So it’s Thanksgiving here in the US. Quite appropriately, we have had a giant flock of wild turkeys parading between our house and the in-laws’. No sign of the gorgeous fox we saw the other day, though.
Jumping on this holiday’s bandwagon, I have quite a lot to be thankful for right now. Friends and family, of course. But I don’t like going for the same options we hear over and over again.
I am thankful for my white, cisgendered, heterosexual, middle-class privilege. There are many harder life difficulty settings, as John Scalzi might say, and it would be horrifically ignorant for me to take that for granted and not appreciate how much easier my life has been because of it. I do not say this to brag. I certainly have done nothing to deserve it; this privilege is the circumstance into which I was born.
I am thankful for the comfort and confidence I’ve learned to have in my body, my mind, my life.
And I am thankful for synchronicity, the way things tend to work out for me. Case in point: just as I found out I could no longer afford to stay in my part-time day job, I get a phone call about an application I put in last summer. The person they hired is leaving, and they need to find a replacement ASAP. The next day (last Thursday), I have an interview. Tuesday morning, I get the phone call offering me the position. Full time, significantly closer to home, all that jazz. I start Monday, so yesterday turned out to be my last day working retail for the foreseeable future.
Cue celebration!
Life doesn’t always fall into place that nicely, but it happens frequently enough that I think it’s something more than coincidence. I won’t call it God because I enjoy being agnostic and leaving things undefined, thank you very much. So I’ll just call it synchronicity. And that is something I am very, very grateful for.
Also, new job. Yep. Definitely thankful for that.
Melissa Burkart 