So I stopped speaking up.
I stayed in situations I should have walked away from years earlier, and the entire time I was telling myself the same line they told me. Some people don’t even have this. Who am I to complain. And I would feel bad, and I would smile, and I would sit back down.
I want to be honest about what that cost me, because it wasn’t small. It was years. Years in a job I had outgrown. Years in a dynamic that was never going to become what I needed it to be. Years of talking myself out of my own knowing because I had been trained to read that knowing as a character flaw.
The thing nobody explained to me is that gratitude and dissatisfaction are not opposites. They live in the same body at the same time and they always have.
I can be grateful for the roof and still know the roof is temporary.
I can be grateful for the job and still know the job is not the ceiling.
I can be grateful for the person and still know that this is not the love I’m supposed to end up in.
None of those sentences cancel each other out. I spent a long time thinking they did.
There’s also a difference between complaining and refusing to settle, and we have gotten lazy about telling them apart. Complaining is naming a problem you have no intention of solving. Refusing to settle is naming a problem out loud on your way to fixing it. When somebody says out loud that they want more, that is almost never complaining. That is usually the very first move of someone about to change their life, and if the first thing they hear is a list of what they already have, they’ll put the thought away and go back to sleep.
I’ve watched it happen to women I love. I’ve watched a woman say she’s unhappy and get a reminder of her blessings, and I’ve watched her go quiet for another two years.
So here is what I’ve stopped doing.
I don’t tell people to be grateful anymore. Not when they’re in the middle of telling me something hurts. Gratitude is not a correction. It’s not something you hand someone to make them stop talking, even when you don’t mean it that way, and most people don’t mean it that way. It still lands that way.
Now when somebody tells me they want more, I ask them what more looks like. I ask them what they’re reaching for. I let them say it out loud, because sometimes hearing yourself say it is the whole thing.
I’m grateful for plenty. I’m also nowhere near done.
Both of those are true, and I’m not going to keep apologizing for the second one.
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