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Every morning for the past two years I have written a sentence a day about what I am grateful for. It’s a practice that helps me stay present and helps ground me as I begin my day. Some mornings I find it difficult to write something to be grateful for. I have a complex relationship with gratitude.
Being in a body that continues to be ignored in regards to people accommodating my basic needs, I grew up being conditioned to just be grateful for the fact I have anything as a way for systems to avoid any sort of accountability or effort to do better.
“I'm very tired of being thankful for accessible toilets, you know? I-- I really am tired of feeling that way, when I basically feel that, if I have to feel thankful about an accessible bathroom, when am I ever gonna be equal in the community?” - Judy Heumann
Sometimes, we may view gratitude as this “all or nothing” thing where we can’t critique things or want things to be better. I see people holding on to crumbs that they are acknowledged by systems that still won’t do anything to actually protect them and their rights.
I can receive an opportunity and feel deeply grateful for it while at the same time, acknowledging that the experience itself wasn’t the best. I can still critique some aspects of my experience while still being thankful for other parts of it.
I believe gratitude shouldn’t mask our need to be taken care of. I’m currently in Ohio wrapping up an artists’ residency where I am mentoring a group of young Queer artists. It’s been a really lovely time working with them.
We’ve been talking about a lot of things but one of the themes throughout these conversations were regarding self advocacy when it came to spaces they’d showcase their work. I remember when I was younger, that I felt I should just be grateful to even have a place to showcase my work, regardless if it was accessible or not.
I saw this same feeling show up in experiences of these artists I am working with now. I’ve been trying to encourage them to communicate their access needs in spaces and I told them that just because they feel thankful to share their work in spaces, doesn’t mean those spaces shouldn’t do the work to accommodate them.
This isn’t to say, don’t be grateful. This is to say, you deserve to have standards that inform your gratitude. Gratitude isn’t here to be a cloak that you put over your head to ignore pain and suffering. It isn’t here to ignore our own personal or global realities. It’s here ground us in where we are at in real time.
This morning as I am about to wrap up my residency after a fairly rainy week here in Ohio, the sun was out shining really bright. I wrote in my gratitude journal, “I’m thankful the sun is out.”
Gratitude can be as simple or complex as you wish for it to be, but either way, your gratitude deserves to be guided by your own integrity and not by systems that don’t want you to have integrity or autonomy.
Four things for you
Eliza Crofts is facilitating this Sunday’s Community Art Making at Charis with a Fungi Drawing Workshop.
This is happening in Atlanta!
As always, thank you so much for taking the time to read my newsletter, and I look forward to sharing things with you soon! Please feel free to comment on this post and share anything connected with you, to a loved one, or on social media if you wish to do so. My Instagram tag is @barryleeart. I hope that you are staying safe and well. <3