The Blessings We Mistake For Normal

There is a particular kind of privilege that is almost impossible to notice from the inside, because it doesn't feel like privilege. It feels like normal. It feels like how things simply are.

I did not grow up thinking of food, school, or healthcare as blessings. I grew up thinking of them as the baseline — the floor beneath which life does not fall, the assumed conditions against which everything else gets measured. It took years of being around people for whom that floor does not exist before I understood that I had been mistaking a gift for a given.

This is, I think, the central difficulty with gratitude as most people attempt to practice it. You cannot feel grateful for something you don't recognize as having been given to you in the first place. Gratitude requires first noticing that something could have been otherwise — that the floor you're standing on was not, in fact, guaranteed to anyone, including you. Most blessings hide from us specifically by never failing to show up. Their reliability is what disguises them.

I have started keeping a kind of inventory, mostly mental, of the things in my life that I once assumed were simply how things are. Having never had to choose between rent and a doctor's visit. Having never sat through a class wondering if I'd be allowed to finish the year. Having never watched someone I love struggle to breathe without immediate access to the medication that would fix it. Each one of these, once I actually looked at it directly, turned out to be a blessing I had been quietly mistaking for a baseline for most of my life.

I do not think this realization is supposed to produce guilt. I have said this before and I want to say it again, because I think it's easy to slide from this kind of reflection into something heavier and less useful than what it's actually meant to produce. The realization is supposed to produce attention — a sharper awareness of what you actually have, which is the only precondition for deciding, honestly, what you intend to do with it.

From the archive