Thread by @HoarseWisperer

Every Friday I post a One Good Thing message asking people to post one positive, happy things from their lives no matter how big or small.

I seldom post my own largely because I don’t want to distract from others’ contributions.

Today, I’m posting one of my own.

1/

I’ll do it here away from that thread (which, as always, will come later today).

This has been a particularly good week for me. Some understatement there.

I filled my gas tank and got a haircut and stocked my son with warm clothes and a jacket that fits like a glove.

2/

I fell asleep next to him on his bed after talking until we both just conked out.

I took him out to dinner at a little hole-in-the-wall Cuban place that he picked.

I ordered a braised oxtail for both of us. He ordered the rest. Garlic shrimp, roast pork, flan.

3/

It was absolutely delicious.

To him it was just a good meal.

To me though, it was a celebration of many of the things I love about him and our relationship.

I ordered the oxtails knowing he would love them. He dove in knowing I know him well enough to be right about that.

4/

We ate like kings for little money. It’s something we do. We find great food on the cheap. Nondescript places that are long on great food and short on ambiance.

Cost little more than cooking.

My son has an adventurous palette for an 11-yr old and it is just so fun to feed.

5/

So, it has been a good week.

And all of that was enabled by the kindness and support of people who kindly signed on to my Patreon or Ko-Fi this past week from posts about them or the links in my bio.

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I’ve had easy times and hard times financially. I had a period when I earned well more than I needed to live and have now had a long stretch where I’ve earned far less.

One thing people who have never experienced deep financial hardship don’t understand is the weight of it.

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Just the sheer weight.

Struggling to make ends meet isn’t just a matter of living the same life as someone who isn’t with just a more frugal eye on what you spend.

It is a constant, oppressive burden.

It is a weight that never leaves your shoulders.

8/

Having less than you need or barely enough reduces all of life to a tense, fraught struggle to foresee and manage potential catastrophes.

What will I give up if the car that seems slower to start needs a new battery?

What can I push off or run late on?

9/

What will I do if a new expense arises. Do I need new contacts enough to invite how much they’ll cost? Am I so sick, I really need to go see a doctor.

Financial struggle colors your entire world. It reduces the aperture of what you see, think about and can picture.

10/

It chokes out even the luxury of imagining what you’ll do next or be.

It slowly robs your freedom to enjoy even small joys that go unnoticed for people with more.

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So, this week has been a good week.

It chokes me up to say that because in all bare, unflinching honesty, it has been the best one in longer than I can remember.

Years maybe.

12/

A year ago, my father died on my son’s birthday. It was a surreal day of closing one book that had been long since written while celebrating the end of a mere chapter in another book barely begun.

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For me though, it was also just another quiet “...and another thing” piled atop a decade of pain and loss and hardship.

It was just another reminder of the long, steady erosion of what my life once was into what it now is.

14/

This year though, I’m on the cusp of the Year of the Phoenix I wrote about in my pinned thread finally turning from destruction to transformation.

I’m nearing the end of an impossibly long tunnel. I have not yet stepped out into the sunlight but that distance draws shorter.

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Every year for the past decade, sometime around Christmas, I put on Counting Crows’ “A Long December” and reflect on the year.

It is a sort of agonizing accounting. An unfiltered personal inventory of how the year has really been for me.

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It is a bare and honest moment of living in the emotional stew I back burner all year because there is simply no time for it and nothing at all to come from stirring it up.

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For each of those ten years, the lines that have resonated most have been:

🎶 The smell of hospitals in winter
And the feeling that it's all a lot of oysters, but no pearls

I feel those words in my soul. In my soul. I’ve walked those hospital halls. I know that feeling.

18/

This year though, at long last, the lyric that I’ll grab onto most - with a belief that it will be true rather than just a hope that it might be - will be this one:

🎶 It’s been a long December and there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last 🎵

19/

It has been a good week.

I am immeasurably thankful for that.

It was enabled by the kindness and support of people I’ve never met but to whom I owe much.

Thank you. You’re my One Good Thing this week.

20/20

Now that I’ve got that song stuck in my head, here’s a great version.

Live. A bit more atmospheric than the studio track.