Step Two- “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”
Recently I was asked to share on Step Two. Not my favorite step, it’s the one I sprint by on the way to Step Three, the really exciting one. So I had to take another look at it.
I have always disliked its use of the word “sanity.” I associate insanity, spoken with a wink, with the bundle of amusing eccentricities I like to think make me an attractive personality. Interesting, not ordinary. Another, more contemporary meaning seems to be “unusually advantageous,” as in “Their prices are insane.” “The party, the movie, the choice of appetizers was insane.”
If you have ever come near someone actually suffering from a mental disorder, you know that insanity is neither charming nor advantageous in any way. It is usually terrifying, painful, and desperate. In fact, it comes close to describing what I feel when my eating is out of control, when it is painful, maniacal, relentless, a situation of “incomprehensible demoralization,” to use Bill W’s all-too-accurate phrase.
So the promise of a higher power taking away my insanity with food is tremendous, hopeful news. As is the hint, in the word “restore,” that a pattern for sane eating and sane living survives somewhere within me and may be available to me, even now, through the grace of God.
MC
