One morning this past winter, during a depression, I was meditating downstairs in my bedroom while my wife was eating breakfast upstairs in the kitchen. She sneezed, and my initial reaction was annoyance (not the most spiritual reaction, but human enough). Immediately following the irritation was fear: “Oh no, I just felt annoyed at my wife for sneezing, what do I do? I’m so unspiritual, so far behind everyone else in the spiritual life. Why do I have these terrible thoughts?” After the fear came unreasonableness: maybe I should ask my wife not to sneeze while I’m meditating. Ask and ye shall receive, right? That’s part of my spiritual practice today; asking for what I need, being direct. This is all healthy stuff. Right?

This is depression for me. At least it’s a part of it. Every thought and feeling carries huge significance. And I get crazy.

I called my sponsor and told him I was thinking of asking my wife not to sneeze while I was meditating. I said that part of me thought this sounded a little crazy and I needed confirmation from an objective source. “Yes,” my sponsor said, “you’re crazy.”

Of course I was. But what’s scary is that I remember that part of me really believed I should actually tell my wife not to sneeze while I was meditating. This is why I can’t live the spiritual life in isolation: because I’m insane. Not only that, but I usually don’t even know that I’m insane, and I have to have someone else point it out to me. This can only happen if I have the courage and willingness to share myself with another.

Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions says, about Step Five, “experience has taught us we cannot live alone with our pressing problems and the character defects which cause or aggravate them… We have to talk to somebody about them” (55). A very spiritual man once told me that Step Five is about transparency. It is about coming out of hiding. It is about losing my secret self, and the ego I’ve constructed to protect it, in order to find my true self, a wondrous, beautiful, and (sigh) imperfect child of God, full of light and faith and love.

I can’t say anything miraculous happened the day I called my sponsor to have him confirm my insanity, unless it was that I was able to let go of my ego for a while, or at least to loosen my grip on it a little, enough so that I could feel some space between it and myself—which may be as good as it gets.