by Rachel Leland

In November of 2015, I was in month six of what ended up being 13 months of intense mold treatment (on top of Lyme treatment).

I wasn’t allowed to even step foot inside any building that hadn’t been cleared for mold. No shopping malls, no movie theaters, not even a grocery store.

I was a prisoner in my apartment and I didn’t like it one bit. At that time, I could easily list off all the things going wrong in my life—and was hard-pressed to acknowledge anything about it that was good.

A gentle reminder

One day, I muttered to one of my practitioners that I wasn’t going to hold my breath for any of my various treatments to work. That’s when she gently reminded me how healing it can be to focus on the good, not the bad, in our lives. For days after our conversation, I thought about what she said.

There WERE good things about my life. Fortunately, I lived in a mold-free apartment. I had supportive parents. A brother who texted me funny things that happened to him throughout the week to keep my spirits up. A boyfriend who tremendously helped me through the mold treatment and did all the shopping, making it possible for me to stay out of buildings. And friends who came over to keep me company.

And the more I purposely thought about those things, and felt thankful for them, the easier it was to find other positive things about my situation. This all went down at the end of November. With my new way of thinking, I got an idea of how to decorate my very first Christmas tree away from my parents’ house.

Creating ornaments

I made what I called “gratitude ornaments” –pieces of colored paper with Christmas ribbon attached to them. I made 25 blank ones, and each day leading up to Christmas, I would think about something I was truly grateful for that day, write it on the ornament and place it on the tree. On Day One, for instance, I wrote: Thankful for my amazing parents who never give up on helping me.

The healing power of gratitude

Throughout the month, my tree grew more and more colorful, until by Christmas Day, it was blooming with wonderful, positive aspects about my life. On the good days it filled me with happiness to see all those things I was grateful for. On the bad days, it was a lifeline.

Many times that Christmas season, I found myself standing in front of the tree, re-reading what I was grateful for, to remind me that things weren’t only bad.

Skipping a day?

On one particularly tough day, I sat at my desk, staring at my blank gratitude ornament, thinking that I couldn’t possibly find a single thing to be thankful for. At this point, my food allergies were at their worst, and nearly every week I lost another one of the precious few foods I could still eat. At times, the agony of losing yet another food was unbearable. I contemplated skipping that day and not putting any ornament on the tree.

But I knew that wasn’t how it worked. I had to find something to be grateful for. And finally I knew what it was—I was thankful for stevia. It was something I could still eat and it was the only thing I could use in cooking to make food sweet. So up there on my Christmas tree, along with being thankful for my family, friends, and all these other good things in my life—was stevia.

The healing power of gratitude

And I’m still thankful for stevia today!

After Christmas was over, I took down my 25 gratitude ornaments and placed them in a bag labeled Christmas 2015. In 2016, 2017, and 2018, I repeated the process. Now, in 2019, for the fifth year in a row, my little tree is in its place of honor and I’ve started filling it once more with what I’m grateful for.

(I’ll give you a hint about something that’s included. That boyfriend I mentioned earlier is now my husband!)

I plan to keep all of my gratitude ornaments–forever–so that I can look back each year and see the 25 best things about my life at that moment in time.

And every year, I’ll write down the things I’m thankful for and watch as my little tree gets filled with happiness each day because of it.

Gratitude ornament tree, 2018

Rachel Leland has dealt with Lyme-related health issues since 2005. Now 28, she resides in Arizona. She happily reports that these days she can go anywhere and can eat pretty much anything she wants to!  On Instagram, she’s ResilientlyRachel.