At some point on Thursday, you or somebody in your general vicinity will utter the question, “What are you thankful for this year?”  Sure, it might be worded differently, but it will nevertheless be some form of that cliched question.  And for most of us, it’s pretty easy to answer.  

When I say easy, what I mean to say is that your answer will be as cliched as the question.  You will say that you are thankful for your spouse, your kids, your job, your health, your house, blah, blah, blah.  If you already know the answer, why even ask the question, you know?  If you want to be interesting – or ask interesting questions – you should just go up to your dad, punch him in the stomach, and say, “Aren’t you thankful I didn’t punch you in the nuts?”  It would be a much more interesting question to ask this Thanksgiving.

I’m admittedly not a big holiday fan.  Most holidays are nothing more than stocking stuffers for Hallmark in my opinion.  They just don’t mean much to me (but they mean a hell of a lot to Hallmark.)  Think about a few of these before we get to the reason for this season.

• Valentines Day – I shouldn’t need to be told or made to feel obligated to treat my wife like a queen.  I should do it regardless.   She puts up with me EVERY day.  (Of course, I put up with HER every day, too.  Ha!) 
• Easter – Finding eggs inside candy should be something we all do weekly.  This is just amazing fun.  That’s the reason we celebrate Easter, right?
• Independence Day –  I’m pretty proud to be an American the other 364 days, too.  I don’t really need a specific day to focus on it. 
• My birthday.  Yeah, that’s just so stinking special I share the day with about thirty million people in the world.  Yippee!!

As for Christmas?  I hate it so badly that I physically detest the antiquated, totally impersonal, increasingly banal act of the family gift exchange.  Here’s an idea, family.  Why don’t we all just bring thirty dollars for each person and spend an hour trading money for other money that is exactly like it?  

“How thoughtful and nonconformist of you, Maw-Maw.  Two fives and two tens? I’ll cherish it always.”

And yes, I have been told to shut up and just smile through the gift exchange and try to not damage any teeth when, after the fifth family get-together and the fifth gift exchange, we can hardly close the back gate of the van and I can’t stand that I’m participating in enabling the materialistic reality of Christmas yet another year.  So I will grit my teeth as softly as I can and do as I am told.

On to Thanksgiving!!  This is not so much a Hallmark holiday, but it is certainly becoming more and more of a forgotten holiday, isn’t it?  (See the above two paragraphs on Christmas for the reasoning behind that.)  It has gotten so bad now that retailers have started Black Friday deals the weekend BEFORE Thanksgiving because thirty days isn’t enough time to plan and buy gifts for your baby mama’s third cousin Pookie’s nephew who really wants that Xbox game that you saw on page eight of his Christmas wish list.  He could give a rat’s ass who actually gives him the gift, he just wants the damn game.  Greedy little craphead.  And you fall for it!!  We ALL fall for it!!

Anyway, I’m still pissed off about Christmas and it isn’t even here yet.  But let’s focus on Thanksgiving for a moment, specifically that question that you or somebody you know will ask and/or answer come Thursday.  You know, that question that sums up the entire reason for the holiday? 

What are you thankful for this year? 

Seems like an easy question to answer, right?  For most people, it absolutely is.  They can and should list their spouse, their kids, their job, having all their basic needs met, whatever.  

But what if somebody is asked that question Thursday and they don’t know the answer?  What if they have no idea what they should be thankful for this year?  What if they hate Thanksgiving because of this inability to be grateful?  What if it’s just been a crappy year and they just can’t do gratefulness right now?

If you have no ability to empathize with how this scenario is even possible, please add that to the list of things you are thankful for this year.  This is most definitely a real thing for a lot of people.  Sometimes it’s depressingly hard to find even a single thing for which you are thankful.

I’ve been there.  This year, luckily, I’m not, but if you’re struggling with giving thanks this year, I hope this article helps.  You’ll soon see that pretty much everything you can ever be thankful for falls under a very small number of categories.  This is a good thing.  If you’re struggling with giving thanks, you need to dial in your focus a little.  Start simple.  Find one or two.  Allow those to light a little positivity fire.  Fan that flame with a few others.  By the time Thanksgiving is here, you will be one of the most unique people in the world.

