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Zane from the Point of Pines, Revere

I keep thinking of a kid from the Point of Pines who isn’t with us anymore. I’m not sure why this ghost is in my head, because we weren’t exactly friends.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:1GnCH2KszUkpUjXuDP2G3N]

The kid’s name was Zane. I believe the last name was Mead, though I’m not sure if there’s an E at the end. He was what you would picture as a classic stoner kid. I think he was on something every time I ran into him. He hung out with some of the tougher kids in the neighborhood. But he was never mean. Not to me, anyway.

In fact, I always detected a heart of gold inside him. Unfortunately, that heart of gold had a huge hole at its center and he tried to fill it with all kinds of substances. That’s what I remember, anyway.

I distinctly remember how, right after my brother died in 1984, he came by our house to pay his respects.

He lived in a very small house on Delano Ave., near my friend John Edwards. The neighborhood crazy lady lived at the other end of that street. Her name was Zelda. I always felt sorry for her, because she took a lot of ridicule and the fact of the matter was that the poor lady suffered from severe mental illness. Yesterday I wrote about how I was putting that term to rest and using “struggle” instead, but mental illness is the appropriate language in Zelda’s case.

Rumor has it she died of suicide, though I was never able to confirm that.

I used to see Zane walking the streets alone, looking lost. I guess he was. I remember how he’d stumble onto the school bus in the morning, cigarette hanging from his lips, and collapse into one of the very back seats.

I seem to remember him getting worse around 1988. That year, he went to the top of an apartment building off Shirley Avenue and dived off.

I keep thinking about what a waste that was, and it makes me sad.

I remember a lot of kids being torn up over his death. Understandable, especially given how his life ended. To this day, I’m convinced his death wasn’t one of simply giving up. I think he was just so sick at that point that he was no longer in control of his actions. I’m pretty certain that as he jumped from that roof, his real mind and soul wasn’t in there.

My friend Dan took the death hard. He and Zane used to be neighbors, and they were close.

What really sucks is that less than a decade later, Dan would have to experience another close friend taking his life. I never appreciated until recently what a nightmare that must have been for him. That latter suicide hit me like a knife, and I’ve written about it often in this blog. But Dan had to feel what I felt TWICE in his life. That he bounced back from that is a real testament to his inner strength.

Dan and I have been lucky. We’ve led different lives since Sean Marley’s death and fell out of touch until recently, thanks to Facebook. But we’ve led productive, rich lives full of music and children.

I like to think those experiences of loss helped us grow in ways that made us better people today.

I wish I had made the effort to know Zane back then. I doubt I would have been able to help him, especially with that shallow, 18-year-old brain I had at the time. But he seems like someone who would have been a good friend.

The heart was there.

His life ended early, but his days on this Earth were not a waste. I remember that his tight circle of friends really cared for him.

He did something to make them feel that way.

I hope that by writing about him here, I’m honoring his memory.

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‘Mental Illness’ Must Die

I’ve used the term mental illness in this blog a lot. Doing so has made perfect sense, since Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a form of mental illness that has sparked plenty of depressive episodes in my life. But I’m thinking it’s time to stop packaging my struggle this way.

In fact, from here on out, I’m using the word “struggle” where I would normally use “mental illness.” I’m starting to realize a couple things: One is that EVERYONE has their special struggle, whether it’s depression, alcoholism or an addiction to gambling and pornography. I’m also starting to realize that the term “mental illness” is too limiting and defining for people.

I’m learning this in two places: My 12-Step program and the Cursillo group I’m in. Go to both places and listen to people for awhile and it’s clear everyone has their cross to carry. For one man, it’s a severely disabled daughter. For someone else, there’s the estrangement from a child. For another, it’s a battle with cancer.

For me, it’s been OCD, a binge-eating addiction and the struggles of Crohn’s Disease and the early death of friends and family. In OA, everyone with a binge-eating addiction tells a similar life story of difficulty.

God’s taking me to school again. With each new experience, I realize I’m no more special than anyone else. We all struggle, we all fail and we all grow whether we want to or not.

