This Time, Anxiety Won

A confession: This past week, I’ve done a miserable job using my many coping tools to manage OCD and anxiety. What makes this particularly sinister is that I’ve just finished a week of vacation with the kids.

Mood music:

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Everything I’ve told you in past posts about learning to enjoy the precious present and not let worry take over is true. Weeks like this simply drive home the reality that I can never be fully free of my demons. I can only manage them and keep them from overtaking me most of the time. I’m fine with that. We all have our special challenges that dog us for life. It produces a pain we gain wisdom from. And from that wisdom comes joy.

So what set me off this week? Travel plans.

Tonight I fly to San Francisco for a few days of covering RSA and Security B-Sides. I was supposed to leave tomorrow morning, but was forced to leave a day sooner because of another impending winter storm in the Northeast. That made me resentful right off the bat. I was expecting a nice day with my wife and kids before leaving, and this was a big monkey wrench in the plan.

It also stoked my anxiety. Not the fear part, but the part where I worry to the point where I can’t see two feet in front of me. I watched the weather like a hawk. I downloaded no fewer than three weather apps on my Android and followed them all throughout the days. I checked all the weather sites every time I opened the laptop or switched on the TV.

If the predicted snow count went up, I grew depressed. If the projected amounts went down, I became unreasonably euphoric.

That kind of mood swinging does terrible things to the human body. Hormones go nuts, muscles tense into headaches and you sleep terribly.

I have no one to blame. I did this to myself. I sometimes get so cocky about my ability to manage the demons that I’m thrown for a bigger loop than I otherwise would be when things don’t go as planned.

As for the anxiety, it didn’t have to be that way, because it really was a good vacation otherwise. I got in a lot of quality time with the kids. Erin had to work most of the time, unfortunately, but Wednesday we had a nice dinner out and Friday we had a family day with a visit to the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord, N.H. After that, Erin and I did groceries together for what was probably the first time since the kids came along. That was pretty cool.

But I let my worry overshadow it all, and for that I’m a little pissed with myself.

It’s time for me to regain my control.

Def Leppard Hysteria album cover

Packing For #RSAC and #BSidesSF 2013: An OCD Case Study

I’m preparing to pack for five days in San Francisco, where I’ll be writing about goings on at RSA Conference 2013 and Security B-Sides. When you have OCD, packing a suitcase is as ritualistic as the compulsive hand washing you’ve heard about.

Mood music:

Before I had the OCD under control, packing was an all-day affair. I’d line up all my pants, shirts, socks, suit coats and accessories in order of the days I planned to wear them. I would undergo a similar ritual when gathering toothpaste, the razor, pills, etc. I would always pack extra for fear that I’d be without socks on the second-to-last day of the trip.

I still keep track of what I stuff into the suitcase to ensure I have enough for each day of the trip. But I only look over my cargo twice. It takes less time to do it that way than when I used to look things over five to 10 times.

Packing the laptop bag has gotten easier. I used to cram five notebooks and a handful of pens in there. Now it’s one pen and no notebooks. At this stage of my career, I’m pretty good at storing notes in my head. I don’t let it sit in my head for too long. I usually write up the talks and demos within 10 minutes of seeing them. Some talks, I write the story while I’m sitting there watching.

I also don’t stuff my pockets with cigars and cigarettes anymore. That allows for more room. There are the e-cigs, but they take up less space.

Some things will never change. I’ll always try to get to the airport three hours before the flight because I always worry about unexpected problems and want time to fix what needs fixing. People think that’s crazy and it probably is. This year I’m being a little more bold. I plan to get there exactly two hours before the flight, but that’s because a predicted snowstorm is forcing me to leave a day earlier than originally planned, which is making everything tighter.

Last year I walked around in my big, heavy boots. This year I’m being smart about it and going with the black leather moccasins that slip on and off effortlessly.

I’ll have a supply of Starbucks Via packets in case I can’t find my preferred coffee in the airport.

I’ll have my Kindle, which is lighter than the books I tend to pack. I’m leaving the extra rings and bracelets behind. I figure the less I take with me, the less there is to worry about.

