“I think it’s better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier.” — Dogma (1999)
When we first saw Step Two and read “restore us to sanity,” we didn’t feel insane. Who does? We sat around way too long asking ourselves, Am I crazy? Do people think I’m crazy? That line of thinking gave us more anxiety than answers.
Then we started hearing that it wasn’t about padded-room insanity — at least not yet. It was about the sanity of our drinking. We knew there was a solid chance we’d do something stupid if we drank. We might end up locked up, hurt, or worse… and we drank anyway. That’s the insanity of the first drink — running a dead theory again and hoping this time it would work.
We’re powerless against that. If we don’t use this current window of clarity to get some help, the odds are we’ll try to drink safely again. Maybe we make it back to AA. Maybe we don’t. So we admitted there was a crack in the system of our drinking.
At that point, we had a choice. We could exploit that crack — stay sober long enough to see what might actually happen — or we could seal it up and go back to the life we already knew. The one we hated.
So we stuck around to see what these AA folks were talking about. And it turned out we’d been making this way bigger than it needed to be. They told us: act yourself into right thinking. Pray in the morning and ask a Higher Power to keep you sober. Try to stay out of God’s way during the day. If you make it to bedtime sober, say thank you. Do it long enough, and the belief will catch up.
What if sanity isn’t about becoming “normal” — but just not taking that first drink today?