Since we’re all so much alike, using labels is becoming too problematic for me.

This isn’t a new concept. I know therapists who refuse to label patients with the diagnosis of a certain mental disease. The worry is that those patients make it a handy label to show off whenever the going gets tough.

Call it a case of me getting over myself.

Or simply learning something new and adjusting my tactics as any smart person would do.

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Happily Ever After Is Bullshit & That’s OK

Often, when depression slaps me upside the head, it’s on the heels of a prolonged period of good feelings and positive energy. Especially this time of year, when the daylight recedes early and returns late. These setbacks can be discouraging, but you can survive them with the right perspective.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/NqTuN-35580

It’s easy for people who fight mental illness and addictive behavior to go on an endless, futile search for the happily ever after, where you somehow find the magic bullet to murder your demons, thus beginning years of bliss and carefree existence.

I’m sorry to tell you this, folks: That line of thinking is bullshit.

There’s no such thing as happily ever after. If you want it that badly, go watch a Disney film.

I used to grope around for eternal happiness in religious conversion. But some of my hardest days came AFTER I was Baptized a Catholic. I eventually found my way to abstinence and sobriety and got a pretty good handle on the OCD. But there have been plenty of sucky days since then.

The slide back into depression this past weekend was an example.

I like to think of these setbacks as growing pains. We’re supposed to have bad days to test the better angels of our nature. We’re supposed to learn how to move forward despite the obstacles that used to make us hide and get junked up. When you can stay sober and keep your mental disorders in check despite a bad day, that’s REAL recovery.

This is where I consider myself lucky for having had Crohn’s Disease. That’s a chronic condition. It comes and goes. But you can reach a point where the flare ups are minimal.

It’s the same with mental illness and addiction. You can’t rid yourself of it completely. But you can reach a point — through a lot of hard work and leaps of Faith — where the episodes are minimal.

The depression flared up this weekend, just like the Crohn’s Disease used to. But I’m better now. And I didn’t have to take a drug like Prednisone to get there. I just needed a little extra sleep.

Prozac, therapy and the 12 Steps have helped me immensely. But they don’t take the deeper pain at your core away. These things just help you deal with the rough days without getting sucked back into the abyss.

The depression I experienced this weekend felt more like a flare up of arthritis than that desperate, mournful feeling I used to get. It was a nag, but it didn’t break me. It used to break me all the time.

That’s progress.

Maybe I’m not happy forever after, but that’s OK. My ability to separate the blessings from the bullshit has improved considerably in the last five years.

That’s good enough for me.

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The Positive Man’s Mask

My boss and good friend John Gallant once told me I’m one of the most positive people he knows. I was keeping a sunny disposition despite the Internet being down or something like that. I’m definitely a sunnier person than I used to be. To be truthful, though, sometimes it’s just an act.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukHqzqZOe7g&fs=1&hl=en_US]

What brings me to that line of thinking is the crime wave of depression that hit me this weekend. It was pretty bad this time; possibly the worst I’ve felt all year.

I can’t quite put my finger on what caused it. I wasn’t angry with anyone or about anything in particular. It didn’t help that the days were mixed with teases of sunshine that were snatched away by some thick clouds. When the weather does that, it’s like someone reneged on a promise to bring me light. My eating was fine, typically in keeping with my 12-Step program. So what gives?

Far as I can tell, the problem was a serious sleep deficit. Last week was a busy one, with travel, a lot of writing and editing, and appointments. The writing usually energizes me. The appointments, not so much. I was averaging five hours of sleep per night, which has usually served me well. But as I get older, I’m having more trouble getting rest right.

Could it be that rising at 4 a.m. is becoming harmful to my mental polarity, knocking the brain chemistry too far out of whack for the medication to keep up with? I hope not, because that’s my favorite time of day for writing.

