Someone recently asked if I think about my disease 24-7 and, if so, whether doing so is perilous to those around me. In this case, the disease is OCD and the addictions that go with it.
Mood music:
Let me try to take a stab at addressing that:
I don’t think my disease should define me and keep me in a box. But it’s also a major part of who I am and how I tick. Writing a blog that focuses on that probably amplifies things. But I see some necessity in it all.
Like any person with an addictive personality, I have to have it on my mind around the clock because if I stop thinking about it I forget it’s there. That’s when I get sloppy and sink into the bad behavior.
The OCD part is a little more complicated and maybe even a little contradictory.
Since OCD is largely a disease that triggers destructive over thinking, you would think that the goal is to teach yourself not to think so hard. In some respects, that is the goal. But it’s about not engaging in thinking that snags your brain like the scratch in a CD does to the laser. It’s about never forgetting that the disorder, like addiction, is nearby doing push-ups, ready to kick your ass when you get too comfortable.
I’ll admit that I’m not even close to having this stuff in balance. But to those who think I focus on my disease at the expense of all else, I disagree. The me of today is a deeply flawed animal. But go back and meet the me of five or 10 years ago and you’ll meet a monster. A wounded monster. Everyone is probably better off with me as a flawed animal. I’m less harmful that way.
That doesn’t mean I should tell everyone to fuck off and carry on with no regard for the needs of others.
I need to keep working on being a better husband, a better father, a better friend and colleague. I’m never going to be perfect. But I can be better. If I have to think about my disease 24-7 to keep getting better, so be it.
I also think it’s necessary to remember my disease so I can be be more helpful and supportive of other people dealing with their own diseases — not necessarily cancer and the like, but everything from work stress to a loss of identity.
I’ve tried hard to demolish the wall I hide behind when my mind isn’t right. But whenever I think I’ve made progress, shit happens and I find it’s taller and thicker than ever.
Mood music:
My latest mood swing has me thinking hard about how I allow this to happen. Far as I can tell, I do make progress, but then I take my eye off the wrecking ball and the wall rebuilds itself when I’m busy internalizing everything.
For all the sharing I do in this blog, sometimes it’s still ridiculously hard to open up to those closest to me. One reason is that I’m still a selfish bastard sometimes. I get so wrapped up in my work and feelings that it becomes almost impossible to see someone else’s side of things.
I also don’t like to be in a situation where there’s yelling. There was plenty of that growing up, and I tend to avoid arguments with loved ones at all costs. Putting up a wall can be a bitch for any relationship, because sooner or later bad feelings will race at that wall like a drunk behind the wheel of a Porsche and slam right into it. Some bricks in the wall crack and come loose, but by then it can be too late. Relationships are totaled.
I’m starting to believe this is a chronic condition hardened by my early history. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to sit here and accept it.
When I stop talking, it hurts my wife, my kids and my larger family. But how do I calm the restlessness so that I’ll stay buckled into the bulldozer with my hands firmly on the controls, pounding the wrecking ball through the wall until only dust remains?
Therapy helps, and I have that regularly. But somewhere between the therapist’s office and the rest of my life, the action plan goes missing.
Maybe the problem is that I dance around it in therapy and I’m really not leaving with an action plan in hand.
Maybe the height and thickness of the wall increases and decreases on a set schedule and I just have to be more watchful. It definitely seems to grow more impenetrable at the start of winter, which is where we are now.
But maybe it’s always there, the same size and thickness, and I just happen to ignore it until someone forces me to remember its existence.
If all that sounds like bullshit, perhaps it is. I try to be as honest as possible in this blog, but let’s remember that I’m an addict and addicts are skilled at lying to themselves and others.
My mind is clear about one thing right now: I’ve slid backward and need to regain my footing. The best place to start is by making a real action plan, right here, right now:
–At my next therapy appointment, I need to make my communication troubles the focus of the appointment instead of letting the therapist run down the broader checklist.
–I need to be more disciplined about using the happy lamp I’m supposed to sit in front of during the winter. Truth be told, I’ve resisted it because in the end, I look at the florescent glow and grouse to myself that it’s just not the same as real sunlight.
–I need to reassess my diet. I’m pretty disciplined about following a strict, OA-approved food plan. But I’ve had trouble getting up the mood to eat the vegetables that are a staple of the program. So I fall back on my OA-approved breakfast at other meals. I tell myself the end goal is not to binge eat and that’s true. But messing with the food could also mean I’m messing with my mind.
