So Australia, where I did most of my growing up, doesn’t have a thanksgiving holiday. Not even like Canada, where it’s on a different day. Arbor Day was a bigger deal at my school than American thanksgiving. My family tried to celebrate, but between school schedules that didn’t recognize our traditions, time differences that made watching the Macy’s parade and football game on the day impossible, and a general lack of turkey and pumpkin pie in stores, the effect was that we didn’t really have thanksgiving in the same way it is portrayed.
This is also at least part of the reason that I have none of the compunctions of my neighbors about commencing Christmas decorations, nor wearing holiday apparel. as soon as the leaves start to change in September. Thanksgiving is barely a real holiday, and Halloween was something people barely decorated for, so neither of those things acted as boundaries for the celebration of Christmas, which in contrast to the other two, was heavily celebrated and became an integral part of my cultural identity.
As a result, I don’t trace our thanksgiving traditions back hundreds of years, up the family tree through my mother’s side to our ancestor who signed the Mayflower Compact, and whose name has been passed down through the ages to my brother. Rather, I trace our traditions back less than a decade to my first year in American public school, when my teacher made out class go through a number of stereotypical traditions like making paper turkeys by tracing our hands, and writing down things we were thankful for. Hence: what I’m thankful for this year.
First, as always, I am thankful to be alive. This sounds tacky and cheap, I know, so let me clarify. I am thankful to be alive despite my body which does not keep itself alive. I am thankful to have been lucky enough to have beaten the odds for another year. I am acutely aware that things could have quite easily gone the other way.
Perhaps it is a sad reflection that my greatest joy of this year is to have merely gotten through it. Maybe. But I cannot change the facts of my situation. I cannot change the odds I face. I can only celebrate overcoming them. This victory of staying alive is the one on which all others depend. I could not have other triumphs, let alone celebrate and be thankful for them without first being sufficiently not-dead to achieve and enjoy them.
I’m thankful to be done with school. I’m glad to have it behind me. While it would be disingenuous to say that high school represented the darkest period in my life; partly because it is too soon to say, but mostly because those top few spots are generally dominated by the times I nearly died, was in the ICU, etcetera; there can be no denying that I hated high school. Not just the actual building, or having to go there; I hated my life as a high school student. I didn’t quite realize the depths of by unhappiness until I was done, and realized that I actually didn’t hate my life as a default. So I am thankful to be done and over with that.
I am thankful that I have the resources to write and take care of myself without also having to struggle to pay for the things I need to live. I am immensely thankful that I am able to sequester myself and treat my illnesses without having to think about what I am missing. In other words, I am thankful for being able to be unable to work. I am thankful that I have enough money, power, and privilege to stand up for myself, and to have others stand up for me. I am aware that I am lucky not only to be alive, but I to have access to a standard of care that makes my life worth living. I know that this is an advantage that is far from universal, even in my own country. I cannot really apologize for this, as, without these advantages, it is quite likely that I would be dead, or in such constant agony and anguish that I would wish I was. I am thankful that I am neither of those things.
I am thankful that these days, I am mostly on the giving end of the charitable endeavors that I have recently been involved in. For I have been on the receiving end before. I have been the simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming image of the poor, pitiful child, smiling despite barely clinging to life, surrounded by the prayer blankets, get well cards, books, and other care package staples that my friends and relations were able to muster, rush-shipped because it was unclear whether they would arrive “in time” otherwise. I defied the stereotype only insofar as I got better. I am doubly thankful, first that I am no longer in that unenviable position, and second, that I am well enough to begin to pay back that debt.
