And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.
I both watch for and dread an anniversary that happened this week. I don’t write it on my calendar. I don’t circle it in red or program it into any of the online calendars I have at my disposal. Instead, I wait for Facebook to remind me.
On November 11th, 2016, the event happened that caused my original blog to be born. That was eight years ago. Eight years of writing a Moment. The first year, I did it every single day, except for one. Then it became This Week’s Moment Of Happiness Despite The News, and so I’ve managed, me, the skeptic, the person who was once told by a therapist that I have a “negative cognitive bias”, to come up with a Moment of happiness every single week for 7 years.
How about that? But how did it happen? And what was the very first Moment?
A couple of days after the 2016 presidential election, my world started to unravel. I was taking my two old beagles for their after-lunch walk. As I rounded the corner toward home, I saw a man walking toward me. He wore a cargo coat, large sunglasses, and a red baseball hat which had gold stitching on it, reading, “Make America Great Again”. I tried to move my dogs off the sidewalk so he could pass, but at their age, the dogs moved slowly. To my great surprise, I saw the man draw back his leg and prepare to kick one of my dogs.
I got in between them and he kicked me instead. Then he grabbed me by the shoulders and shoved me off my feet into the grass. “It’s time to get back into your place now, woman,” he said. And he stomped off.
I made sure my dogs were okay, got myself up, and we went home. I didn’t recognize that I was in shock. I got myself a drink of water (why is every solution to every problem a drink of water?) and then went upstairs to my computer. I posted what just happened on Facebook, and concerned friends told me to call the police.
The incident ended up on the news. It went crazy on Facebook, shared, the last time I saw, thousands of times. And then the real trauma began. Absolute strangers from all around the country began to send me hate emails and private messages through Facebook and Twitter. I was the topic of a hate-talk radio program. They accused me of lying, saying that since I write fiction, my assault must be made up. They said I wanted to smear the president. And they gave me death threat after death threat after death threat. The worst message was a note put into my snail mailbox that said, “We know where your daughter goes to school.”
It was a very hard time. It threw me into a deep tailspin.
I began to realize that I needed to find positives. And not just one or two that would last me a long time, but a positive out of every day. I needed something to hang on to.
Now, I’m a natural skeptic. I don’t talk rainbows and unicorns, I’m not a fan of Hallmark cards, I don’t watch Lifetime TV movies. And I hate gratitude lists. For me to say that I needed a positive was almost as hard for me to take as all of the negativity around me. But it felt like what I needed to do. And I also felt very drawn to do it publicly.
Because if I could do it, anyone could.
Where did it come from? I think it came from one of my mentors, years and years ago. Ellen Hunnicutt was a fantastic Wisconsin writer who took me under her wing soon after I graduated from college. She told me I had the voice of a novelist, she told me that what I was writing was literary fiction, and she told me that I was the most dedicated, disciplined, determined writer she knew. I loved her. If I had doubts, Ellen brushed them away. She didn’t do so with unicorns. She told me to buck up and keep going.
When I was offered my first teaching job, leading writing classes for our local park and recreation department, I called her in a panic. I had no idea what I was getting into. She told me that no matter what, no matter what manuscripts I read, no matter what I thought, I always needed to lead my critiques, oral or verbal, with a positive. “If you give someone something positive to hang on to,” she said, “they’ll hold on to it tightly while they listen to the rest of what you have to say. That one positive will get them through.”
And now, years later, it was me that was in need of that one positive. One a day.
So I started, on Facebook, posting Today’s Moment of Happiness Despite The News. The response bowled me over. Facebook suddenly began sending me messages, cheering how many likes and comments I received. Facebook never cared before. I saw responses from people I knew, people I didn’t know, people who were well-known, people who I admired from afar. And so…I kept on doing it.
Let me tell you, it was a challenge. Again, I am a skeptic. I tend to look at the world through shades, not rose-tinted glasses. But I managed to come up with something every day (except one) that made me happy. Some things were goofy. Some were funny. Some were poignant. And same come out of nowhere and blew me away.
I didn’t write these as The Professional Author. I wrote them as me. Just Kathie. They’re personal and they’re heartfelt. They are deliberately raw and unedited; I never intended to submit them anywhere else. I was asked if one here or there could be used in a publication. I said sure. But that was never the intention.
I vowed to do it every day for a year, and I did. I had no idea when I started how difficult a year this was going to be; I thought it was the hardest year of my life. And now, of course, I know that 2017 was not the hardest year. This year, the one we’re almost through with, has been the hardest year, with Michael’s accident and death.
And yet I kept up with writing This Week’s Moment Of Happiness Despite The News. It has saved me, over and over and over again.
No one is more surprised than I am. And my skeptical self is forever grateful (though I will never write a gratitude list!).
So what was the first Moment? You may be amazed to see it, because it was so small. I wrote the Moments as Facebook posts from January 30, 2017 to March 10, 2017. On March 11, it officially moved to my website, though I do still post the Moment on Facebook as well.
So here, for today, to celebrate the anniversary of that awful first event that led to something absolutely wonderful, is the very first Today’s Moment Of Happiness Despite The News.
JANUARY 30, 2017
1/30/17 And so today’s moment of happiness despite the news:
I just went out into our unexpected snowstorm to check the exposed three-story straight-up ramp I need to use to get my car into the parking garage. The ramp is, of course, completely snow-covered – there will be no getting Hemi (my car) out of the way of our condo’s snowplow tonight. I walked back, cursing.
But then I noticed how quiet it was. So quiet, I could hear the snow land on itself.
I stopped to listen, and then saw how snow glitters when it falls into the beam of a streetlight.
Snowlights.
Lightflakes.
And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.
Indeed it does. Thank you for reading me for eight solid years. Let’s keep pushing ahead.
(Did you know, by the way, that the first year of the blog was made into a book? Today’s Moment Of Happiness Despite The News; A Year Of Spontaneous Essays is out there! On Amazon, it’s available at https://www.amazon.com/Todays-Moment-Happiness-Despite-News-ebook/dp/B07FK45MKH/ref=sr_1_6?crid=21VK10OO40K4A&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.oAUSYUHHByRRgDRTiv8d4S4a3xIvF1kImc89-auAjPooaJuAFGLjuBJVotgrcKW1huu55GQM62hfMncEcKa_ntTfVKDIYJ3NyXrBkYfs4Y-MjYMsmN2QNQfCk0OODgcujrbgFG42IHYHdAh6TansGRM96hjEY56y-2mTuMwAzSrkQuQ0WYwK2OIzKEzCNugyN35FTdcDgBxUeBYuu6nNOwLIOgwmKqxI-u8VgCqUkIM.VdHX0-P7qobGQcxIFcW1qCOMSJ28iUj24cF1lN1wJA8&dib_tag=se&keywords=Kathie+Giorgio&qid=1731606982&sprefix=kathie+giorgio%2Caps%2C122&sr=8-6
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