At the beginning of the week, I decided to challenge myself to keep a gratitude diary.

I mean, I didn’t go out and pay actual money for an overpriced book to write down things I’m grateful for in my white middle-class quest for happiness (living without threat of homelessness, political persecution and the complete certainty that I can use public transport without having my ancestral origins called into question clearly isn’t enough for me). For one, I’m too tight. Secondly, I didn’t see a dedicated book purchased entirely for recording my wanky musings as a sound investment.

So I decided to text them to myself – my preferred means of recording my thoughts these days.

This project started last Saturday, when I was on my third day in a row of listening to Madonna’s Like a Prayer on repeat after coming across it while researching an article for work (I love that this counts as legitimate research. One time I said something along the lines of “while I was researching for the Home Alone story…” and I knew I was in a good place in my life). I was on the train, which is where I find myself doing most of my tweeting because I’d rather talk to faceless strangers via the internet than interact with real people who may or may not be concealing a shive made out of a Sunskist can on their persons.

My Tweet read:

I will be forever grateful to Never Been Kissed for familiarising me with Madonna’s Like A Prayer. Forever grateful.

The next day, I posted this Tweet:

Shout out to all the ladies out there who finish washing their face with cold water because of Sabrina’s Secrets.

And upon reflection, I realised I had unwittingly been tweeting my own gratitude journal. Obviously, I was indebted to both Never Been Kissed and Sabrina’s Secrets for the deep, profound impact they had on my life.

Never Been Kissed’s repeated use of the tune made me more than able to belt out the words of the song, which is both powerful and fabulous.

And Sabrina’s Secrets taught me a great deal about washing my face, which, as someone who thankfully managed to get through puberty without major acne scarring, I’m greatly appreciative of. I’m in fact quite indebted to tween magazines as a collective for teaching me all the things that otherwise would have gone unexplained to me. My mother didn’t have a normal teenage experience to draw on to teach me anything about the process of “becoming a woman”. She spent most of that time of her life laying flat on her back using a bedpan thanks to polio and scoliosis and the shockingly primitive medical treatment available at the time (you bet I’m anti anti-vaxxer after hearing about her ordeal). I probably knew the ins and outs (sorry, pun kind of intended) of sex before it even occurred to anyone to explain it to me. I was comfortable using tampons a day into my first period thanks to Dolly Doctor, not to an awkward conversation with my mother. And as a bit of a pregnancy-phobe, the knowledge about the fertility cycle I gleamed from those glossy pages was invaluable.

So, with all this in mind, I decided to continue the declarations of gratitude for the rest of the week in the hopes it might make me less of a misery guts and provide fodder for a blog post. I have achieved at least one of those objectives.

As it turns out, the things I consciously made the effort to feel gratitude for gave a cold, grey insight into the workings of my mind and the life I find myself leading.

Monday

Wednesday’s child is full of woe, but Monday’s tale of gratitude is even more so.

Grateful for: strong elastic in my undies so I can shove my phone in the side like a dollar bill on a stripper in the movies, hidden discretely under my jumper so my housemate doesn’t see it. This means I can smuggle my phone into the bathroom so I can scroll the Instagram while I toilet myself.

Tuesday

I started relying more on dry shampoo than normal shampoo in a bid to not have a wet head during the dark hours of a winter’s day. After using it a few times on the weekend when visiting friends and I were toing and froing without much time to scrub my mane, dry shampoo was the order of the day. And now I can say that it has revolutionised my life.

But that’s not to say the haircare product is a better friend to me than my actual living, breathing friends. That would be a new level of sad even I shake my head over.

Grateful for: dry shampoo, which has been there for me in the past few days like no one else could be.

Grateful for: Having not pooed myself last night even though in a half-dream-half-awake state I was adamant that I soiled myself and had caked up in my undies like an algae mask I had seen earlier that day. 

Wednesday

I wrote this on Thursday, when I’d realised I’d neglected this little challenge. So I had to think about what I was grateful for retrospectively. I decided that given Monday saw one gratitude confession, and Tuesday saw two, I would increase the number of things I had to be grateful for as the days of the week progressed. It seemed to be in line with the wankery of this challenge and seemed like an appropriate punishment for forgetting to be grateful. Bad Dannielle.

I think both the time when I complied this list and the mundane items it contained indicate how seriously I took this challenge, and how meaningful it was for me.

Geeez. Ummmm. Yesterday I was grateful for a Queensland win.

I was grateful for my housemate being out while I watched it because there was no one around to judge me for the way I was inappropriately perched on the lounge room furniture.

I was also grateful to Past Dannielle for taking advantage of the three for five dollar protein ball deal at Boost Juice and being kind enough not to demolish all those probs-not-that-healthy treats so I could eat one when I got home.

Thursday

I really don’t have much to say for myself other than the fact that I was tired. Hence my dinner choice.

Today I was grateful for:

Tea.

Avocados.

Toasters.

The fact that we don’t have to say aubigines or corrgettes in Australia when “zucc” and “eggplant” does the job.

Carpet.

Obviously, I wrote this list quite quickly while watching a cooking show while I ate avo toast and tea for dinner.

Friday

My last day of the challenge. As you can plainly tell.

Today I was grateful for in-app ordering for my Mexican Friday treat. I like to go all out for Tuckshop Fridays, so it’s nice that I don’t have to stipulate all my extras and vaguely healthy additions verbally to another person. I like the privacy in-app ordering allows. It’s like a secret between me and the conveyor belt of people who chucked various items in my box. No one can see what’s inside once that lid is closed.

I’m grateful for water.

I’m grateful for washing machines.

I’m grateful that many UK residents want to escape to the country and are happy to share their house hunt with the rest of the world.

I’m grateful for skin, which keeps everything in. Honestly, think about how difficult life would be without it. You’d be forever getting your tendons caught on branches.

I’m grateful for kettles. They’re pretty good, aren’t they?

Look, I don’t really feel that my insides have changed that much with a week of forcing myself to nominate things I’m appreciative of. I’m still the sullen, cynical person I was at the start of the week. But at least I didn’t have to think too much about a blog post for today.

And I’m bloody grateful for that.