Too Many Things to Lose
In the latest period of my life,
I lost my Medium account.
Then, I lost my earnings from it.
Shortly afterward, I was told to take some time off work.
Stress in my relationship
My house key got broken
And then lost my wallet.
Through it all, I thought I didn’t have too many things to lose.
But I was wrong. And among all the losses in this past time, I found a simple fact, a shred of good news: I wake up every morning with my health and that’s something to be thankful for.
It turns out we don’t give enough appreciation for how many things there are to be grateful for.
For all of those losses, I am immensely grateful. So many things in life are good. My recent losses taught me this the hard way.
One can sink down in what feels like all that has been lost — all the setbacks that, it can seem sitting in one’s disappointment, have additionally descended. With the loss of my Medium account, some of my identity — the voice — seemed gone too. The loss of my income signaled a hurtful reminder about the fragility of very real material security. I felt frustrated by my employer at work due to ‘administrative issues’ that meant I just couldn’t go in. My relationship felt stressed. The broken key to the house and the lost wallet didn’t feel like minor episodes. The accumulative effect simply left me feeling a little rattled by life’s development.
However, what all these experiences taught me was that there is much for which I should be grateful. The fullness of life is not what we have but what we make of what we no longer have. It’s about acknowledging what remains: the many small blessings, ordinarily taken for granted, persisting through loss.
There were important lessons I took from these hurdles — and they were more about gratitude than the work itself.
“unless you can really lose something you take for granted, you’ll never truly realize how much it was worth.”
It’s only when we lose things that we really value them. But when faced with loss, you can choose to look for what you still have. Each loss became an opportunity to build deeper appreciation; not just for the things I had lost, but to appreciate what remained, remembering that life is not so much about what we acquire as how we experience it — but that life is not forever, and we can have our richness of experience in the way we live each moment, rather than living for the end result.
Now, I have opened a new Medium account so that I can write again; gradually, I am finding my voice. I have worked on my relationship and made the right steps for the papers. So, everything seems fine.
This journey of appreciation has taught me that gratitude itself is independent of circumstance. It’s a daily practice of recognizing abundance in the midst of adversity.
Despite loss, there’s always a gain, to help us sustain our understanding of resilience, gratitude, and the tenacity of positivity.
