The moment my family stopped wanting me to be grateful for them,
I felt grateful for them.
I was simultaneously attracted and repulsed by it. The meaning — thankfulness — was beautiful, but the sound — it just grated on my skin.
I wanted to cultivate a personal gratitude, but I felt bogged down by cultural gratitude.
Fellow South Asians, we better be careful around the insistence on writing gratitude lists. It may be a novel concept in Western culture, but in our society, gratitude is demanded like toll tax at every turn of life. Gratitude to our parents, our teachers, our employers, our national leaders.
On teacher’s day and independence day, during every small or big festival, we must pay our gratitude, whether we feel it or not.
And do our elders know how to receive gratitude? Nope.
They want gratitude but don’t want to be seen wanting it. When you say thank you to them, parents and teachers act like they are above it, like sheesh! they never did everything they did to be thanked, they are the most selfless people on the planet.
We want women, caregivers, helpers, and workers to work selflessly and live gratefully. We want daughters to be grateful for the ‘freedom’ they have been ‘given’ and use their education to be better women, not to break traditions.
We want gig workers to be grateful for ‘flexible’ timings, but never unionize, never fight for their rights. We want minority groups to be grateful that we don’t treat them as inhumanly as our enemy states.
After years of struggling with this nebulous concept, here is one thing I can say with confidence:
Gratitude cannot be decided by the giver of the gift. It can only be expressed by the receiver of the gift. And everything that is gift-wrapped and thrust into our hands — is not a gift.
If questioning gratitude makes me ungrateful, so be it. It is important to be ungrateful, if gratitude feels like a shackle. It is important to be ungrateful, if gratitude means we are not allowed to feel our anger and agency.
When you share your grief of losing a beloved, your frustration about your body’s struggle, your rage against your family - some random person is extra ready to remind you to be grateful. Public service announcement: This person is not interested in your mental health. They can’t bear your raw emotions and gratitude acts like a strong suppressant they bought from the factory of toxic positivity.
One group of people that struggles the most with to thank or not to thank is creative people.
Creativity is seen as such a luxury, that we are tempted to thank everyone, from our ancestors who sacrificed their lives to work, to our 8th grade English teachers and college friends and kind colleagues who recognized our creativity.
Our ‘Acknowledgments’ page can be longer than our book. But chances are, forced gratitude will not even allow you to write a book.
My inner critic often speaks on behalf of the gratitude police:
“When you have your basic needs fulfilled — why do you want to pursue your creative needs? Just be grateful, na. Do it as your little hobby. Steal time for it. Don’t shuffle too many ‘important’ things around for your frivolous passions.”
Forced gratitude destroys the creative spirit. When you’re constantly supposed to be grateful with the status quo, how will you create anything new?
There is good news. There is — a different kind of gratitude. One that liberates you from ever using that ear-grating word, gratitude. One that channelizes an organic feeling of thankfulness into beauty, art, change, and mutual care.
Drumroll please.
Creative gratitude is a mindset where joy, safety, satisfaction, nostalgia, and love - become SOURCES of creativity, not squashers of it.
You don’t spout thankyous all the time, you LIVE them. You embody the spirit of gratitude by knowing that what you are and what you create is simply a vessel - for inspiration, information, wisdom, skills that came from so many different sources.
You create with more courage, because you consciously enjoy every gift from the world: The sparrow’s nest, a piece of smooth chalk, a bowl of ramen, a creative calling — you pay homage to everything, of your own accord, with your own willingness.
Creative gratitude is a playground, not a bank to calculate what you owe others.
Instead of the dreaded gratitude list, you write juicy letters to the people in your life. You write praise songs for ordinary things. Essays dripping with delight. Poems about your sweet French teacher. Watercoloured flowers for your writer friends.
When you write memoir, you cry - not just with the grief of what you lost, but with genuine gratitude for everything that helped you survive the loss. You see the present moment with awe and write haikai. So much art in the world is born out of gratitude.
When your immense creativity becomes your way of expressing gratitude, instead of a single dreaded list, it automatically becomes authentic, slow, vibrant, powerful.
Let gratitude be your medium of expression, not a censoring device. Let it be born through your incessant awe and wonder for the world and its human beings, not by obligation. Let it be your secret superpower, not your powerlessness.
Have you been called ungrateful? How do you enjoy your gratitude?
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