Making Myself Crazy

This morning I sat alone in my living room, drinking coffee and reading the paper. Everything was fine. Slowly I began to think about the man in my life and began to imagine a scenario where in which my feelings don’t matter. I began to write the script in my head and fill in the details: what he’d say and then what I’d say. Pretty soon I had one hand on my hip and I was telling him exactly what he could do with his life without me in it.

I looked around and I was still on the couch, newspaper on my lap and a cold cup of coffee. My body was flooded with adrenaline and cortisol and the day had begun to feel different.

I did that all by myself. My own little mind-body chemistry set. Mind and mood altering chemicals with out a pill or a glass or a needle.

If there is any good news in this crazy scenario is it that I saw this; I realized what I had just done and the very uncomfortable effect on my body and my mood and I got up and went to pray.

Please restore me to sanity. Please help me to change the things I can—which include the fantasy stories I tell myself and the movies I make up just to rock my own world.

Holy cow—it’s the thinking more than the drinking!

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.”