Fortunately, my brand of depression isn’t the suicidal kind. I don’t crawl into a dark corner and lament the day I was born. I do get withdrawn. I get very serious, and I do tire more easily. There’s this weird thing that happens with my vision. StarWarsEpisodeIII_1.jpg

I can see everything, but there’s a haze. It’s like I’m staring at someone but staring into space at the same time. The eyes themselves itch and buzz a bit. It makes me think of the Star Wars art where someone under the influence of the dark side of the force develops a strange light around the eyes. It sounds melodramatic, but it’s the best way I can describe it.

This was not a good weekend to be this way. Yesterday was Duncan’s birthday party, and the day before there was a lot of cleaning to do. Erin wasn’t happy with me for getting home late from my OA meeting because she had stuff to do. I think that might have set off my mood, though it’s hard to tell for sure. I don’t blame her for being pissed at me. Sometimes the commitment to my program of abstinence and sobriety can cast a big shadow. In my mind, I’m putting my family first and balancing all these other things around that. In reality, I have work to do.

I think the big trigger this weekend was the realization that I might be doing too many things. There’s the book project, a wonderful BUT demanding job and all that service: Being an OA sponsor, being on team for a Catholic retreat next month, which involves lots of meetings and homework, and the occasional Saturday morning working the church food pantry. Saturday afternoon was spent writing a talk I’ll be giving at that retreat.

It’s an odd sort of conflict to have. On the one hand, I’m able to do all these things — I crave it, actually — because I cleaned up from my addiction and learned to manage my mental disorder most of the time. A lot of space in my brain that was taken up with crazy thinking, fear and paranoia was suddenly freed up, and I found I could do all these other things.

And I can.

But I’m not Superman, and I’m starting to see where my limitations are. I know I have to make adjustments as a result. That pisses me off. I lost a lot during those years of mental illness and addiction. It robbed me blind. I don’t want to give up anything that I’ve gained.

What’s all this have to do with acting positive?

I’ve made it a point, no matter how crummy I feel, to put on the positive man’s mask. It’s important for a variety of reasons.

On Facebook, for example, so many people bitch and moan about the little inconveniences in their lives that you simply need positive people on there to balance things out. I prefer to be one of the latter people. Maybe I can’t always make myself feel good. But if I can make others feel better by saying something positive, it’s better than nothing.

One of my political heroes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was a master at this. He was known for his “ebullience” and he was rarely photographed without that huge, toothy smile. fdr franklin roosevelt car cigarette holderIn private, however, he had a lot of pain. Polio had taken away his freedom of movement. He put on a good act in public, using a cane, leg braces and the arm of one of his sons to make it look like he was standing and walking without effort. The truth is that those were moments of blinding physical pain. But he kept the sunny disposition and it was just what people needed at the height of the Great Depression.

As WW II slogged on, his photos were a lot less ebullient and you could clearly see the strain. He had met his match, and it cracked his positive mask.

My issues are nothing compared to what he went through. But in my own little world, I’ve run up against that wall that cracked my own mask.

It’s time to go find the glue and put it back on.

This morning I do feel a little better. At Erin’s insistence I went to bed at 7:30 last night and I’ll do it again tonight.

We’ll see how that works. I’m just grateful to have a wife who knows what signs to look for and how to help me through it. The kids help, too, keeping me laughing with their verbal zingers.

God certainly helps. Writing that talk Saturday allowed me to work through some of what I was feeling.

I have all the tools I need to get through these rough spots.

I just have to remember that one of those tools needs to be the ability to slow down.

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Old Friends

Just when I thought I was done writing about the Point of Pines, Revere, another old friend re-enters the picture.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMhhsafywkk&fs=1&hl=en_US]

He tried to call me the other night and left this message: “Mr. Brenner, I just want to say sorry for being such a punk when we were kids, and for taking so long to call you.”

And there it was. For the first time in more than 20 years, a message from Kevin Flanagan. One of the kids who was always around. He was among the friends who tried to offer me sympathy when my brother died in 1984.

We fought a lot as kids, mostly because we were both the awkward types who would sometimes pick on someone else to make ourselves feel better. At one point when we were around 16, I boasted to my under-the-bridge friends that I could take Kevin down in a fight.