–I need to get better at letting people yell at me sometimes. Yelling from anyone inevitably sends me back under my mother’s roof. Maybe Ma doesn’t yell anymore but she did back then, and a raised voice goes in my ears and hits the brain like gunshots. But avoiding arguments doesn’t make problems go away. They just sit patiently in the corner waiting for the next opportunity, which is always there.
–I need to get better at talking back. This might seem strange to those who think I’m pretty good at speaking up. But that’s just in writing form. Verbally I still suck at it. I don’t want to say things that might be hurtful and, at the least, uncomfortable. But sometimes others need a talking to for their own good. I need to be more helpful in that regard.
–I need to start walking again. I used to walk compulsively, then a few years ago I stopped. Perhaps I need to work 20 or 30 minutes two or three times a week back into the mix, so I can use the time to process my thoughts. I used to use walking time to do that and I was still a mental mess. But I’ve made a lot of progress since then and maybe the walks will be more useful for organizing thoughts now that it’s not a game of spinning worries and anxieties around in my skull.
Is any of this realistic? I don’t know. But it’s time to try more radical wall-demolishing activities.
Part of the holiday tradition around here is a viewing of “It’s A Wonderful Life.” The ending used to make me sad, because it seemed to sum up what was missing in my life.
For a long time, I didn’t feel like I had any friends. It was nobody’s fault. I had crawled so far inside myself that I chose dozing off on the couch with the TV remote in my hand over going outside and dealing with people.
I was terrified of my own shadow and too absorbed in OCD-driven thoughts to reach out to real people outside the closest family.
But that’s what insanity does to you. You think all the shit that’s untrue is real and, in the process, you miss the very real beauty that’s right in front of your face.
But I’ve done a lot of mental healing in the last few years. I’ve written about it at length here — more than some folks think I should. But the facts are ironclad:
–I’m much better at living in the moment than I used to be.
–Once I learned to get out of my own way, I realized that I do have a lot of friends; way more than I can count. That’s a big deal, because in my late teens I used to be so insecure about how many friends I had that I would try to count them all. They never went away. I did.
That last scene from “It’s A Wonderful Life” — where George Bailey finds a copy of “Tom Sawyer” from his guardian angel, Clarence, with a message inside the cover that says “No man is a failure who has friends” — is so true.
Two years ago today, in a moment of Christmas-induced depression, I started this blog. I meant for it to be a place where I could go and spill out the insanity in my head so I could carry on with life.
In short order, it snowballed into much more than that.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/IKpEoRlcHfA
About a year into my recovery from serious mental illness and addiction — the most uncool, unglamorous addiction at that — I started thinking about sharing where I’ve been. My reasoning was simple: I’d listened to a lot of people toss around the OCD acronym to describe everything from being a type A personality to just being stressed. I also saw a lot of people who were traveling the road I’d been down and were hiding their true nature from the world for fear of a backlash at work and in social circles.
At some point, that bullshit became unacceptable to me.
I started getting sick of hiding. I decided the only way to beat my demons at their sick little game was to push them out into the light, so everyone could see how ugly they were and how bad they smelled. That would make them weaker, and me stronger. And so that’s how this started out, as a stigma-busting exercise.
Then, something happened. A lot of you started writing to me about your own struggles and asking questions about how I deal with specific challenges life hurls at me. The readership has steadily increased.
Truth be told, life with THE OCD DIARIES hasn’t been what I’d call pure bliss. There are many mornings where I’d rather be doing other things, but the blog calls to me. A new thought pops into my head and has to come out. It can also be tough on my wife, because sometimes she only learns about what’s going on in my head from what’s in the blog. I don’t mean to do that. It’s just that I often can’t form my thoughts clearly in discussion. I come here to do it, and when I’m done the whole world sees it.
More than once I’ve asked Erin if I should kill this blog. Despite the discomfort it can cause her at times, she always argues against shutting it down. It’s too important to my own recovery process, and others stand to learn from it or at least relate to it.
And so I push forward.
One difference: I run almost ever post I write by her before posting it. I’ve shelved several posts at her recommendation, and it’s probably for the best. Restraint has never been one of my strengths.
This blog has helped me repair relationships that were strained or broken. It has also damaged some friendships. When you write all your feelings down without a filter, you’re inevitably going to make someone angry.
One dear friend suggested I push buttons for a good story and don’t know how to let sleeping dogs lie. She’s right about the sleeping dogs part, but I don’t agree with the first suggestion. I am certainly a button pusher. But I don’t push to generate a good story. I don’t set out to do that, at least.
Life happens and I write about how I feel about it, and how I try to apply the lessons I’ve learned. It’s never my way or the highway. If you read this blog as an instruction manual for life, you’re doing it wrong. What works for me isn’t necessarily going to fit your own needs.
