Why is Gratitude So Hard?

Or: what that rude punk Hamlet and anxious mess Macbeth taught me about suffering

Gratitude can be a very confronting thing to me - when I’m invited to look at my life and name the things that make me happy and focus them in my attention, I find myself instantly resisting. I then find myself amazed by this resistance - why would I ever resist the opportunity to feel at least a little better about my life? Why do I feel like it’s impossible or at least unfair to turn my attention away from whatever I might be upset about? 

I felt really understood when I found this phenomenon vividly depicted in Hamlet - it’s Act 2, Scene 2, Hamlet’s been brooding like crazy and freaking people out and two of Hamlet’s friends (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) have arrived from out of town to try and figure out what the hell his deal is, and then they have this famous exchange:

Hamlet: What have you, my good friends, deserv'd at the hands of Fortune, that she sends you to prison hither? 

Guildenstern: Prison, my lord? 

Hamlet: Denmark's a prison.

Rosencrantz: Then is the world one. 

Hamlet: A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o' th' worst. 

Rosencrantz: We think not so, my lord.

Hamlet: Why then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.

Here we find Hamlet consciously insisting on seeing the world as bad, as forcing him to feel miserable. In two sentences he asserts absolute freedom to tell whatever story we want about the world, that we are always at choice for how we interpret ourselves and our lives, and that with this freedom he chooses misery. 

I’ve done a lot of work to get to a point where I can see what Hamlet sees here, that all interpretations of self and world are optional and can be re-configured at will. The ‘good’ side of this is that we can always tell ‘better’ stories about ourselves, stories that make more things possible for us. Getting out of my misery, out of miserable certainty that things are terrible, has meant letting go of that certainty, which is really hard to do. It’s really hard because it involves seeing myself as Hamlet does here in the second part of his assertion - I am free to create myself and my reality, and I have chosen to freely wield that power to soak myself in misery. 

That’s embarrassing! I don’t want my suffering to be optional! I want to be the precious victim of the world, or society, or myself. I want to feel superior to the world, or society, or at least to myself. Victimhood is moral superiority, affirming and disempowering at the same time. There’s a momentum to it, a sunk cost. I’ve put all of this energy into this misery and this identity and I don’t want to feel like a fool for having done so. I don’t want to let go of how good victimhood feels. 

This isn’t to say that there’s no such thing as injustice, or trauma, or loss, or anything like that. It’s to say that whatever those things are, I have some say in what I make them mean about who I am and what’s possible for myself and my life. 

The price I pay for having that say is humility - the humility to say that I am not a righteous, superior victim of life. 

Hamlet - frighteningly brilliant, terribly vivid - revels in his delicious insistence on suffering, and pulls down the house around him. Macbeth, another archetype of human misery, is completely stuck in the experienced reality of his anxieties, the daggers of his mind. He is so set on preventing bad things from happening (being dethroned and killed) that he makes all kinds of bad things happen (butchering a bunch of innocents who might dethrone him) that lead to the occurrence of the very things he was so afraid of (the survivors are justifiably pissed and destroy him and his kingdom). He never once questions the necessity of his interpretations of the world - Macbeth is a freak of anxious reactivity. Hamlet, by contrast, ponders and reflects and pulls everything apart beautifully and puts it back together again as a pile of shit, because he consciously wants to be a stinker. 

Which one am I today? Am I Macbeth, creating the very things I fear by obsessively resisting their possibility? Or am I Hamlet, seeing all the way through the arbitrary silliness of my suffering and choosing it anyway, just because I can?

Either way, I’m grateful for the opportunity to look at myself this way - and I’m grateful for the opportunity to read Shakespeare and see myself looking at myself in his characters. Interpreting Shakespeare is a baffling task - as I find myself trying to interpret his characters I find his characters interpreting me!

I’ll end by saying, of course, that I’m grateful for you for reading this, for giving me the opportunity to express and explore and create myself in front of a bunch of people. It’s what Hamlet would have wanted, after all.