Which brings me to the pills. One year I forgot to grab my Prozac bottle on the way out of the hotel and only realized my mistake after getting through the airport TSA line. Now I just pack the exact number of pills I need for the trip. The rest of the bottle stays home.

Now I’ll have the rest of the day to enjoy time with my family.

Repetitive OCD behavior is a time thief. You lose so much because of it.

I’m not totally free of it, but I’m fighting back.

A New Addiction Takes Hold

During my vacation this week, I’ve been playing a lot of guitar. I picked the instrument back up over the summer after a 20-year break, and I haven’t looked back. My addictive personality has latched onto it like a starving lamprey. But it may be one of the best outlets I’ve ever had for calming the mind.

Mood music:

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I now own two electric guitars and an acoustic. I’ve acquired a Marshall amp and a multi-effects pedal. Sean calls me a guitar hoarder.

I’ve been taking guitar lessons, and my instructor has taught me songs like Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” and Van Halen’s “Ain’t Talkin ‘Bout Love.” I learned a few on my own, too: “Foolin'” and “Hysteria” from Def Leppard, “Rock You Like a Hurricane” from The Scorpions and several Black Sabbath riffs.

I’ve also been putting together chords that sound good to me, which will lead to some songwriting of my own in short order.

I’ve learned a lot of mindfulness techniques in recent months, and all have helped. But the guitar playing is the tool I don’t have to throw a lot of concentration into. The action itself soothes.

Binge eating used to soothe me, but only for the first few minutes. Then shame followed. Smoking was soothing, but it smelled terrible and was making me a time bomb for cancer. The e-cigs — vaping, as it’s now called — help, but the idea is to eventually stop that habit, too. It’s a temporary crutch.

Read more about what the addictive process is like in “Anatomy of a Binge.”

The guitar sustains me for much longer, without the shameful, smelly byproducts.

It’s an addiction I think I can live with.

Bill's guitars

Mindy McCready and the ‘Celebrity Rehab’ Curse

CNN doesn’t say so directly, but in its follow-up coverage of country singer Mindy McCready’s death, it suggests that those who appear on Celebrity Rehab are cursed.

Mood music:

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The report notes that McCready is the fifth Celebrity Rehab alum to die in the last two years. She follows former Alice In Chains bassist Mike Starr, Real World cast member Joey Kovar, Grease actor Jeff Conaway and Rodney King, who had been beaten by police in 1991, to the grave. McCready’s death is especially horrific. The mother of two shot herself to death on the front porch, the same spot David Wilson, her boyfriend and father of her children, committed suicide a month ago.

Many people watch Celebrity Rehab to laugh over the wreckage of celebrity lives. We see these people at rock bottom, slaves to their addictions. Their money has run out, their careers have crashed and burned and they can’t stop from embarrassing themselves in public.

When we laugh at the spectacle, it’s usually over the relief that it’s not us on the TV. Some viewers have sympathy, while others make heartless, tasteless jokes about how the mighty have fallen.

Some people have suggested that the show’s host, Dr. Drew Pinsky, is presiding over a Hollywood circus, showing off the freaks to an eager public, so to speak. But that’s not how I see it.

Pinsky has seen a lot of his famous friends die at the hands of addiction and the underlying mental illness, and his stated goal is to show people just how terrible a disease this is. He told CNN:

One of my hopes was, in bringing ‘Celebrity Rehab’ out, was to teach people how dangerous addiction was. … If I was doing a show on cancer, there would not be much surprise when my cancer patient died. In fact, we’d celebrate a few years of good quality life. People don’t understand that addiction has virtually the same prognosis. If you have other mental health issues on top of that, it’s so much worse. …

There’s a cautionary tale here about the stigma of mental illness and the way in which the public attack celebrities who take care of themselves. … [McCready] became so fearful of the stigma and the way people were responding to her being hospitalized that she actually checked herself out prematurely. … She is a lovely woman, we have lost her, and it didn’t have to go down like this.

Having followed Pinsky’s work over the years, I think his efforts are sincere and useful.

