Counting My Blessings While I Can

I have a propensity for doom. I’ve attempted to blame it on adolescent depression, or the fact that I was born fifteen months before 9/11, but I’m beginning to suspect it’s a biological condition. Though, not one my parents passed down. They are both buoyed by hope in a way I can only admire—such innate optimism has always felt foreign to me. 

I’m not alone with my doom either. Surely, it’s a generational thing. Gen Z’s woes are very likely the consequences of a post-9/11 reality—not to mention the Internet age, the worldwide pandemic, the unleashing of AI. But I refrain from making any sweeping claims. I am not equipped to measure the generational score and declare who had it worse. Besides, there’s no use in that. It’s not a competition. I just think it’s interesting that all my favorite movies growing up were about the end of the world. Chicken Little (2005). WALL-E (2008). Divergent (2014). Edge of Tomorrow (2014). Interstellar (2014).* If nothing else, Gen Z has a shared language for, and a mutual understanding of, doom. 

Even the concept of hope eluded me for a while. One of my beloved teachers in high school gave me a book called Hope in the Dark, but I never read a page because I thought if it was already dark, it was too late for hope. (A melodramatic sentiment only appropriate for a seventeen-year-old). 

Hope is all the more radical when it is not built in. Because it’s not innate for me—and many of my generation—it’s a choice we have to make again and again. Now that I’ve read Hope in the Dark, that’s the argument the author makes as well. Hope is an act of resistance. Believing things can get better inherently helps them be better. In my early twenties, it finally clicked for me. Choosing hope became my operating system.

At last, my doom had been dampened. I’d successfully locked it in a little box and thrown away the key. I was high on hope. And that high can do crazy things to a person. I started making plans—long-term plans about my life and career that I’d never allowed myself to make before. I started agreeing with my father that the trajectory of the world ultimately trends upwards. I started to sound like that Tumblr quote, “Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”

Oh, how the mighty fall. 

My doom broke free from its cage and swallowed me whole. I think it swallowed a lot of people last year, and certainly more this past month. Every truth we held to be self-evident is vanishing in a blink of an eye. All of our mainstays and our guardrails have been bulldozed over, replaced by nothing. The scenes I’ve seen on screen and read in books now air on nightly news because they are happening in my community, in my country, at this very moment. We are being inundated with horrific images that are unfamiliar to the generations before us. My father, my smart, optimistic father, sent me a text the other day that said: “Civilization is collapsing.” Like I had learned hope, he had learned doom.

And I haven’t been able to convince myself yet that we can fix it. I’m open to the idea, rest assured, but I can’t currently envision it. Because we can’t go back to the way things used to be. Something has been broken irreparably, which means something new must be constructed in its place, right? That requires a hope I do not have the capacity for right now. Someone has that hope, someone has that vision, but it is not me. 

I would not call what I’m doing “giving up hope.” I have come a long way from that melodramatic seventeen-year-old. What I am doing is repositioning my hope. It wasn’t even particularly intentional, just an instinctual response to this new, heavier wave of doom. It felt like the only thing left for me to do. If it feels ridiculous to hope for an unimaginable future and dangerous to have no hope at all, then I must count my blessings while I can. 

My hope is now in the small things. It is in a long phone call to my friend. It is in cooking food for my family. It is in staring up at the stars and pointing out Jupiter. It is in looking a stranger in the eye and introducing myself. It is in watching a movie so I can discuss it with someone else. It is in writing letters. It is in sleeping on my friend’s couch. It is in throwing my head back and laughing. It is feeling seen by those around me. It is seeing them back. My hope is minute to minute, person to person. Small, but not inconsequential.

You can call that whatever you want. Gratitude. Prayer. Meditation. Carpe diem. I, personally, like the folksy charm that “counting my blessings” evokes. The small things are right in front of you, tangible and immediate. They are within your control when nothing else is. You can count them on your hand and mold them with your hands. 

The impulse to count my blessings isn’t part of some grand scheme to fix the world, nor can I call it an act of resistance. It is merely a means of getting from one day to the next without My Year of Rest and Relaxation-ing myself. Because countless people in this country—and across the globe—do not have the luxury to focus on the small things. The very big, very scary things are already at their doorstep.

*2014 was not a good year to be an impressionable fourteen-year-old.