dry turkey.

It’s that time of year again.  In small halls and church basements across the land, people are being grateful for their alcoholism.

Step 12: having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Being grateful for being an alcoholic is definitely something that didn’t appear on my radar during steps one through eleven.  That’s because it’s an attitude that only surfaced for me upon reflection, after exercising willingness, participating in fellowship, regularly talking to my sponsor, and believing and relying in a power greater than myself.

Sure, early on it was nice knowing that I was an alcoholic; that there was a name for why I couldn’t control my drinking.  I had a thinking disease, and I was administering my own medication.

And what did all my efforts accomplish?  It doubled the problem.  Not in size, but in volume.  I essentially created a problem to solve a problem. Leaving me with two problems.

Make no mistake:  they were both problems that existed long before I knew of them, and they were always and forever independent of each other before I started drinking.  I need to remember that “fixing” one doesn’t fix the other; it only makes the fixing of the other possible.  Which is everything.

Today, I’m grateful that I’m getting better at taking what I eat, and eating what I take.  And that goes for much more than just stuffing.