June 8

HUMILITY MONTH: DAY 8: “If every moment is sacred, and If you are amazed and in awe most of the time when you find yourself breathing and not crazy, then you are in a state of constant thankfulness, worship and humility.” — Bernice Johnson Reagon

There are two new quotes this month that I totally and completely resonate with. This is the first of them. Every day I wake up excited for what is going to happen in this day…this next 24 hours. I held out the hope (my last loop hole) when I got here that if it got too tough without drugs and alcohol, I could step over the sanity line and get locked up in the looney bin. We still had them then, and I was a prime candidate. My most sincere and deepest fear (which, of course, I did not share for a long time after coming into these rooms!) was that I was crazy and that you would find out and that you would be required to do something drastic about that. I was so insane when I drank! I was talking with a friend the other day about the powerful construct we know as “denial” and told them about my really convoluted idea of what was going on with me when I drank. It was such a complex idea of insanity that terrified me! And it had nothing to do with alcoholism or drug addiction! I knew I used too much cocaine and I also knew that when I drank, I had to be prepared for never knowing what I was going to find when I came back to consciousness afterwards. I did not know what a blackout was, but I had them all the time. SO…I determined that I had multiple personalities and that the “other” personality was the problem. Now, let me say right here that I never, ever considered not doing drugs and drinking! Because the “other” personality was controlling what happened when I drank, I got a separate ID card for him…because he was the antithesis of who I believed myself to be when I was NOT drinking. I named him Herbert J. Schwartz, a little Jewish bastard (my language for him, not my opinion!) who was as far from the nice, Irish-Catholic girl I wanted to believe myself to be. Because I was beginning to go to jail and get into big-time trouble at this stage of the game, it was necessary to have an excuse, a reason, someone else I could blame. And I can honestly say, to this day, that I wait around to be sure Herbie is gone! One of my early recovery friends invited me to see if he ever came back, so far (30 years later) he has not. So I am grateful, today and every other day, for the loss of Herbie and that I have been restored to a seeming state of sanity. I was given, at about 90 days or so, the gift of learning that my head will always continue to have crazy ideas and thoughts, but that I was now free of the compulsion to take action based on what it had to tell me. This is such a tremendous gift! I am so very, very grateful for the life that gives me these freedoms and these gifts. I would probably still be locked up in prison for life if Herbie had been the only personality I ever got to run with.