We see celebrities crashing and burning on TV, but countless people from all walks of life suffer these horrors every minute of every day. We can’t help them unless we know the behaviors to look for. Pinsky and the people who have been on his show have given us quite an education.

I hope we don’t waste it on mere gawking.

Dr. Drew and Mindy McCready

How To Avoid Becoming #RSAC Roadkill

Last year was a first: I had a stay-at-home vacation a week before flying out to a big conference. We took the kids to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and did a lot of relaxing. It worked so well I’m doing it again.

Mood music:

The kids are on their February school vacation, which was my main reason for choosing this week. That it fell the week before RSA — one of the biggest security conferences of the year — was pure luck. That it’s happening two years in a row is even luckier.

I always run myself ragged the week before a conference. A couple years ago it caught up with me. This time I have a chance to soak up some quality family time and rest my brain before getting on the plane.

That should allow me to be at the top of my game in San Francisco next week. It certainly did the trick last year.

Conferences have always brought out the the good and bad sides of my OCD. On a professional level it gives me the extra push to write more, network more, stay awake later for said networking, and get up and at ’em early. It also takes over the parts of my brain that manage my pacing and ability to stop and breath.

Not helping is that usually, the week before, I work in overdrive mode to get as much business out of the way as possible. In doing that, I’m already half burned before my plane takes off.

I won’t always get to vacation right before RSA like this. So I’ll be making the most of this week.

I’m especially going to need it this year, because a couple hours after the plane lands Sunday, I’ll be darting back and forth between BSidesSF, the hotel, the Moscone Center registration area and quite a few evening events.

What’s Your Phobia?

I’ve recently come across a couple of interesting phobia lists, and being the OCD head I am, I decided to carefully go through the lists to see which applied to me.

Mood music:

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The Phobia List is a straight-up dictionary of phobias, in alphabetical order. Here are some of the phobias that have applied to me at various points:

  • Agateophobia: The fear of insanity. Who’s not afraid of insanity?
  • Aviophobia or aviatophobia: The fear of flying. This used to be a big one in my book. The thought of being in a metal tube hurling across the sky with no safety net below terrified me. Because of that, there were many years I didn’t travel beyond what I could do by car. I got over it, though, and love flying today.
  • Brontophobia: The fear of thunder and lightning. This one dogged me as a kid. There was one storm when I was about 10 that made it pitch-black outside at 1 in the afternoon, and for a long time after that every clap of thunder hit me like a whip to the back. I don’t feel this one so much anymore, but there are still occasions where a good storm will rattle me.
  • Claustrophobia: The fear of confined spaces. I used to find confined spaces safe and cozy. Now I can’t stand them. I much prefer big, open spaces.
  • Iatrophobia: The fear of going to the doctor or of doctors. I avoided doctors for several years because of this. Then I went to the other extreme, running to the doctors for everything. I don’t fear doctors today, though I have met many who are so incompetent that they should be feared. But I’ve know some outstanding doctors, too.

Some of the items on this list surprised me and even made me laugh at first. Then I realized how cruel life would be to hand a person such fears:

  • Anthrophobia or anthophobia: The fear of flowers.
  • Bibliophobia: The fear of books.
  • Dendrophobia: The fear of trees.
  • Francophobia: The fear of France or French culture.
  • Geumaphobia or Geumophobia: The fear of taste.

The other site is The ABC of Fears: The Famous People’s Phobias. It’s actually the website for a leather-bound book of art focusing on different phobias. Here are a few pages:

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It didn’t take long before I gave up scouring these sites; the lists are just too vast. We all have our little fears, and if you look long enough at a list, you’re bound to see a bit of yourself in many of the definitions. I’m no doctor, but I don’t think you automatically have a phobia if you tend to fear or loathe certain things. The question is whether they make our lives unmanageable.

If you never leave the house and avoid all human contact for fear of catching a disease, for example, it’s a safe bet that you have a phobia. If you simply find certain things unpleasant, such as doctors or certain foods, but you’re able to deal with them, it’s probably not a clinical phobia.

The good news is that phobias don’t have to dog us for life. Or so I’ve learned from personal experience.

