The most useful thing I learned last year was that the best antidote to stress is gratitude. It’s been scientifically proven that it is impossible to feel stress and gratitude at the same time.
Naturally, when we think of what we’re grateful for, our minds make a beeline for family. Go ahead and try it the next time anxiety creeps in. Think of how lucky you are to be surrounded by people you love, and watch your stress evaporate like the conspiracy theory of the week. Can I hear an Amen?
Last Christmas, my mother-in-law presented me and Doug with a DNA ancestry test kit. “Who’d be dumb enough to do this?” Doug scoffed after pulling off the wrapping paper. “He ya go, FBI! Help yourself to my DNA! Go ahead and frame me for whatever the f*ck you see fit!”
(Where one conspiracy theory dissolves, another is born.)
I, on the other hand, was intrigued. There are three good reasons for this. The first is that family is important to me, and if there are hidden members to my clan, I think it’d be cool to connect. Second, my great-grandmother once had her family tree professionally drawn, and although I can’t be certain about the reliability of family-tree research at the turn of the twentieth century, it revealed her origins in the Algonquian tribe with direct lineage (cover your ears, Mr. President) to Pocahontas. If there’s a single drop of Native American princess coursing through my veins, I want immediate confirmation of it. Third, as far as family trees are concerned, I think everyone ought to know how many degrees of separation exist between themselves and Kevin Bacon. And so, I promptly spit in the vile, licked the envelope and sent it off to Ancestry.
When the results came in, my family tree didn’t look like anything I’d expected. Pocahontas wasn’t even a leaf bud dangling from a branch (although the reason for this, I’m convinced, is because she never got around to registering with Ancestry.com. Kevin Bacon was nowhere in sight. However, the kid who sat next to me in Biology class from September 1988-June 1989—the same kid I bantered with as we inspected our twin DNA under a microscope but were too dumb to see the similarities—the same kid I once backhanded after his offhanded remark, to which Ms. Simpson sternly admonished, “I never want to see that kind of animosity in this classroom again”—was.
Back to the topic of family and gratitude. Scott Santa Maria, my long-lost fourth cousin with whom it’s highly likely that I share a pair of great-great-great grandparents—I am so, so, SO very grateful that we never dated.
Amen.