Johanny OrtegaDay 26: Gratitude as Survival, Not Aesthetic
Gratitude didn’t enter my life wrapped in pretty bows or soft morning light. It came to me out of necessity. Out of survival. Out of a deep need to rewire a brain that was constantly bracing for impact.
I am a recovering pessimist. For a long time, my default setting was waiting for the other shoe to drop. If something good happened, I didn’t celebrate it. I prepared myself for the fallout. Joy felt temporary. Safety felt suspicious. Peace felt like a setup.
That mindset didn’t come from nowhere. It came from lived experience. It came from instability, from having to grow up fast, from learning early that good things didn’t always last. So I adapted. I stayed alert. I stayed guarded. I stayed ready.
But living like that takes a toll.
This gratitude ritual is one of the ways I’ve been slowly teaching my nervous system that not every calm moment is a trap. That it’s okay to acknowledge goodness without fear. That the present moment deserves to be seen as it is, not as a precursor to disaster.
My Gratitude Ritual (The One I Need to Function)
I’m going to be honest: I haven’t been as consistent with this ritual lately. Moving, work stress, personal chaos — all of it knocked me out of rhythm. And that alone told me how important this practice actually is, because the days felt heavier without it.
When I’m in alignment, this is what I do.
As soon as I wake up, before emails, before social media, before my brain starts spiraling through responsibilities, I open my journal app. I use Clearfold, a subscription app that lives in a folder on my phone literally labeled I Am Sane. That folder name is not a joke. It’s a truth.
Inside Clearfold, I’ve favorited a gratitude template that prompts me to identify three things I’m grateful for. Just three. Not a list of twenty. Not a forced gratitude dump. Three intentional acknowledgments.
Some mornings they’re big things. Some mornings they’re painfully simple. The point is not magnitude. The point is awareness.
That small act, done first thing in the morning, shifts how I move through the day. It’s like setting my internal compass toward noticing instead of bracing.
Why Three Things Matter
There’s something powerful about limiting it to three. It keeps the ritual accessible. It removes pressure. It makes it sustainable even on hard days.
More importantly, it trains my brain to look.
Once I name three things I’m grateful for, I start subconsciously scanning for more. Not because life suddenly becomes perfect, but because I’m no longer filtering everything through doom. When things derail later in the day, and to be honest, they often do, I can remind myself that this day already holds goodness. That the narrative isn’t “everything is wrong.” It’s “some things are hard, and some things are good.”
That distinction has been life-changing for me.
Gratitude as Rewiring, Not Denial
This ritual is not about toxic positivity. I’m not pretending bad things don’t happen. I’m not bypassing pain. I’m not forcing myself to “be grateful” for struggle.
What I’m doing is grounding myself in reality.
The anxiety comes when I live in the future.
The despair comes when I live in the past.
Gratitude brings me back to now.
And more often than not, right now is survivable. Right now has light in it. Right now has something worth acknowledging.
That realization has helped me become less reactive. When my nervous system isn’t constantly sounding alarms, I respond instead of explode. I pause instead of panic. I choose instead of spiral.
This is especially important for someone like me, who learned early that things could fall apart without warning. Gratitude doesn’t erase that history, but it gives me a different ending to the story.
A Work in Progress, Not a Perfect Practice
I want to be clear about something: I’m still learning. I still slip into old patterns. I still have days where pessimism creeps back in and whispers that I should prepare for the worst.
But this ritual gives me a way back.
It’s the practice I return to when I feel myself hardening. When I start assuming loss instead of possibility. When I forget that I’ve survived everything that’s come before.
This is not a “nice-to-have” ritual for me. It’s a need. It’s one of the ways I stay emotionally regulated, spiritually grounded, and mentally present.
If I had to strip my routines down to the bare minimum, this would stay.
Because gratitude didn’t just make me more positive.
It made me more stable.
More aware.
More alive in my own life.
And for a recovering pessimist like me, that’s everything.
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