Over time, the subject matter of this blog has broadened. It started out primarily as a blog about OCD and addiction. Then it expanded to include my love of music and my commentary on current events as they relate to our mental state.
I recently rewrote the “about” section of the blog to better explain the whole package. Reiterating it is a pretty good way to end this entry. You can see it here.
Every year, when family members ask me what I want for Christmas, I’m always at a loss for words. I don’t really care about getting presents, though I love to give them.
Mood music:
But there are some non-material things I wish for:
It’s not how big your house is. It’s the souls inside that make it a home.
Erin and I have had frequent discussions about what it might be like to own a larger home. Our 1300-square-foot townhouse has served us well for more than a decade. But there’s always that desire to have what others have.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:1gmPJL4u6Jv1oTZEQyDlfw]
The discussion usually starts with everything that needs fixing around here: A hole in the kitchen wall that gets bigger every time the front door is slammed against it. Chipped and mismatched paint. Toilets that constantly need plunging.
For all our work success, we never seem to make enough money to do things we might want to do, like fixing the items above, gutting the kitchen or buying a bigger house.
To me, there’s a mental health issue at play: Your surroundings have a big affect on your sanity. When my OCD was at its worst, I was delirious over how clean the floors were or how the curtains were arranged. I became a nutcase when the kids made a mess.
Now, admittedly, I’ve become something of a slob in my recovery. I can walk right by a mess and not notice a thing.
Erin, on the other hand, finds it harder to have clarity and peace of mind when the house is a mess and falling apart.
As a kid, I grew up in excessive cleanliness and some filth. My mother was always obsessive about keeping a squeaky clean house. But I can’t say I was particularly happy in those years. After my parents divorced and my father got the house, he was so focused on the family business much of the time that the house became a mess — even with housekeepers. Erin grew up in a house that was always in disrepair. But her parents had — and have — a strong marriage and raised four daughters. It was a warm and happy home.
To me a house with holes in the walls is a pain in the ass. But it beats an immaculate house where the mood is always tense.
I know a lot of people who try to keep up with the proverbial Joneses. They bury themselves in debt they can never get out of and they never seem to be happy. They have to have a TV as big as their neighbors. They have to have a nicer car, a bigger yard.
It doesn’t seem worth it to me anymore.
Though I will admit there are days where I wouldn’t mind a bigger house and someone to clean it for us.
If more than one member of the same family is in therapy, is that a sign that the family is seriously screwed up?
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/iFAweWkqqjk
That’s the question we are asking ourselves these days. As the reader knows by now, I’ve been in therapy for OCD and related issues for seven years. Duncan sees a children’s therapist to help him work through his ADHD.
Is this family a basket case? In my opinion, it’s exactly the opposite.
I wouldn’t be enjoying the equilibrium I have today if not for the years of therapy.
Meanwhile, Duncan is learning a lot of helpful techniques to help him focus and control his anger.
I’m a staunch advocate of therapy as a tool for mental health. I think too many people are embarrassed when it’s suggested that therapy would do them some good. People who stay away from therapy because they feel it’s a mark of weakness have no idea what they are denying themselves. That makes me sad.
It’s a funny thing when I talk to people suffering from depression, addiction and other troubles of the mind. Folks seem more comfortable about the idea of pills than in seeing a therapist. After all, they’re just crazy “shrinks” in white coats obsessed with how your childhood nightmares compromised your adult sex life, right?
I’ve been to many therapists in my life. I was sent to one at Children’s Hospital in Boston as a kid to talk through the emotions of being sick with Chron’s Disease all the time. That same therapist also tried to help me and my siblings process the bitter aftermath of our parents’ divorce in 1980.
As a teenager, I went to another therapist to discuss my brother’s death and my difficulty in getting along with my stepmother (a wonderful, wonderful woman who I love dearly, by the way. But as a kid I didn’t get along with her).
That guy was a piece of work. He had a thick French accent and wanted to know if I found my stepmother attractive. From the moment he asked that question, I was done with him, and spent the rest of the appointment being belligerent.
That put me off going to a therapist for a long time. I started going to one again in 2004, when I found I could no longer function in society without untangling the barbed wire in my head. But I hesitated for a couple years before pressing on.
The therapist I started going to specialized in dealing with disturbed children and teenagers. That was perfect, because in a lot of ways I was still a troubled kid.
She never told me what to do, never told me how I’m supposed to interpret my disorder against my past. She asked a lot of questions and had me do the work of sorting it out. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what a good therapist does. They ask questions to get your brain churning, dredging up experiences that sat at the back of the mind like mud on the ocean floor. That’s how you begin to deal with how you got to the point of dysfunction.
