s easy to practice gratitude for what is, because it has all shaped itself into something easy to appreciate. But I still know that I must not rely on that, and don’t have to. No matter how hard it is to appreciate what is, it is still within reach so long as we take responsibility for our own minds.

Thanks for this great post.