You will be in a very select group of people who actually respect the intent of the holiday by giving proper, heartfelt thanks.  And remember this:  Blessings appear where needs or wants exist.  Sometimes you need to sit down and focus on exactly what those needs and wants are so that you can determine if there is already a blessing there that you’ve somehow missed.

As mentioned earlier, there are very few categories we need to address to find all of the areas where you might be able to find blessings for which you are able to give thanks.  There are only five.  No matter how difficult you want to be with respect to an argument that there are more than five, I would argue that “simple” is the goal here.  Five is more than enough.  If you’re struggling to give thanks this year, simple is good.  So here are the five simple categories that most of your blessings (or their opposite, trials and tribulations) fall under:  

• Physical Blessings
• Mental Blessings
• Emotional Blessings
• Spiritual Blessings
• Social Blessings

Let’s break each one down a little.  I’m willing to bet you can find something to be thankful for under each one.

Physical Blessings

This one is the most obvious.  This is your physical health.  How is it?  If you have no complaints, you are one of the luckiest people on Earth.  If you don’t have an ache or pain or crink or boo boo or a weight problem or a heart problem or a tummy problem or whatever, you are damn lucky.  Be immensely thankful for that.  If you have four limbs and twenty digits, and they all work, be thankful for that.  If you are struggling to find thankfulness, you absolutely must start with the mundane and obvious.  At the very least, get them out of the way so you can find something deep and transformative for which to be thankful.

So what happens when you can’t be thankful for perfect health?  What are you thankful for if you have a bum knee or chronic back pain or gluten is giving you hell or god forbid you have cancer or multiple organ failure or dementia?  How in the world can you be thankful for that?

You can’t.  Don’t try to find the sugar-coating because typically that means you’re scratching and clawing for answers to why it happened to you.  So don’t do that.  Say it sucks and move on.  Yeah, you can say, “Well it could be worse,” but can’t everybody on the planet say that about something?  Whether it is depression that has led you to this place or you’re on the tracks heading there, you can’t build a case for thankfulness of your physical condition if you are lying to the jury.  And guess who sits on the jury?  You and you alone (and your doctor to some extent.)

The other aspect of being thankful for your physical health is the question of whether or not you can fix it.  If you are overweight because you eat terribly, you are nothing more than a victim of your own manufactured misery.  Be honest with yourself.  If you have a thyroid problem and that is the cause of the weight issues, then you do not fit in that example.  Otherwise, you might.  Take an inventory of your entire physical health.  Find something good.  Find something else about which you need to set some goals.

Most people can fix a good many things associated with their physical health.  If you can’t, and you’re so hung up on it that you will NEVER be thankful for your physical health, skip this one and move on.  If you CAN fix it, be thankful that you have the ability to do so.  However, recognizing that you have control over certain aspects of your physical health can be a severe depressant if you aren’t particularly strong on the mental side of this blessing pentagon.  It takes some mental fortitude to change your physical hardships.  Trust me on that one.  I’ve been living in that Groundhog Day for years.  And that is exactly why that one comes next.

Mental Blessings

How tough are you mentally?  How WELL are you mentally?  That second one is the bigger question.

What is addressed repeatedly every time you hear about a mass shooting or a father that kills his children or a teenager that commits suicide?  You hear everybody questioning their mental health, right?  This is a completely viable question.  And it probably has a perfectly concrete answer.  The problem is that nobody will ever know that answer, even if the killer is still alive.  And do you know why?  Because the only person that will ever be able to understand the human mental condition of every sick (or healthy) person is God.  The person on Earth that is a close second?  The mentally ill person himself.  He is the only one intimately familiar with his own mind, no matter how twisted and sick it is.

I have this belief about mental illness that is probably not too far-fetched and it is probably shared by a lot of actual professionals.  Most people with mental illness have fully functioning cognitive abilities, right?  They know what’s going on, they know what they’re doing, they have no trouble conversing with people, they are fully capable of driving a car or cooking a meal, etc.  Whatever their illness affects, it does not effect their daily functionality.  Think depression, anxiety, mild personality disorders, eating disorders, addiction, etc.  These are still functional humans, even if they have some major issues.

