One day when I was a depressed college student, a friend named Rita, famous for drinking tealess hot water and writing dense, academic poetry, knocked on my door.
As I recall, I had been crying and had not left my room all day. When I did not answer the door, Rita slid a tiny piece of paper underneath. It was a sticker with a picture of a rainbow, and it said, "It takes both the rain and the sun to make a perfect rainbow." It was a stupid cliché and she knew it. But it was her way of reminding me that, in the making of a fully realized human being, pain and joy are equally essential.
When I was a depressed twentysomething, my father, famous for salami eating and saying things like, "You can't win 'em all" when, in fact, you had never won anything, arrived at an insight about me. I was deep into an eating disorder and living at home due to resulting health problems.
"You think you have to punish yourself in order to reward yourself," he said.
In my head I scoffed and rolled my eyes, but in my heart I concurred. I believed that everything - desserts, vacations, time out from self-flagellation - had to be earned and that, before I could partake of anything good or desired, I first had to suffer. Maybe I had to not eat for a week before I could have a cookie, or maybe I had to get through a grueling regimen of study before I could go to the mall for an hour. Whatever it was, the formula was clear: There could be no joy without first paying for it in pain.
There is a lot of talk these days about gratitude. It seems most of us could use more of it. To this end, we're encouraged to keep "gratitude lists." There is some debate about how often we should make these lists and how detailed they should be, but the general consensus is that we should make a gratitude list about once a week, and it should focus on maybe five things we are grateful for.
Also, we should note "Why," exactly, we are grateful for those things, so our list-making doesn't become an empty exercise, much like "liking" a post on Facebook without really reading it.
It occurs to me that many of the things I am grateful for have their roots in the exact same things that, at another time in my life, made me miserable. For example, I am intensely grateful to have two dogs who get along beautifully because not long ago I had two dogs whose mission in life was to destroy one another, which was deeply upsetting and went on for six heartbreaking years.
Today, every time one dog pops up onto the bed and the other wags her tail in greeting, I am profoundly grateful, because my dogs ground me and, when there was fighting, it destabilized my whole life.
And many years ago I had a counseling job that was all but unbearable. These days, when I step back and see myself happily putting together the small newspaper I edit, I remember those days and I am deeply grateful to have moved on. I am happy to be doing something that uses new skills, and that is creative, entertaining and in a comfortable working environment.
But lately I have been wondering: If it takes both the rain and the sun to make a perfect rainbow, and pain and joy to create a sense of gratitude, what exactly, are the proportions? If I have unhappiness in my life, how much of it should I try to alleviate and how much should I simply accept, knowing as I do that discontent is an important contributor to my future gratitude?
Maybe it's a moot point and the idea is to have gratitude for where you are and what you have without overthinking the strategy for how you got there. Happily, I no longer have to punish myself to reward myself. For this, I am perhaps most grateful.
If my father were alive, he'd be thrilled. He'd probably say I finally won 'em all.
Dana's memoir, "The Body Tourist," is available on Amazon. Contact her at dana@danashavin.com.