They held me to it. They brought the two of us down onto the beach, carved a boxing ring into the damp sand, and we went at it for however many rounds. We didn’t really fight, mind you. We just circled each other, waiting for someone to throw the first punch.

We worked out those kinks as we got older. We settled into a pattern of smoking cigarettes on the boulders behind the sea wall at Carey Circle and occasionally drinking together. One summer he worked in my father’s store. We both went to the Voke in Wakefield for high school. He was a regular in my basement, which sometimes resembled a neighborhood bar for minors.

Then he went his way and I went mine.

He was lucky enough to miss my most self-destructive years, particularly those immediately following Sean Marley’s death. I doubt I would have been much of a friend to him at that point, anyway. I was too busy isolating myself, binging and spending what was left of my brain in the fearful pursuit of career advancement. He didn’t miss much.

Turns out he’s been living in Atkinson, N.H. — the next town over from me — for years.

Go figure.

He’s not on Facebook, so it was particularly cool that he sought me out. He seems to be doing well for himself.

We hung out at the bar at the Haverhill 99. He had a beer and I had a diet coke, because that’s all I can drink at a bar. Someday, I’ll find a place where Red Bull is offered on tap. We ended up sitting next to a woman who got more talkative with each sip of wine.

I’m still trying to decide if she made me feel proud of the fact that I’m sober now or if she made me long for a real drink. I think I would have understood her better had I been drunk.

Ah, well. I was home by 8:30, which was for the best. I had been tired and depressed for much of the day and really didn’t need a late night out. I was supposed to go to Lynn for a Paul Revere School reunion, but that was postponed.

Why does Revere keep following me?

I guess it’s a ghost I’m supposed to keep trying to make peace with.

Whatever the case, I’m glad Kevin Flanagan is back in my life. You can never have too many good friends, and he was and is a good friend.

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Mental Hangover

This morning I wrote about the one-two punch I got yesterday from the good and evil sides of OCD. Right now I’m experiencing a hangover as a result.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Iho1V–8G4&fs=1&hl=en_US]

This hangover has nothing to do with binging or drinking. I did neither, though I did think seriously about it. I lingered in the wine section of the grocery store for a few minutes, wondering if I should buy a couple of those little bottles that are easy to hide. Maybe, I thought, I’ll have some tonight. No one will ever know.

Then I snapped to my senses and moved on, muttering something to myself about how sobriety sucks sometimes. Not a huge deal. I’ve been through this sort of thing a hundred times over. It’s something every person in abstinence and sobriety goes through on a regular basis. We didn’t stop because we didn’t love the feeling of intoxication. We stopped because we had no choice. The addiction was going to destroy us. So we did what we had to do. But the love affair never dies completely.

Of course, there’s always a deeper emotion triggering the impulses. I think I’m feeling sorry for myself this afternoon because it’s a day off and I’ve been running around all day when all I really want to do is pull a blanket over my head and go to sleep. I got the kids up and off to school. I dropped off my niece, who spent the night with us. I checked on a guy I sponsor in OA to see if he was OK because he’s had some diabetic trouble. Then it was time to pay some bills and run to the grocery store. Now I have to run back out to get a coolant light in the car checked before the kids get home, at which point we’ll have to run to my chiropractor appointment. I can’t break it because I’ve been having twinges of pain in my back this week. Tonight I have to start writing a talk I’m going to give at an upcoming Catholic retreat.

If I sound like a whiny punk, that’s because I am a whiny punk. At the moment I am, anyway. This is especially unsettling because I have little patience for other people who do the same thing. Go figure.

So what am I going to do about all this?

I’m going to get the stupid coolant light checked and keep my chiropractor appointment. Once the kids are settled after dinner, I’ll write that talk. That’s actually something I’m looking forward to.

Life can be exhausting, but you know what? I sought the relentless activity in my life. It’s a blessing to do these things every day. And if the payment is that I have to keep moving when I want to collapse, so be it.

