Ugh but and also

My life has been exceptionally stupid lately. There were all the happenings I talked about in my two most recent posts and even more things since then. I decided to do a little gratitude writing exercise for myself using a format I made up. Not in a toxic positivity way, but in a "if I continue to only think about the bad things I will probably turn into a black hole of misery" way. It doesn't cover every bad thing that's happened recently, but I stopped after doing three because I was already feeling noticeably lighter. Since I found it helpful and liked what I ended up writing, I thought I'd share it here. Feel free to steal the "ugh but and also" format to try out for yourself, and let me know what you think of it! UGH, my day job was only able to give me 7 hours per week of work this semester. And one of my composition/theory students quit and the other reduced their lesson frequency*, so I went from making ~$700/month from teaching to now making ~$200 per month from teaching. BUT…