There is a particular quality to gratitude that asks nothing of us but presence—a dwelling in the somatic fact of aliveness itself, in its quiet insistence, its refusal to announce itself with fanfare. Today I feel grateful for the simple, ongoing act of being alive. In the quiet, embodied sense.
I am grateful for the way the world continues to offer itself in fragments: a cup of hot chocolate, a familiar street corner, a moment of inner calm that would have once felt unreachable. I’m grateful to live in this small world I’ve arranged into beauty, decorated like a studio from elsewhere, a sanctuary that exists slightly outside of time.
I’m grateful to be on a path of self-discovery. What I have come to understand is that I am engaged not in a project of self-improvement—that teleological fantasy of becoming someone other—but in something more akin to return. A slow reorientation towards what I might call the “true self,” though I prefer to think of it as a kind of archaeological practice: the careful excavation of accumulated sediment, the brushing away of narratives that were never mine to begin with. Old stories. Inherited anxieties. Roles adopted out of necessity rather than authenticity. Beneath these accreted layers, something remains. Something that does not require performance as the price of its existence.
There is potency in the symbolic architecture of beginnings. 2026 arrives as threshold, as demarcation, as invitation. We mark these temporal boundaries because we are meaning-making creatures, because the nervous system responds to ritual, because we need to believe—perhaps must believe—in the possibility of choosing again.
I’m grateful for the coming of spring, my favourite season, even if it’s still far away. Grateful for the idea of the first snowdrop—that small, defiant softness pushing through frozen earth, insisting that life continues. I like how spring arrives as a gradual uncoiling, a softening, a release. A slow permission. A gentle undoing of winter.
I’m grateful for what I’m learning to let go of.
Letting go of the emotional baggage that no longer deserves a permanent room inside me. Of the patterns I carried because I didn’t know what else to do. Of survival strategies that have outlived their utility. The distinction between what I learned in order to survive and what I am learning in order to live. Letting go is not always clean, linear, instantaneous, redemptive—sometimes it’s a series of small releases, repeated over time, until the nervous system begins to trust that the present is not merely a continuation of the past.
I’m grateful to exist exactly as I am.
Not as a future version. Not as the more polished, more healed, more “sorted” self that haunts self-help discourse. Simply as a woman engaged in the ordinary work of living—learning, creating, becoming, and also remaining constant in the ways that constitute continuity of self. To be allowed complexity. To be permitted ordinariness. To be real.
I’m grateful for the privilege of distance from what harms me.
For possessing sufficient autonomy to step away from what destabilises, to curate not just my physical environment but the subtler architecture of inputs, relationships, temporal rhythms. To treat sensitivity as a form of attunement worth protecting rather than as pathology requiring correction. This is not equally distributed, this capacity for choice. Safety is unevenly allocated. And yet here it arrives in my life: the possibility of choosing softness rather than armour.
And I’m grateful to do the work I’m meant to do.
The work that feels like it has a pulse. The kind that aligns with my values, my mind, my aesthetics, with the longing to transform experience into something that resonates beyond the merely personal. I am grateful that creativity persists, that it continues to return even after periods of dormancy, that it keeps insisting I pay attention.
Mostly, I’m grateful for this: that life still feels possible.
That even as the past exerts its gravitational pull, the future continues to call. That fear and forward motion can coexist. That tenderness and strength are not opposites but companions. That I can be here—breathing, becoming, being—and let this be sufficient. Let it be enough.
DIANA MARIN 