I logged into the New York State Department of Labor website to check on my payout status.

Three times I went through the process to set up direct deposit for my unemployment benefits.

Three times instead, the state loaded my benefits on a debit card.

Exasperation set in. How do I pay my mortgage on a debit card? How about my utilities? Everything is set up as an auto payment through my checking account. Why can’t the state just deposit the money into my bank account? Please? Pretty please?

I let out a deep sigh. And then I felt gratitude.

Because I was receiving my unemployment benefits. I already had two payments processed. Additionally, I had some savings and help from my family, something so many people don’t have in good times, let alone times of crisis. I would be down but OK financially.

That’s not the case for everyone. I know people who have called more than 400 times to get their benefits set up. People for whom the website wasn’t working or for some random reason needed to call an office in Albany that’s been overloaded. There are people still waiting to file their unemployment. So while it may be inconvenient and a hassle for me to go to one bank with my debit card to withdraw money and then go to my bank to deposit that money, at least I have my money.

I can be grateful and frustrated at the same time.

Multiple things can be true.

And it’s a lesson I’m learning more and more from both grieving my mom and living in COVID-19 quarantine.

In the past year, I’ve read a lot about the power of gratitude with practical tips, like keeping a gratitude journal or thinking of three things you are grateful for that day. At dinner, I installed a “gratitude moment” where we all say something we’re grateful for that day. As an outgrowth it usually leads to deeper conversation, because gratitude, I’m finding, is a rich, full, complex feeling that leads to interesting places.

For me, in gratitude I find my humility. In gratitude, I find my human-ness. Because as I’ve learned, multiple things can be true and they are often true at the same time.

From time to time, I get upset with myself. Usually it’s for silly things, like eating too much junk food. Other times it’s for having feelings of anger or jealousy that I want to move past. Lately, at these times when I’m journaling the story of those feelings, when I’m explaining why I must be a horrible person, I hear the gentle, matter-of-fact voice of my therapist saying, “OK. So, you’re human and you had a human moment.”

And I smile.

Because ain’t that the truth.

There are certain truths about being human. We stumble and make mistakes. We have feelings and emotions. But those things are neither good nor bad in and of themselves. It’s part of being in this human body, having this human experience at this particular moment in time.

In addition, multiple things can be true. I think of my mom, who could win a gold medal in the Worst Case Scenario Olympic Games but find the lone patch of brightness in a dark grey sky or find wonder in the seemingly overnight transition of buds into leaves. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Song of Myself:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman

Which brings me back to gratitude. Because gratitude, for me, forces me to see the flip side. Life it not all love and light. I sit with the difficult feelings — grief, sadness, confusion, pain, jealousy — because they are part of the human experience. And as I sit with them, I can find the moments of gratitude, I can find the contradictions and the multitudes that lie within me.