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Why I Skipped #ShmooCon — Again

Like last year, a lot of people have asked me why I’m not at the ShmooCon security conference in Washington D.C. After all, it is one of my favorite events.

Mood music:

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Simply put, it’s too close to the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco the week after next. Being away from home for multiple days for two weeks inside a month is simply more than my family can handle these days. Last year that realization was painful and I felt a deep sense of loss. The folks who attend ShmooCon have become cherished friends and I hate missing opportunities to see them.

But this year I don’t feel the sense of loss. For once thing, I’ll see many friends at RSA. And, this past year I’ve learned a lot about making choices, sticking with what my gut tells me to do and not being all pissy pants about it. I’ve spent a lot of time this year learning to accept that I can’t do everything I want.

Ever since I shook myself free of the fear and anxiety that came with my earlier form of OCD, I’ve had a craving for these journeys, perhaps for the simple reason that I can go through an airport and onto a plane without feeling like nails are being hammered into my intestines.

I think there’s also a high I get from going to a security show and kicking ass with my writing. Writing conference stories used to leave me harried. No more.

But that liberation has come at a cost. Specifically, since the OCD still runs hot from time to time, I have a problem with balancing my professional cravings with life at home.

I started to figure it out at the RSA conference in San Francisco a couple years ago.

Something went very wrong on that trip. Professionally everything was fine. But below the surface a personal crisis was brewing. If you look at my OCD Diary posts from that week, you could see me coming unhinged. I wrote about discomfort I felt as everyone told me what an honest guy I am because I’m not always so honest. In fact, that week a lie was eating away at my conscience.

I came home to a wife who was understandably angry with me. I was also sick as a dog, burning with fever. We worked through it, but it woke me up to the fact that I can’t do it all, 24 hours a day like I sometimes want to.

I needed to find the middle speed, which is hard as hell when you have an obsessive-compulsive mind and an addiction or four to keep in check.

I re-realized that I had to be truer to my top priorities: God, my wife and children. I can’t stop doing all the things I do. My life has evolved this way because, I think, I’m meant to give a part of myself to helping others. At the very least, it’s payment for the second chance God gave me.

But, to use corporate business-speak, I need to do it smarter, and be willing to drop it altogether for family. That’s one of the truly sick things about OCD: You know who and what you should be paying attention to, but the mental pull still drags you to less-important things that seem awfully important at the time.

That’s my blessing and my curse.

Last year, ShmooCon coincided with Duncan’s first confession, a very important event in the life of a young Christian. There was no way I would miss that. Not even for ShmooCon. Being Sean and Duncan’s dad and Erin’s husband comes first.

Next week I’ll take vacation and be with the family. Then I’ll go to RSA, kick some ass and enjoy the company of friends.

I feel pretty good about my strategy.

Meantime, I wish all my friends at ShmooCon a fantastic weekend. Bruce and Heidi Potter always put on an awesome event, and a lot of the talks are video recorded, so I know I’ll still get to lap up the content eventually.

Onward and upward.

If You Saw It on Facebook, It’s Probably a Lie

People on Facebook love to get all self-righteous. That’s fine by me, as long as the emotion is based on truth. The problem these days is that people are increasingly gullible, accepting memes as gospel when they are in fact bullshit.

Mood music:

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One example is a picture of a letter reported to be written by a U.S. service man claiming, essentially, that Starbucks hates soldiers and won’t let them have their coffee. The letter reads:

Dear everyone: Please pass this along to anyone you know, this needs to get out in the open. Recently Marines over in Iraq supporting this country in OIF wrote to Starbucks because they wanted to let them know how much they liked their coffee and try to score some free coffee grounds. Starbucks wrote back telling the Marines thanks for their support in their business, but that they don’t support the War and anyone in it and that they won’t send them the Coffee.

So as not to offend them we should not support in buying any Starbucks products. As a War vet and writing to you patriots I feel we should get this out in the open. I know this War might not be very popular with some folks, but that doesn’t mean we don’t support the boys on the ground fighting street to street and house to house for what they and I believe is right. If you feel the same as I do then pass this along, or you can discard it and I’ll never know. Thanks very much for your support to me, and I know you’ll all be there again here soon when I deploy once more.