The answer for me is the same answer I give my kids when they grouse about having responsibilities:

Too bad.

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The OCD Curse Meets the OCD Blessing

Something interesting happened yesterday. The OCD was running hot all afternoon and kicking my ass. Then, when I wasn’t expecting it, it gave me a second wind that worked out for everyone.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:4AAwBktkUB8LXGy5xNW3Rc]

I was running around trying to get things done before going to a National Information Security Group (NAISG) meeting and the kids were in their usual state of after-school chaos. Duncan was sitting over his homework, not really getting anything done, and he kept messing up the table cloth.

That table cloth, wrinkled and out of place, drove me absolutely insane.

In a classic moment of OCD run ragged, I repeatedly walked up to the table and fixed the cloth. Duncan would immediately get it rumpled up again (not on purpose — the thing just doesn’t fit the shape of the table and is easily knocked out of place) and I just kept coming back and trying to fix it.

I was fully aware that I was having an OCD episode, which is progress in itself, because once upon a time, an OCD attack would overtake me without my knowing what hit me. Erin came into the kitchen and, before she could point out what I was doing, I looked up and acknowledged that the table cloth was freaking me out.

Then Duncan finally got his homework done and the tablecloth was back in place.

As I wallowed in the tired moment, the phone rang. It was my sister-in-law. She needed a babysitter in a pinch. She was upset about it, too. Grandma was already coming to watch the boys, and I told her to bring the niece over.

When something like this happens, my first instinct is to make things as easy as possible on the babysitter. So the OCD kicked in again and before I knew it, I was getting everyone’s dinner on the table  and shifting around the bedtime routine to make Grandma’s life easier.

By the time everyone got here, the food was on the table and I was ready to head to my NAISG meeting.

I’m glad I could do that.

It just goes to show what a two-faced bitch OCD is.

Most of the time she makes life unmanageable and fuels my self-destructive behavior.

Then she turns around and gives me the extra push I need to move forward. When she does that, it’s like I have super powers.

And that is my curse. I have to keep the OCD at bay because it would destroy me if left to run hot around the clock. I went through all kinds of hell to bring it under control.

But every once in awhile, I’m glad I have it, because it can come in handy.

I don’t want it most of the time.

But sometimes, I’m afraid of what life would be like without it.

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Run Out of Town (Or Off Facebook, Twitter)

One of my security friends thinks she needs to delete her social network accounts because she lacks social skills. She tends to offend people sometimes, you see, and she wants to go away until she can learn to behave. Though admirable, it’s a bad idea for lots of reasons.

At the height of my mental illness and addictive behavior, social skills were alien to me. Isolating myself from the rest of the world was the better thing to do, so that’s what I did. There was no Facebook or Twitter back then, mind you. I sometimes wonder how I would have behaved on those sites if they were around at the time. My behavior probably would have been a hundred times worse than anything my security friend is worried about.

A few notes about this friend: Her posts are laced with sarcasm. She uses the word “fuck” a lot in the adjective form and she makes it plain that she is an atheist.

Of course, as I’ve discovered, sarcasm is a tricky skill that can get you into trouble. When you make comments about someone’s faith or the way they look, it’s almost always going to be negative. So you have to use it sparingly.

Can my friend do better with how she conducts herself on Facebook and Twitter? Sure. But then most of us can do better.

Consider the following:

–A ton of people on Facebook and Twitter use it as a political soapbox. If they’re Republican, almost every post is a tirade against “elitist socialistic liberals.” If they’re a Democrat, it’s the reverse. That stuff has offended me before. Not because they are expressing their beliefs. That’s something I respect. What annoys me is that they never have anything else to talk about, which makes them too one dimensional for my tastes.

–Too many people for my tastes pour their frustrations out on Facebook. If someone’s having a bad week, they complain about everything. Maybe their cat looked at them the wrong way. Maybe their job sucks. One of my friends constantly complains about her job on Facebook.

