After much thought and personal debate because it’s been a long year of night I have decided to give thanks.  Everyone is giving thanks for something right around this day, right up until they pass the gravy. How could I resist thought, debate, and gravy? 

The “winner” of my thanks is three-fold:  The backspace bar, ctrl+backspace bar, and the delete button.  (Note the Oxford comma there?) 

This year (and I am not kidding) I am grateful for the ability to backspace or delete.  I would rather remain on a blank page with a blinking cursor tempting me to “go on… go on… you know you want to say it!” than saying it, the satanic cursor that wants me to puke out every last thing I think or feel and make it public with the push of a button! “Go on… do it… it’ll feel so good, it’ll be okay….”  So I took up the keyboard and wrote terrible things, damning things on long pages of Word documents or little tweets or other social media platforms that zoom past where we are always in danger of being pushed off into an oncoming train. I wrote missives and critiques and opinions no one asked for while dabbing lukewarm coffee I spilled on the tablecloth or sucking Chinese food sauce from my fingers and (allegedly) from the keyboard from which I write this thing, the letters “j” and “g” are sticking…. 

I am grateful to be able to scream to the holy high heavens that everything sucks and I hate everything, that I am a miserable piece of shit and nothing matters, but the backspace button gives me space to take it all back before you see it. It allows me to wail and whine and cuss and be so damnably politically incorrect. I get to be petulant, pedantic, sexist, racist, ageist, uniformed, uneducated, illiterate and worse–boring! 

You don’t get to see that I still hit the @ key when I meant !  and that’s because the blessed backspace button exists. You don’t get to see my exposed private parts that disclose rage and horror in favor of vanilla and pablum.  (Somebody who reads this might know where that came from.)  

So, thank you, backspace and delete for allowing me to tailor my thoughts and words to be delicate, kind, favorable always.  I guess it’s what I believe everyone needs.  Thank you for giving me space to scream and throw things and give you a piece of my mind and then deleting it all because the world doesn’t need another angry woman. How could that be helpful in any way? Thank you for helping me sort out tornado thoughts from surgical words and maybe that’s not the right thing after all, but today is a day for grateful, for sharing, for embracing those we love who we haven’t seen in a long time where we keep our real words in purses on the floor in the bedroom and we don’t open them until we get home and we weep.  

Thank you, backspace delete for helping me figure out why.