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Some People You Just Can’t Save

I just learned that a young man from my extended family was murdered recently. I only met him once, when he was a baby in the late 1980s, and I’m told he had a troubled adulthood that led him to seedy neighborhoods and bad crowds.

Mood music:

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When good kids fall in with the wrong crowds and go tragically astray, it’s hard on their family, especially those who offer help. That’s an obvious statement, but it’s easy to forget when you’re not at the center of the storm.

This post is for one particular family member.

I know that you tried hard to reach this kid but you still feel like you should have done a lot more. I went through that when my best friend spiraled into depression and eventually took his life. This wasn’t a case where I only saw him once in a while. I saw him all the time. We took walks on Revere Beach every Sunday. We spoke several times a week on the phone. We never lost touch.

Yet I was still oblivious to just how bad things were getting for him. I knew he was depressed. But it never occurred to me that he’d kill himself over it. In the years that followed, I continuously churned the events around in my head, looking for clues I should have seen and pondering my failure as a friend. Surely, I could have done a lot more to make him feel loved and see that his was a life worth living.

In hindsight, I think I did the best I could. I was there all the time, but a lot of the man’s pain was out of view from most of us. Not the general state of depression. He talked pretty openly about that. It’s the part of him that was secretly plotting his exit. None of us saw it coming, even though we think we should have.

I suspect it was the same for you. You saw the boy’s troubles and hoped you could talk him into a better life. But you couldn’t. It’s not your fault.

Sometimes, our best isn’t going to be good enough. Because the path someone takes isn’t up to us.

I doubt these words are going to help much, if at all. I just wanted you to know I’m thinking of you.

—Bill

Lost soul

Art by Bill Fennell
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Return From the Overeaters Anonymous Wilderness

Last summer I wrote a post about being lost in the Overeaters Anonymous wilderness, filled with discontent and a fair amount of self-righteousness. I have no regrets. We all need to step back from time to time and reevaluate pieces of our lives. Now that I’ve done that, I’ve decided to return from the wilderness.

Mood music:

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I’ve made peace with what I see as the program’s imperfections, and I’ve gained the wisdom to understand that it’s not about the egos who show up and periodically annoy me (as I’m sure I’ve annoyed others). It’s not all about simply abstaining from binging, either, though controlling the food is certainly of vital importance.

The biggest reason I’ve returned is that I need the 12 steps of recovery to help me keep my head screwed on properly. A couple of weeks ago, I got a new sponsor. Yesterday, I attended my first OA meeting in a long time.

Related content: Resources for those with eating disorders

I’ve mostly stuck with the food plan a previous sponsor helped me carve out when I first decided to tackle this monster in 2008, but it’s becoming clear that the plan needs some major adjustments. To fix that, I’m going to see a nutritionist.

In recent weeks I’ve felt adrift, more inclined to enter a stupor over things I can’t control. I forgot that I have to put my trust in God.

Break time is over.

Overeaters Anonymous Medallions

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People Without Filters

My closest friends know that a true sign of affection from me is when I pick on them. For one friend’s birthday recently, I called him a “broken-down barge” on Facebook. He loved it, because he knows that when I talk that way, I cherish the friendship.

I’m all too aware, though, that this trait is a double-edged sword that can cut deep when turned the wrong way.

Mood music:

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I guess you could say I’m one of those people lacking a filter.

I get a lot of this from my father. He’s always been the type to share his observations with you, no matter how insensitive. He’ll look a friend or family member in the eye and tell them they’re getting fat. If someone doesn’t stop for him at a crosswalk, he’ll give them the middle finger and call them an asshole loud enough for people to hear at the other end of the street.

I’ve always worked hard to keep my observations about a person’s weight to myself. Having fought the battle of the bulge my whole life, I know people get zero benefit from being told in public that they’re fat. I would never flip someone off in the street today, though the 20-something version of me would have. Just ask my parents-in-law, who were sitting in the back of my beat-up 1985 Chevy Monte Carlo when I flipped someone off for cutting me off in traffic. Or maybe I was the one doing the cutting.

