Tag: "New Year"

On New Year’s Eve at the dawn of the last decade, I was fairly miserable. Not by the “foreign power laying siege to my homeland” standard, or the “bank repossessing my house on Christmas Eve” standard. The “finding out I have a catastrophic disease” standard also did not compare, because I know people who have heard that news and seen the effect it has had on their lives. I have to make the distinction because qualifying my unhappiness by comparing it to that of others is part of who I am. The guilt that surrounds whatever feelings of dissatisfaction I may have with certain life circumstances is palpable regardless of what those more knowledgeable of the human psyche have said. “There is no hierarchy of suffering,” states Dr. Edith Eva Eger, holocaust survivor and author of The Choice: Embrace the Possible. “There’s nothing that makes my pain worse or better than yours, no graph on which we can plot the relative importance of one sorrow versus another.” Still, I tend to measure, and that’s what I was doing ten years ago. Telling myself I had nothing to be unhappy about and everything to be grateful for.