No Judgement. No Jargon. Only Gratitude!

Hi, I’m Catherine and I’m the Gratitude-in-Chief of the #AppreciateAmerica tour.

Have you ever loved something so much that you just want to hug it and squeeze it and give it a sloppy, puppy dog-style wet kiss all over its cheeks? Well, I feel that way about America. Now listen. I’m no Pollyanna. Things have been rough. Very rough. I get it. My husband and I live two blocks from a COVID hospital in midtown Manhattan. We did not leave our apartment for three months! We lost three friends in one month. Tragedy comes in threes these days.

Fast forward. It’s been five months since that fateful Friday, March 13th when the city that never sleeps turned off its taxicab meters and went into a gelatinous, lethargic freeze. 

I froze, too. A survivor of war and revolution, trauma is near but not very dear to my psychological heart. I felt like I was back in the war. I slipped into darkness and fell into the inkwell of a heavy, saturated grief.

For me, the way out of trauma and tragedy has and always will be through gratitude. Gratitude does not mean denying that there are problems. It means acknowledging that we have more than we think we have as a resource, a foundation; a base for rebounding. Gratitude is the bedrock of resilience. It’s the fertile soil in which shame is healed, denial is devalued, and pain becomes promise.

So I’m on a quest and hitting the road to talk to people, to you. A little experiment from this big ‘ol heart of mine that’s been broke a thousand times. I’m on a journey to find gratitude in the grief; freedom in the fright; possibility in the pain. I hope you’ll join me.