During my senior year of high school, I decided to take a creative writing class. What started out as just a way to get a credit turned into the start of a beautiful journey that I never saw coming. I always knew that I was good at writing but I never really enjoyed it until I took creative writing. All the writing I did was full of finding sources and putting in citations, talking about symbols, themes, and characters. I like English class, but it was never my favorite. It wasn’t until I started writing about things that pertained to my own life that I started to enjoy it. That may sound selfish, like I didn’t care until it was about me – but I don’t mean it that way. I simply mean that spewing out facts and quotes never got to the heart of what makes writing beautiful. And I never saw that until my senior year of high school. One thing I loved was that besides the assignments we had to do, we had journals that we wrote reflections in on a regular basis. I love looking through that journal and seeing how I grew throughout the semester and the deep thought I put into my writing when I was simply asked to reflect on certain aspects of my life. I still have that journal sitting in the basement at my house, as a kind of reminder of why I love to write and where it started. One of my favorite pages is titled “Attitude of Gratitude” and we had to write about what we were grateful for. I think it still rings true to me and I think it’s a good reminder that you choose to be thankful every day of your life. Here’s what it says:

“I’m thankful for the sun that gives the hope of a brand new day. I’m thankful for the people in my life that are like my sunshine, reminding me that dark times won’t stay: my family, my friends, my youth group leaders, my Jesus. He is what I am most thankful for. That he thought of me before I was born, and believed that I was worthy to save. I’m thankful for the little things in life. A cup of coffee in the morning, a warm hug, a full set of markers, a good book, laughing so hard that I cry, crying so hard that I laugh because a weight has been lifted. It’s those kinds of things that drive me, that make me see the beauty in every day. it’s the little things that I may not even realize or remember when times get tough that I really am thankful for.”

I know that this is just scraping the surface. I know that I have so many beautiful things to be grateful for. I am blessed beyond measure and that’s what I need to reflect on when I feel like the world is against me. I am thankful for the gift of writing and all that it has taught me about life and about myself. I’m thankful for all the ways that it has helped me grow. I’m grateful to have such an amazing outlet to share my thoughts and feelings in a healthy way that can have an impact on others too. I don’t ever want to stop seeing the beauty writing can hold.

And I don’t ever want to stop having an attitude of gratitude.