Saying No

I’ve come to this place again and again in my recovery. I have a rich and active life with work, art, friends and community. There is always something more that I want to learn or try. And then I cross some line and wham! I am overwhelmed and I need to back off from some things. But, in truth, there is always a pretty ugly moment before I realize that I need to back off—and it’s a kind of denial: I want to believe that I can fit 36 hours into 24 and I say “Yes” too much and “No” not enough.

I’ve come to this place again. And so I am having to practice my “No’s”. So borrowing from the anti-clutter advice books I’ve set a daily goal of saying “No” to three things each day—they can be large –I resigned from a class today—or small—saying “no” to a tidy laundry room, or no to my “need” to send a birthday card on time.

Three NO’s a day. Like vitamins for sanity.

Step Two Restored to Sanity

My prayer has been to be restored to sanity. Working the program and steps and getting outside help and still I see myself caught. Caught in a web. Fear of abandonment and a feeling of my own defectiveness are woven together and I fight to get free. It’s hard to know whether my fears led me to a relationship that is not good for me or is it that my fears conspire to drive me away from someone who loves me? How do I know what is fear and what is God or good for me?

The answer that I know is that quiet and stillness will allow me to hear God, and that if I avoid all compulsive behavior I will feel what I need to feel. “Sit still and feel.” Isn’t that a slogan too? “Trust the process” and “Don’t leave before the miracle happens.” are also slogans that come to my struggling mind this morning.

Came to Believe in Us and Sanity

For the past two weeks I have been actively praying to be restored to sanity. That intense desire came after a close look at what I do to myself with my own thinking and after a closer examination of how deep and pervasive this thinking addiction is.

After many attempts to restore myself to sanity I remembered that we are, in Step Two, asking God to restore us to sanity. God, not me. I also noticed that it is “us” that is being restored. Not me. Us. Now there is a thought: We are being restored to sanity is different than I am being restored to sanity. If my AA community and my home group and my recovery peers and my friends are being restored to sanity collectively then we must depend on each other to stay sane in any situation. That’s why we make phone calls and raise our hands and listen really hard. On any given day only one or some of us may be sane so they carry the “we” and the “us” for that day. The next day it may be my turn and the next day it’s yours. But “we” are restored.

The other startling realization that I had came yesterday sitting in a theater in New York City. I was watching Equus---the play by Peter Shaffer about a 17 year-old boy who is in a mental hospital in the care of a psychiatrist. He has blinded eight horses and the psychiatrist has to make sense of this and has to restore him to a normal life. But in the helping and the healing the question arises in the psychiatrist: what will be the cost to passion and individuality when the cure has occurred? The boy can be made to fit society and he could be one of us again but at what cost to the life energy, passion, and primitive force that are truly him—however destructive that may be.

I have been praying over and over, “restore me to sanity” and to my thinking God has not been working fast enough. But in one minute at The Broadhurst Theater in New York City I thought, “Trust God on this one. Trust him to restore what he will and leave what he will because only he can see what is happening in this surgery.”