What that means is that they have the capacity to “let people in” only to the point where anything incriminating is deemed harmless or treatable.  That means that they are the ONLY person on Earth who can fully diagnose their problem.  And that means they are still – to the outside world anyway – completely normal.

And WHY are they completely normal?  Because the experts say that one in five people suffer from mental illness ranging from mild to severe.  That’s more common than left-handed people.  Are THEY not normal?

All of that is to suggest that there is quite literally only one person who can diagnose your level of thankfulness over your mental condition.  That person is you.  If your mental health feels pretty healthy, if you are able to force yourself to do stuff you dislike via the willpower of your own mind, if you can rationalize good and bad and right and wrong, if your focus is sustained and your thoughts mostly positive and your self-esteem average, and if you have an innate desire to better yourself every day, you should be damn thankful.

Emotional Blessings

Depending on what link you want to click on or what study you want to peruse, different people will tell you there are anywhere from four basic emotions to as many as twenty-seven.  I knew I couldn’t write this article and talk about how to find thankfulness in dozens of different emotions, especially when we’re focusing on chiseling even the most minute thankfulness out of a stone unwilling to allow it, so I chose the one that had no author.  Seriously, nobody is taking credit for this, but it’s concise and inclusive (and pretty obvious, honestly.) Let’s look at each one briefly.

1.  Anger – Pretty simple question with this one.  How much anger do you live with daily?  I’m willing to bet that most of those things that make you angry are either not worthy of your anger or, in the case of anger towards another person, can be fixed with a simple, open, honest conversation.  Be thankful that the cure for most anger is actually pretty easy.
2.  Sadness – What makes you sad?  If it is something that required you to complete the stages of grief, did you chicken out on them?  Was sadness just easier than saying goodbye?  If you can let something or somebody go whose loss saddened you, that is a blessing.  Be thankful you have the mental health to say goodbye and then look back with happiness, not sadness.  If your sadness is more in the form of a general daily malaise, that’s one you’ll have to tackle yourself.  But it goes back to that first question.  What makes you sad?
3.  Fear – I’ve written a lot about this one.  Fear has consumed me since the day I got sober (and all the years before.)  I’m thankful for it because it has taught me that those things which scare me are the things I know I absolutely must do.  If you can smile at fear and just say, “Bring it,” that’s a blessing.  It’s a second blessing if you are able to follow through on squashing the fear.
4.  Joy – Every person on Earth knows what joy feels like.  If you don’t, you sure as hell wouldn’t be reading this article.  So you know what joy feels like.  Are you joyous?  If not, what is standing in the way?  You have to discover it before you can fix it.
5.  Interest – If you like your family, your job, your house, etc, and those things interest you enough that you do not show apathy towards them, you know the feeling of interest.  It is those people that know nothing but apathy who cannot claim a blessing here.  In addition, do you have a hobby you enjoy?  That means you have interest in something.  That’s a blessing.
6.  Surprise – This is not only the blessing of FEELING surprise, it is also the blessing of wanting to deliver it.  If you’re married and have no interest in surprising your spouse, your heart is beginning to decay.  But if you love to surprise your significant other, your children, or even your coworker, you have some emotional health.  That’s a blessing.
7.  Disgust – Pretend you’re watching the news tonight and the first story is about genocide in a third world country.  The next story is about the guy that killed his two little girls and his pregnant wife.  The third story is about maggots crawling out of a fast food hamburger.  Do these disgust you?  If so, you’re in tune with your emotional side.  That’s good.  Now think about yourself.  Have you done something that still, maybe even years later, disgusts you?  That’s bad.  Work towards forgiving yourself.
8.  Shame – Same basic scenario as the second half of disgust, only shame is a more hollow, painful emotion.  It’s much quieter than disgust.  It rests on your spirit like a thousand pound weight.  But you don’t talk about shame the way you may other emotions.  Shame is deep-rooted and VERY difficult to strip away.  Even if you still have shame, if you can leave this article feeling like you can ask for help in cleansing you of that shame, that’s a blessing.  You should be thankful for your willingness to seek help.