The present me is a lot more docile in that regard. I might tell someone to go fuck themselves in the heat of heavy traffic, but I do it from the privacy of my car with the windows up and the kids absent, though my boys will probably be able to recall moments when I slipped. They love it when I have to drop change in the curse jar.

I let the sarcasm fly, though. I like to tease — mostly because I like trying to get people to laugh. Yet I know I take it too far sometimes.

I may be too old to change my personality, but you’re never too old to refine your communication skills. So if you run into me on the street or in the grocery store and my words are too cutting, remove your own filter long enough to tell me so.

I’ll keep working to do better.
motormouth

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Julian Assange: Autistic Hacker Or Just An A-hole?

Last year I wrote a post about a report suggesting autism is an affliction of the brilliant. One man mentioned as an example was WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has described himself as having the “hacker’s disease.” Yesterday, a reader’s comment inspired me to revisit the issue.

Mood music:

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The reader said in part:

This compares a neurological disorder to genius people whose curiosity takes finite state machines to places that their creators never imagined. How’s that? Julian (who I met once) is an egomaniac and an arrogant prick, and Daniel (who I do know) and the rest of them have given him the Heisman. If he’s representative of hackers, then I’m cancelling my membership! Kids have always been a PITA for parents, especially ones that “won’t behave”. First it was “hyperactive” – then it was “ADD” then “ADHD”. It’s always some excuse for f**ked up parents who hit their kids, kids who are too smart and see through their parents’ bullshit.

 

A friend in the security community once took me to task for using the autism angle because he felt it was unfair to compare someone with a neurological disorder with me and my OCD struggle. He was right that the two are vastly different things, but for me it wasn’t simply about comparing myself with someone who has autism. It was more about my interest in people who have abilities within them, diseases and disorders be damned.

We’ve seen countless stories about people who rise above physical and mental limitations to achieve greatness, and I’m always inspired after hearing about them.

As for the reader’s comment, I agree with one thing: A lot of parents do make excuses for kids who don’t fall in line, and that often leads to a misguided diagnosis. But that’s beside the point.

Is something like autism a hacker’s disease? I have no idea. Frankly, I don’t care.

Each of us has something from within that can either hold us back or propel us forward: A blessing hidden inside a perceived curse.  That’s what OCD has been for me: A curse when left to rage out of control, and a blessing when managed and properly harnessed.

Some of us are afflicted with disorders that can’t be managed so easily; maladies that force people into wheelchairs or psychiatric hospitals. The victim has little control over it, and is trapped. For some, the affliction attacks the nerves and muscles. For others, the disease targets the brain and disables basic functions. In both cases, all or part of the brain still burns brightly, and the individual is able to ride that to something good. Like Stephen Hawking. And, in some cases, like hackers.

The one constant is that we’re all handed challenges in life. If the mind works, what matters from there are the choices we make and the lengths we’re willing to travel to rise above.

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The Worst Abuse of All

I’m taking a lot of abuse lately, the kind that leaves me mentally tired and physically aching. It’s not abuse from family, work colleagues or law enforcement, however. I’m doing it to myself.

Mood music:

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In the past, I’d binge myself sick in times of uncertainty, but these days the abuse takes other forms: I allow myself to get lost in the deep weeds of worry. The kicker is that I’m not worried about anything bad. No medical scares or fresh family strife in my world. Deep-fried worry over those things would be more understandable.

In this case, I’m worrying about potentially awesome changes in my life. Someone with a more balanced mind would enjoy the potential for good things and take it a day at a time. But when you have OCD, anticipation is the spiked club you use to repeatedly club yourself. We crave control like a newborn craves mother’s milk. In reality, however, there are few things an individual can control.

So here I am, walking around in a daze, waking up in the middle of the night and having trouble going back to sleep, checking my computer way too often for some sign that answers will come.