She moved to Florida a year in and I started going to a fellow who worked from his house. I would explain my binge eating habits to him, specifically how I would down $30 worth of McDonald’s between work and home.
“You should stock your car with healthy foods like fruit, so if you’re hungry you can eat those things instead,” he told me.
That was the end of that. He didn’t get it. When an addict craves the junk, the healthy food around you doesn’t stand a chance. The compulsion is specifically toward eating the junk. He should have understood. He didn’t. Game over, dumb ass.
That’s not to say I blindly obey his every suggestion. He specializes in stress reduction and is big on yoga and eliminating coffee from the daily diet. Those are two deal breakers for me. Yoga bores the dickens out of me. If you’ve been following this blog all along, I need not explain the coffee part.
I also find it fun to push his buttons once in awhile. I’ll show up at his office with a huge cup of Starbucks. “Oh, I see you’ve brought drugs with you,” he’ll say.
Our relationship has settled into this banter back and forth, and it continues to serve its purpose. We go over everything happening in my life at that given moment, and if he suspects I’m thinking in unproductive ways or lying to myself, he calls me on it.
I’m better for it.
All that is the long way of saying I think it’s absolutely healthy if multiple members of one family are in therapy at the same time.
A friend of mine was taken aback yesterday when I used a text she sent me in a post. I thought it would be OK because I was keeping her identity a secret. But in hindsight, I should have asked first.
That’s the challenge with a blog like this. I need to take things right to the danger line to make points I feel need making. But sometimes I step over that line. I’ve worked on being extra careful, but it’s obviously a work in progress.
But there’s a bigger point to this than my own foolishness. My friend was not amused by what I did and she made it known. But she quickly forgave me and on with life we go.
That’s one of the many things I admire about this friend. She’ll get angry and sound off, but she doesn’t hold a grudge and freeze out the folks who get on her bad side.
As many of us know, holding grudges is the easiest thing in the world to do. So is NOT holding grudges.
That’s a sign of deep character and strength. I’m lucky to have her as a friend, despite myself.
Fifteen years ago I lost the friend who had become my older brother and rudder. A vicious cycle of depression destroyed his body, but it failed to kill his soul.
Mood music:
For a lot of my more religious friends, that has to sound odd, if not foul. We’ve been taught that suicide is a mortal sin, the kind that sends the soul straight to hell. I used to believe that. Now I think that line of thinking is wrong, stupid and even a little dangerous. It makes us give up on people who were good to the core, whose only fault was an inability to climb out of the black fog depression smothers the mind with.
Here are a couple brief paragraphs on the day he died:
In the weeks leading up to his suicide, I knew he was badly depressed. I even had a feeling he harbored suicidal thoughts. I just never thought he’d do it. Or it could be that I thought I had more time to be there and help him through it. Instead, I stayed wrapped in my own world as he deteriorated.
On Nov. 15, 1996, he decided he’d had enough. It was a sparkling, autumn Friday and I was having a great morning at work. But early that afternoon, I got a call at work from my mother. She had driven by Sean’s house and saw police cars and ambulances and all kinds of commotion on the front lawn. I called his sister and she put his wife on the phone. She informed me he was dead. By his own hand.
I hated him for years after that, failing to comprehend why he would leave us that way, especially since he knew suicide meant a damned soul. That’s what we were taught.
But I’ve had my own battles with OCD-fueled depression over the years, and despite all the pain that goes with it, I’ve gained wisdom. I understand now what happens to a mind on the ropes.
In that state of being, I don’t think a person can be held responsible for the damage they inflict on themselves, because they are not acting with a fully-functioning brain. I could put it another way and say a person in that state is no longer dealing with a full deck, but you should get the point by now.
My friend Linda, herself a person of strong Catholic Faith, recently sent me a passage from the Catechism of the Catholic Church that shows that suicide isn’t the trip to eternal damnation many in the church would have us believe:
“2282 Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide.
2283 We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.”
Nothing is as black and white as we’d like to believe.
Now that I have the peace of knowing that Sean Marley’s soul didn’t die on that confused morning, I’m able to focus on what he did for me.
–He taught me that it’s OK to question the status quo at all times, to never take things at face value.
–He taught me that it’s OK to be different, and that being different is even something to celebrate.
–He taught me that the world is bigger than the neighborhood you grow up in, and that you need to see something of the world to understand it.
–He taught me to be a fighter.