Spiritual Blessings

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this one.  Spiritual health is a personal feeling of closeness with whatever higher power you choose to believe in, even if it is the absence of one.  If you have an intimate relationship with your creator, that is a blessing.  It means you realize your own insignificance, but it also means you know how significant you can be to others.  It means you have allowed the power of the spirit inside you to empower you to become a self-reliant, self-validated machine.  Spiritual blessings equate to a spiritual confidence.   If you possess that, you are indeed blessed.  You should be thankful for that.

You will also notice that there is a theme in this article.  Only you can determine your own blessings.  You already know if you possess spiritual blessings, even before reading the words I used to try to describe it.  Be thankful for that knowledge.

Social Blessings

This one is mainly going to focus on a series of questions that only you can answer.  And if you can’t answer them positively, you either have to decide whether you have the power to change them or the power to never let them bother you again.  The reason that last option is there is because you have never – and will never – have the ability to control other people.  Stop trying.  It is simply not worth your effort or mental health to worry about idiots you can’t control.

So here’s the questions.  Answer them honestly.  Then ask if you can do anything about it.

• Do you have at least one friend? (And no, this does NOT mean a social media friend.)  Do you have a friend who would go to jail with you, for you, because of you, or in protection of you?
• Do you have a family that loves you?  (Notice this does not say that you have to love them in return.  Remember, we’re trying to go simple. You can worry about your family issues Friday.)
• Are you proud of the effort you put in at your job?  (Notice I did not say, “Do you love your job?” Most people who are searching for thankfulness do not have a positive view of their job.  But you can be proud of your effort even when you hate the job.)
• Is your education sufficient to change jobs if you so desired?  If not, is that door still open?
• Are you embarrassed to be around people, whether those people are known to you or unknown to you?  If so, why?
• Do you have access to everything you need to survive?
• Do you have access to things that entertain you or otherwise make you happy or fulfilled?  (Notice again that it does not say you take advantage of these things. We are only asking about having access to them.  Think simple. Really, really simple.)

Here’s an addendum to the last two questions.  Are the ways in which your needs are met a source of pride, comfort, contentment, or embarrassment for you?  In other words, are you proud of where you live or the condition of your house?  Are you embarrassed at your monthly grocery budget?  If yes to either of these, why? And if you can honestly say that you are content with your place on this Earth, that is an extreme source of pride.

In the realm of social thankfulness, most of the time there is (or was) an element of control that you either have or once had.  Money, whether the situation is good or bad, can usually be traced back to how well you performed in school, what job you chose, what financial decisions you made, etc.  Not always, but often.  Where you live can either be familial in nature or what was at one time borne out of necessity.  Your ability to make, keep, or increase the number and quality of friends is often based on social skills learned and developed long ago, but there is a definitive mental health side to friends, especially in that of making friends.  If you have no confidence in social settings, making friends is nearly impossible.

Once again, though, go simple if you are struggling to give thanks this year.  Be thankful for that one friend, that house that will never be much bigger but at least it has a good roof and electricity, that family member that still sends five dollars in your birthday card like you’re still eight years old.

It is completely trite and commonplace to say, “Look at what you have that other people don’t,” and while it pains me to write something so pedestrian and finish with it, if that is not one of the most accurate statements in the Cliche Hall of Fame, I’m really not sure what surpasses it.  It’s just so true.  Find those little things, and I’m betting a bigger truth will emerge.

In Conclusion

I sincerely wish you a happy Thanksgiving.  If you read this article because giving thanks is difficult for you, I especially hope you celebrate the hell out of it.  The holiday itself can mean nothing.  It doesn’t really matter if you love Thanksgiving or hate it.  It doesn’t matter at all.  But if you can learn to be thankful even when you hate everything around you, including yourself at times, and you can do it in November or May or August, you’ll never dread the holiday season again.  And that is definitely something to be thankful for.