I keep repeating a phrase that I learned in a recent course I took on mindfulness-based stress reduction: “The past is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and the present is a gift.” I know these words to be true. Knowing them and living them isn’t necessarily the same thing in my world.

Eventually all this will pass; it always does.

I’ve been praying a lot. Some of you scowl at the idea of praying, but it really helps me. If nothing else, it calms me down and reminds me that I’m not a soul adrift or alone. I have all the support I could ever ask for, and that’ll see me through.

I did a lot of house cleaning this weekend. Ironically, this activity, often conducted in OCD overdrive, helped me wring out some of the anxiety. I guess I needed the exercise that comes with running up and down three flights of stairs all day.

I played a lot of guitar, too. Few things have been better at helping me stay in the moment. And I feel younger when my kids tell me to turn it down.

I used to be a mental mess most of the time, so I’m grateful that these worry binges only come in waves now. The trick is to take them from frequent or even infrequent events to absolutely rare moments.

Out of control

Art by Bill Fennell
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Control Freak-Out

OCD sometimes makes me feel adrift even when things are going well. I’m feeling it a lot these days and this post, originally written in 2010, captures the malady well.

Mood music:

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There’s another byproduct of OCD that I’ve described indirectly before, but never head on. A byproduct for my own special blend of dysfunction, that is.

Sometimes, no matter how well things are going — and no matter how good my mood is when I wake up — I’ll sit at my desk and suddenly feel awash in melancholy.

It comes over me suddenly, and it can be even more frustrating than the black moods that hit me when there are visible troubles to spark it. When a wave of melancholy hits for no good reason, I sit here feeling like an idiot.

I start to contemplate doing things that are bad for me, like going and binging on $30 of junk food. It used to be that less than 10 minutes after a thought like that entered my head, I’d be doing just that. (See “The Most Uncool Addiction” for a better explanation of why this used to happen)

Things are going very well for me these days. Yet the blues persist. 

As I sit here analyzing my head, an answer is emerging. What I’m feeling is adrift. Not in the sense that my life is adrift, because it’s never been more full of purpose. The adrift feeling is over things I can’t control.

Why yes, everything you’ve heard about OCD and control freakism is true. People like us crave control like a junkie craves a shot of smack to the arm. It grabs us by the nose and drags us down the road until our emotions are raw and bleeding.

That’s why I used to be such an asshole at The Eagle-Tribune. Every story I edited then went through three more editors and then to the page designer. Along the way, everyone after me had to take a whack at it. I’d hover over the poor page designers because it was the closest thing I had to control. Ultimate control would have meant laying out the pages myself. That would have been a stupid thing to do, mind you. I couldn’t lay out a news page to save my life.

When I was the assistant news editor for the paper’s New Hampshire editions, I was out a week when my son Sean was born. I came in one night to catch up on e-mail and saw the message where my boss announced my son’s birth. In it, he joked that I probably stood over the doctor and told him how to deliver the baby.

I wanted to punch him.

I saw red.

Because I knew that was something I could easily be pictured doing. It hit too close to the truth.

The control freak has emerged in a variety of other ways over the years. Getting stuck in traffic would send me into a rage because all I could do is sit and wait. Getting on a plane filled me with dread because I could only sit there and wait. There was the fear that the plane might crash. But the bigger problem for me was that I was at the mercy of the pilots, the air traffic and the weather. I had no control over the schedule, and that incensed me. Today, I love flying.

So what’s my problem now?

I think it’s that all the cool things going on right now are still in play. The various projects are set in motion, but now I have to sit and wait on others to work through their processes. A more normal person would just take these things as they come and just live in the moment. But I’m not normal.

I have to wait my turn. I don’t like that.

But then it’s appropriate that I should be made to feel uncomfortable about it, since I really have no business trying to control any of these things. Other people have their jobs to do, and I should trust them.

I’m working on it.

I handle it better than I used to.

And this particular strain of melancholy is like New England weather:

If I wait an hour, it’ll change.