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It’s Friday and I feel lazy. So I’m going to keep this one short and sweet. I just wanted to pass along something I heard this week that I found quite helpful.
I was at a meeting a few days ago and a guy told his recovery journey story, and he kept using the phrase “Troubled mind, sensitive heart” to describe himself.
Wow, that hit home. It describes me through most of my life—definitely during my drinking and drugging days, and even in sobriety some weeks. The day I heard that guy say it, it helped just to be at a meeting and hear somebody say something relatable, something I can identify with, something that reminds me I am not unique. It’s not like those four words add up to an incredible piece of advice that will change my life too much. Those words sure helped me the day I heard them, though.
Let me unpack that phrase a bit. I do have a troubled mind. It’s not that I think I have horrific thought patterns that are dangerous or anything, but my brain is toxic sometimes. I can get super judgmental, or gossipy, and I definitely can rack up resentments in a hurry. I think about this all the time, but I’ll say it again: The most seductive, potentially dangerous voice I have ever heard is my own. I can convince myself of just about anything. That falls under the definition of a troubled mind, in my humble opinion.
Now for the sensitive heart part… I do have a sensitive heart, which I interpret as being empathetic but also thin-skinned. As the old saying goes, I have a big ego and low self-esteem some days, and that is a bad mix. I try to work really hard in recovery to not take life so damn seriously, to let things roll off my back and be able to laugh at myself when I goof up.
That ain’t always easy. I don’t have a dog, and I found a mound of dog crap in my yard the other day and was ready to go try to buy a dog DNA kit to try to trace this tremendous insult back to whoever dared allow something like that. I took it as a deep insult that someone would let their dog drop a deuce in my yard. Don’t they know who I am?!?!
A few hours later, after it had rained pretty hard for awhile, I walked down my driveway and, voila, the dog bomb was gone! And so was my sensitive heart’s irate reaction to it.
ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE DAY
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
HEARD AT MEETINGS:
“When I go to one AA meeting a week, I can stay sober. When I go to two meetings a week, I start to like myself. When I go to at least three meetings a week, other people begin to like me.”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, June 2001, Thomas W. from Missoula, Montana)
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