–Though I don’t set out to insult anyone, I know I do. I push out a lot of links that are relevant to my work in the information security community. If it’s something I wrote, be it a security article or something from this blog, up it goes. I know I’ve been “un-friended” for that. People don’t like their feeds dominated by one person. That person comes off as egotistical and full of himself. I’ve already confessed to that sin. I also write openly about my Faith. That friend at the focus of this post? She’s an atheist and I’m surprised she hasn’t un-friended me by now. And I’ll confess I was a little pissed off last Saturday — the anniversary of 9-11 — when she made a crack about how science flies us to the moon and faith flies us into buildings.

And yet I don’t think she should leave the social networking realm. Why? Because we all have our stuff to work on, and I’ve learned from experience that it’s better to do it out in the open than in isolation.

Hell, I’ve done far worse than being sarcastic on Facebook. I’ve lied to people in the past about my addictive behavior. I’ve hurt people along the way and have spent a lot of time lately trying to make amends to them. There are worse things in the world than being an ass on Facebook. Besides, as I’ve said, we are all asses on Facebook from time to time.

In the end, we all have the choice to disconnect from a connection we find offensive. I’ve un-friended people on Facebook or un-followed them on Twitter for annoying me. It’s like the old saying about how if you don’t like the music, turn to another station.

To this friend of mine who thinks she needs to drop from the world: Don’t be silly. People are connected to you because they want to be. We already knew of your sarcasm when we decided to connect to you on these sites. Some of us enjoy your posts for the sharp, edgy humor you provide.

You need more social skills? OK. But you can’t build those skills in isolation.

And if your friends aren’t willing to hang around as you work through that stuff, then they’re not really friends, are they?

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The C Group of Paul Revere

Two things can doom a kid to a future of depression and addiction: Overprotective parents and clueless school districts. This is a post about both.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9dW8_qOjzQ&fs=1&hl=en_US]

Neither case is one of evil. It’s about good intentions gone wrong. I think of the old saying, “The path to hell is paved with good intentions.”

In the case of overbearing parents, this was only partly true for me. My father was all about pushing me out into the world to learn how to survive. My mother was a different story. In her defense, she had already lost a child, so wanting to protect the kids she had left was understandable. While me and my sister still took a lot of abuse, I was also smothered to the point of wanting to explode. And that’s what I did.

I rebelled. I grew my hair long and started staying out all night. I learned to escape not just in food, but in alcohol and weed. Think of the trouble that fish Nemo got into in “Finding Nemo” when his father got too overprotective. Nemo rebelled by going out to that boat and got himself caught in the dentist-diver’s net. Later in the movie, when Marlin, the dad, says he promised never to let anything happen to Nemo, his friend Dory piped up, “If you never let anything happen to him, then nothing will ever happen to him.”

It all worked out for Nemo in the end and it has for me. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Before I experienced all the ups and downs that ultimately led to recovery and salvation, I chafed against my mother’s smothering by shoving aside my studies.

The school district knew I was an emotional, troubled kid. I started getting extra help in elementary school because of the toll Crohn’s Disease had taken on my young body. It worked at first, but when I went to the Paul Revere School for seventh and eighth grade, it all went to hell for me.

There, kids were divided into three groups: The A group, the B group and the C group. The first was for the kids who consistently got As on their report cards. To the lower groups, they were sort of an elite class. The B group is where most kids were. Then there was my group, the C group, where the kids with bad grades were sent to rot. That may be a harsh description. I do believe the school was trying to do what was best for students. But the stigma of being on the low end of the student body was damaging all the same.

The C kids were never really encouraged to study their way to the B or A groups. We just got teachers that gave us the bear minimum for work and treated us like troublemakers to be kept in line.

Indeed, the C group was where all the troublemakers were. I was a quieter version of trouble. I mostly hurt myself by dabbling in addictive substances and ignoring the academics. Other kids in my class were always getting into fights and some were already getting arrested. There were some so-called normal kids in the mix who did study their way into the higher groups.

Some of the C kids got picked on a lot, including me, though I also met a lot of great kids along the way.

