Inside The Big Book

[bluidkiti]

"Miracles"

"We, who have recovered from serious drinking, are miracles of mental health." ~Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th Edition, The Family Afterward, pg. 133~

A lot of people take the word miracle for granted. They say ?It is a miracle that I am still around after all of the crazy things I did?. But what does miracle really mean. Well if we look at the definition of the word, it means: a marvelous event manifesting a supernatural act of God (dictionary.com). So we that have recovered from serious drinking have had a marvelous event happen because of a supernatural act of God.

This marvelous event has happen in the mind! Oh yeah! That is where we were messed up! Our mental health was probably as poor as health can be. But see unlike any other chronic health problem, chronic mental health is not looked as something as serious as cancer, hepatitis C, or AIDS. Especially if the one who suffers from it seems to be normal in every other way.

See us alcoholics seem to be normal people who have episodes of mental incapability. To some effect that is true, but to me it seems as though the mental illness goes a lot deeper than that. See the inability to differentiate true and false could immediately be construed as mental illness. In fact you actually might be able to use that as a viable definition of insanity.

Einstein coined the definition of "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Let's take a look at what he was talking about. We alcoholics not only picked up the drink over and over again and expected something other than the undignified results we got almost every time we touched it, but we pretty much tried to do everything with that type of thinking.

How many of us lied and lied and expected people to believe us? How many of us cheated and cheated on a loved one and expected them to still be in love with us? How many of us got behind the wheel of a car and expected not to get a DUI? How many of us did completely asinine things and expected the people around us to be accepting of our actions? How many of us did all of this and had not one care of how our actions effected anyone other than ourselves?

A little story about how I used this insanity as a tool. People knew I was crazy even when I was a teenager. In fact one of my girlfriends called me ?Crazy Eddie?. That name stuck with me and as I grew older it seemed to fit more and more. I even had the name tattooed on my shoulder as a memento of how insane I really was.

So here I was this crazy person drinking and drugging. A person who really believed that he was a badass. I scared people with this mirage and expected them to act exactly the way I wanted them to. A lot of people bought the act, but I kept on wondering why it was that no one ever wanted to hang out with me. Oh yeah, there were the ones who tolerated my bad boy act, but they too were using a fa?ade to cover up who they really were. In fact they acted just as crazy as I did, some even more!

This act became so routine that it started to be normal for the cops to be waiting for me to stumble out of the bar just to cart me off to jail for public intoxication. Oh I knew it was going to happen, but blamed the cops for harassing me. Heck now that I think about it they were not only protecting the neighborhood, but also me from hurting myself. But see I expected something different to happen and it never did! My mental illness went a lot further than just drinking and drugging!

It wasn't until I finally read the words of step two: "Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity." ("How It Works" pg.59 Alcoholics Anonymous) that I started to understand that the problem I suffered from was insanity. Yeah I knew I was crazy, but didn't know why.

Well folks the why of it stands in knowing that this Power greater than ourselves has given us tools to survive in this world. If one uses those tools only to benefit himself/ herself, then they are being used for purposes they were not intended for. This causes extreme confusion in the mind and the results become what I have explained in the previous paragraphs.

Only God is capable of returning people like us to a state of mind that is relatively thought of as sane. That is if we are willing to let him! Then and only then do we become miracles of mental health!!!
--Ed C.