Thoughts going into thanksgiving

I can’t help but thinking of the flip-side to gratitude going into this Thanksgiving; resentments. I need to deal with resentments by accepting what I can’t change. However, sometimes accepting defeat is also self-defeating. I resent alcohol. It’s healthy to resent my addictions. I’m not grateful for their existence. Drugs have radically shortened my life and damaged my brain. I had an atheist friend who stumbled with the first three steps of 12 step recovery. He used acceptance of alcoholism and his relative powerlessness to literally rationalize drinking himself to death. A few other friends in recovery killed themselves as well in the last year. I struggled to live instead.

I work in customer service, so my behavior does require I present a large degree of fakeness to my presentation. I need to be self-aware of my own truth, or I can rationalize toxic behavior. ‘To thy own self be true,’ it says on the back of the coins. I once read a daily thought from a wheelchair-bound Christian writer describing toxic positivity. To paraphrase it to the best of my recollection: “do not pretend evil is good.” I get that, and don’t even see it as abstract in its relation to Thanksgiving and mass social pressure towards declaring generic and/or false gratitude.

I have legitimate aspects to my life that I am grateful for. The key is that I am grateful to be alive and willing to struggle to live going forward. I was suicidal long before I drank, but drinking gave me a way of coping with being painfully anxious in my own skin. I don’t think I felt like I should legitimately be alive. I was completely self-absorbed. I felt inferior and with no merit to my living. I don’t need to drink to pass out anymore, which was the biggest reason I drank. I am alive and want to be alive. That’s a miracle for me. I’m not afraid to be alone in my thoughts. I don’t need a diet of brain candy, because I don’t need to obliterate my consciousness away. That is the most legitimate gratitude I can have. The more I want to live, the healthier my behavior progresses.