Semper Fidelis, Sgt Howard C. Wright
1st Force Recon Co
1st Plt PLT RTO

The letter is actually not new; Sgt. Wright wrote it in 2004. But I’ve seen it on Facebook a few times in the past week alone, and people are posting it to their profiles with comments about how evil Starbucks is and how they won’t ever buy coffee there. I knew it was bullshit straightaway. I’ve bought a lot of coffee from Starbucks, and I clearly remember its campaign to send coffee to the troops. Customers were given the option of buying coffee by the pound that would then be sent to the front lines.

Back when Sgt. Wright wrote the letter, Starbucks contacted him to clarify its position. He then sent out another email, retracting his above statement:

Dear Readers,
Almost 5 months ago I sent an email to you my faithful friends. I did a wrong thing that needs to be cleared up. I heard by word of mouth about how Starbucks said they didn’t support the war and all. I was having enough of that kind of talk and didn’t do my research properly like I should have. This is not true. Starbucks supports men and women in uniform. They have personally contacted me and I have been sent many copies of their company’s policy on this issue. So I apologize for this quick and wrong letter that I sent out to you. Now I ask that you all pass this email around to everyone you passed the last one to. Thank you very much for understanding about this.

Howard C. Wright, Sgt USMC

The Facebook meme is someone’s rewrite of the letter, with facts changed and no mention of Sgt. Wright’s later retraction:

Facebook meme

This whole thing illustrates a larger problem with Facebook: In our rush to show how morally upright we are, we users fall for just about anything we see. We essentially do what Sgt. Wright did back in 2004, acting on rumors without doing our homework first.

I include myself in this group; I’ve fallen for fraudulent memes in the past as well. It’s a human trait to take shortcuts, and memes are a shortcut. The lesson is that if you see statements of outrage on Facebook, you should research the matter before opining, because what you see is probably a lie.

Truth in Advertising at the Heart Attack Grill?

I admit to some laughter when I read the news that John Alleman, unofficial spokesman and mascot for Las Vegas’ infamous Heart Attack Grill, dropped dead of a heart attack outside the restaurant. “Talk about truth in advertising,” I thought to myself. Then I felt like an asshole.

Mood music:

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Finding humor in someone’s death is bad enough, but I could have easily been this guy. Frankly, I still could be.

The Heart Attack Grill is typical of the excess that is Las Vegas. Its high-calorie menu includes the 9,982-calorie, 3-pound Quadruple Bypass Burger. The restaurant’s waitresses dress as sexy nurses and “prescribe great-tasting high-calorie meals including the Double Bypass Burger, Flatliner Fries, Full Sugar Coke, Butterfat Shake, and no-filter cigarettes!” according to the website. Its slogan is “Taste worth dying for.”

Alleman, a 52-year-old security guard, was featured on the Heart Attack Grill clothing line and ate at the restaurant daily. He was known for devouring so many burgers chased down with cream-laden milkshakes with a dollop of butter on top that the restaurant nicknamed him “Patient John.”

The poor guy collapsed outside the eatery while waiting for the bus. It’s really not the way a person wants to be remembered, is it?

I’ve walked past the restaurant during trips to Vegas for security conferences, but I’ve never gone in. As someone with a history of binge eating and overall food addiction, that would be unwise. But then excess is everywhere you go in that town, which is why I hate the place.

Need help with your relationship with food? Visit our Eating Disorders Resources page.

It would be easy to get on my soapbox and decry restaurants like this as an evil that preys on people like me, but I know that’s just not true. As I’ve said about McDonald’s, once my favorite binging hole, the problem isn’t the establishment. Healthy-minded people can eat there once in a while and balance it with a healthy lifestyle the rest of the time. The Heart Attack Grill is no different.

If someone can enjoy infrequent moments of total excess without letting those moments control and consume them, good for them. I envy them, because a disconnected wire in my brain prevents me from living that way.

It appears Alleman had the same problem. I’m glad it wasn’t me this time.

Heart attack grill