And now for some of the cool things you may not have known about him:
–He was a gifted guitarist. He could learn to play just about anything, and could write great musical bits when he wanted to. He gave me my first guitar for Christmas in 1986. It was an Ibanez strat model. He had what I think was a Guild electric guitar with a dark blue or black body. I sold the Ibanez several years later and it’s one of my biggest regrets. Sean was pissed but forgave me. I sometimes wonder whatever happened to his guitar. I hope someone’s putting it to good use.
–He was a great writer, and was a very disciplined diary keeper. He showed me several entries over the years, but I haven’t read them since his death. I know they are in safe hands, though.
–His hair went through more changes than Hillary Clinton’s, in both style and color.
–He reveled in listening to bands that weren’t as well known. He was listening to Kix several years before they achieved moderate success. He turned me on to T-Rex, Thin Lizzy and Riot (not Quiet Riot. This band was just called Riot).
–He loved the sea as much as I did, which makes sense, since his father Al was the one who really taught me to appreciate the ocean.
–He was a vegetarian who could not understand why people had to kill animals for food or any other reason. I never caught on, but I respected him for it.
–He was a very spiritual man who was always seeking. He eventually rebelled against the Catholic faith he was brought up on, but he was always reading, writing and exploring who exactly his higher power was.
–He used to find a lot of bizarre z-grade horror movies for us to watch. I can’t remember half the titles, though the Toxic Avenger was in there somewhere. One movie involved aliens who drank their own vomit. He thought that was especially funny.
–He was a Libertarian way before it was the popular thing to be. In fact, in the 1988 presidential election we both voted for a practically unknown politician named Ron Paul. He was the libertarian candidate. Sean voted for him because he was a true believer. I just didn’t want to vote for Bush or Dukakis.
–He was always taking classes, studying and studying some more. He had a serious, deep academic mind. He never stopped learning.
Thanks to him, I’ve never stopped learning. Though he probably didn’t intend it, he also taught me lessons about dealing with suicide. That may seem absurd, but if not for his death, I never would have embarked on the journey to understand.
For those dealing with a suicide in the family, I have a few things for you to consider. I’ve written this down in a few other posts, but it bears frequent repeating. Read it and then get on with your life:
–Blaming yourself is pointless. No matter how many times you replay events in your mind, the fact is that it’s not your fault. For one thing, it’s impossible to get into the head of someone who is contemplating suicide. Sure, there are signs, but since we all get the blues sometimes, it’s very easy to dismiss the signs as something close to normal. When someone is loud in contemplating suicide, it’s usually a cry for help. When the depressed says nothing and even appears OK, it’s usually because they’ve made their decision and are in the quiet, planning stages.
–Blaming each other is even more pointless. Take it from me: Nerves in your circle of family and friends are so raw right now that it won’t take much for relationships to snap into pieces. A week after my friend’s death I wrote a column about it, revealing what in hindsight was too much detail. His family was furious and most of them haven’t talked to me since. They feel I was exploiting his death to advance my writing career and get attention. What I’ve learned, and this is tough to admit, is that you’re going to have to let it go when the finger pointing starts. It’s better not to engage the other side. Nobody is in their right mind at this point, so go easy on each other. Give people space to make their errors in judgment and learn from it.
–Don’t demonize the dead. When a friend takes their life, one of the things that gnaws at the survivors is the notion that — if there is a Heaven and Hell — those who kill themselves are doomed to the latter. I’m a devout Catholic, so you can bet your ass this one has gone through my mind. What I’ve learned though, through my own experiences in the years since, is that depression is a clinical disease. When you are mentally ill, your brain isn’t firing on all thrusters. You engage in self-destructive behavior even though you understand the consequences. A person thinking about suicide is not operating on a sane, normally-functioning mind. So to demonize someone for taking their own life is pointless. To demonize the person, you have to assume they were in their right mind at the time of the act. And you know they weren’t. My practice today is to simply pray for those people, that their souls will still be redeemed and they will know peace. It’s really the best you can do.
– Break the stigma. One of the friends left behind in this latest tragedy has already done something that honors her friend’s life: She went on Facebook and directed people toward the American Association of Suicidology website, specifically the page on knowing the warning signs. That’s a great example of doing something to honor your friend’s memory instead of sitting around second guessing yourself. The best thing to do now is educate people on the disease so that sufferers can help themselves and friends and family can really be of service.
–On with your own life. Nobody will blame you for not being yourself for awhile. You have, after all, just experienced one of the worst tragedies there is. But try not to let it paralyze you. Life must go on. You have to get on with your work and be there for those around you.
Life can be a brutal thing. But it IS a beautiful thing.