I remained a slacker in high school and it took a couple years of community college before I found my ability to study hard and advance.

I feel like I found my way despite a smothering parent and the mistakes of the Revere Public School system.

I should also note that this isn’t about bashing the Revere schools. That was all 25-plus years ago. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and hope the A-B-C system of labeling kids is a relic of the past.

But in the final analysis, looking back, it’s easy for me to see how the mistakes of parents and educators fed into my struggles later in life. I fault no one. It’s not like God dropped us here with an instruction book for parenting and educating. The Ten Commandments aren’t clear about such specifics.

As a 40-year-old dad who takes an active interest in my children’s education, I still feel like I’m winging it for much of the time.

Before I managed to bring the OCD to heel, I was a basket case about making sure the kids were shielded from danger. It just led to me becoming more of a basket case and, because being that way is exhausting, it made me too tired to do other things with them that I should have been doing.

All I can say is thank God for abstinence and sobriety — as much as staying clean can suck from time to time — and thank God for Erin, who has been especially relentless about teaching those boys right from wrong and making them study hard. Together, I’d like to think we’re pretty good parents and that we give Sean and Duncan the right mix of love and discipline.

But because of where I’ve been, I ALWAYS worry about how my actions will impact them.

That paranoia is probably a good thing.

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Alone vs. Isolation

One of the big things I’ve struggled with over the years is when it’s OK to be alone and when it’s not. I spent a lot of years in isolation. I’m slowly realizing isolation and alone aren’t necessarily the same thing. Isolation never amounts to anything positive for me. Alone does — when I let it.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk7jVsiWb3o&fs=1&hl=en_US]

I spent a lot of years in isolation when I was sickest with the OCD and addiction. You isolate when it’s time for that next binge, whether it’s drugs and alcohol or compulsive overeating. I always did it in the isolation of my car. Addicts typically get their real fix out of view from other people.

At the same time, I never liked being alone. If I’m left by myself for too long, I get into trouble. And I don’t want to go there.

I seem to always be around people these days. There are the folks in my 12-Step program, including my sponsor and the three people I sponsor. There are the one-to-three meetings a week, and the daily phone calls. For someone who hates the telephone, I spend a lot of time on it these days.

I spend a lot of time around parents of the boys’ classmates. I spend a lot of time around business associates. When there’s downtime, I increasingly seek out friends. Fortunately, they seek me out, too.

But while it’s never good for me to be isolated, I’m finding that I DO need to be alone sometimes.

Not alone in a brooding, depressed state. That better fits the isolation category for me. It’s more like being alone in a state of prayer or creativity.

I’ve come to treasure the alone time I get first thing in the morning, when I can listen to music, write or just flop my head back. My relationship with the car has changed. Instead of using it as a place to isolate and feed my addiction, it’s now a place for reflection, music and sightseeing.

It used to be on business trips that I would isolate in my hotel room whenever I didn’t have to be out in public. There’s a lot of trouble you can get into with yourself when you’re holed up in a hotel room.

Now, I make some alone time for myself so I can walk around the city I’m in and take it all in. Yesterday I roamed the streets of NYC and spent a lot of time at Ground Zero in contemplation and prayer. I continued praying as I walked back across the Brooklyn Bridge to my hotel.

It was excellent.

Later in the evening, it was time to mix with people again and I did — having a long overdue reunion with my cousin Andrew and meeting his beautiful bride-to-be, Violet. We inadvertently wound up in a gay bar, but it’s not like there’s anything wrong with that. And the other patrons were friendly and polite. It’s been years since I saw Andrew. Shit, I remember when he was small enough to fit in a beer mug.

Afterwards, it was time to be alone again. I went back to the hotel and read myself asleep, which didn’t take much.

If the whole concept of isolation vs. being alone is confusing to you, it should be.

It’s certainly something I’m still trying to figure out.

I’m getting there. Slowly but surely.

Of course, it’s time to go mix it up with people again, so off I go to listen and then write about day 1 of the CSO Security standard.

Seize the day.