The OCD Diaries

April 8, 2010

Scenes from the Airport

The author finds airport amusement where he once found hell. Here’s what happens.

Mood music for this post: “Learn to Fly” by Foo Fighters:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VQ_3sBZEm0&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

I sit here at 6:23 a.m. San Francisco time, sitting at the gate for a flight home in an hour. Considering what I just passed through, I got here pretty quickly and calmly.

Let’s back up.

When I got here, the TSA line was as long as I’ve ever seen. Directly ahead of me in line were 40 or so tweens headed on a trip to Gettysburg and Washington D.C.

Finding MY food was more trouble than I expected, but I found what I needed. I also found some coffee that was made following my friend Ken White’s recipe.

A few minutes later, I found a Peet’s Coffee stand and things immediately started looking up. I tossed the “White” blend in the trash and got my rocket fuel.

All things considered, I’m in a chipper mood. I keep thinking of airport disaster movies and it makes me laugh. I find myself searching Youtube for some Lynard Skynard videos. Some of you might remember that half that band went down in a plane crash. That’s how my gallows humor works.

I have plenty of reasons to be happy. I’m going home to my family, who I miss. Our security conference was a smashing success. And each night here I caught up with many of the cool people I’m connected with on Twitter.

The weather has also been pretty brilliant, though strangely cooler than it was back home this week.

But there are other reasons to feel this way.

For one thing, I stuck to my plan of recovery and kept my strict alcohol-flour-sugar-free eating program intact. I also didn’t feel the edge around people drinking booze that I felt on the last trip.

I wasn’t perfect. I drank A LOT of caffeine, even by my standards, and smoked more cigars than I normally do. Maybe that’s why I didn’t feel the edge around the liquor.

Ah, addictions. You put two of them down and three more pop up.

But when I think of how much I’ve polluted myself on past trips over the years, this is pretty good behavior.

There’s actually an even bigger reason I’m in a good mood: Trips through airports used to terrify me. It was one of the top freak-out items on my OCD-anxiety itinerary. I’d live the weeks leading up to a trip worrying about whether the plane will drop from the sky. Long lines would send my blood pressure soaring until my head was ready to go supernova.

Sitting on the plane for five or more hours was pure hell because closed-in spaces triggered anxiety attacks, the kind where you have trouble breathing and you see spots in your vision.

I would get home and collapse from the exhaustion.

So here we are, years after I started the therapy and found the 12 Steps of recovery. Oh yeah, and Prozac.

The TSA line doesn’t freak me out anymore. I chatted easily with the fellow overseeing the traveling tweens and with a couple of the kids. All the kids were actually very well behaved and polite.

Being on a plane now brings me peace. I look out the window and see how vast and amazing this country is. If the weather is gray, the pilot will fly us above it to a sky of blue.

Maybe I’ll get some sleep. Maybe I’ll listen to my music or read, or some of each.

Then I’ll land in Boston and get a ride home from a good friend.

Then I’ll see my wife and kids, who I’m eager to see again.

I was talking to a good friend at a meet-up last night — Ed Bellis, chief information security officer for Orbitz — and he asked me if I ever return to the darker feelings of my past.

Sure I do. Managing a mental disorder and its related addictions is hard work and you never stop feeling the ups and downs of life. Nor should you.

I still feel anger and even a little fear sometimes. But instead of those things controlling me, they are now more minor occurrences.

I still get tired. And with addiction, you’re always half a second away from potentially slipping on your darkest habits.

And I definitely go through a day here or week there where depression sets in. That’s normal.

But I told him — truthfully — that there are some things about the old me that will never and can never return.

I can’t see ever having the anxiety attacks and fear I used to have, though I suppose anything is possible. I’ve seen too many of the things I missed to ever turn back. Even if I lapse back into periods of anxiety (I hope not!) there’s no turning back.

My eyes have been opened to a whole new world and going back to the dark room — which is something I used to crave — is now one of those things I’d dread instead.

Another friend, Jen Leggio (@mediaphyter on Twitter), asked me how I manage to write something new in this blog every day while maintaining the writing load I carry on the work side.

My answer is simple:

Back when fear, anxiety and depression led me to binge eat and spend 80 hours a week working out of fear that I might not please everyone (Man, that was fucking dumb), I was constantly wiped out. I would sleep all the way through my weekends.

As a result, writing was hard and stressful.

Now that I’ve learned to get out of my own way, writing comes easily, whether it’s here or in the security realm. I can write a lot more because I don’t feel the least bit of stress about it. I love it, so I do it.

The other thing I chalk it up to is Faith. As my Faith in God deepens, I realize that the things I used to freak out over are trivial items that I can’t take with me into the next life. So getting worked up about them seems pointless.

I know there’s always the chance I can slip backwards. Indeed, setbacks are a natural part of recovery. I like to call those moments growing pains.

But yeah, in the big picture, I’m one grateful SOB.

Now to board the plane. I’m in the middle of my annual reading of Helter Skelter, so I guess I’ll do that until I happily pass out.

End music: “Times Like These” by Foo Fighters:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhzmNRtIp8k&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

March 13, 2010

The Long Road Through Self-Hatred

The author has learned that it’s damn hard to like yourself at the beginning of sobriety and abstinence. The feeling will pass. Eventually.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/TP06kxW_M3I

A friend and fellow 12-Stepper just hit a major milestone in her recovery: 90 days of abstinence. In the world of compulsive overeating, think of this as 90 days of back-to-back sobriety.

She worked hard for this and has every reason to be bursting with joy. Yet she’s uneasy.

She doesn’t feel quite right in her skin.

She’s going through something a lot of us go through when we kick our addictions. To call it self hatred might be a stretch. I don’t think she dislikes herself. But now that her mind is clear of the intoxicating haze, she sees things about herself that she doesn’t like. She’s suddenly aware for the first time that she has some flaws that are tough to look at in the mirror.

For a lot of people, it can become a matter of self hatred. It certainly did for me.

Truth be told, I disliked myself way before I cleaned up.

I hated how I looked. I thought I was the crappiest son/sibling/friend on the face of the Earth. Certain relatives would tell me just that, and I believed them. There’s no question that I was a lousy friend when my best friend, Sean Marley, was sinking into depression and I was too worried about my career to notice.

That’s WHY I gave in to my addictions.

Even though my mental illness included a lot of fear and anxiety over getting sick or dying, I did a pretty good job of trying to kill myself. Not in a suicidal way. Not deliberately. But in the end, addiction is a compulsion — an ache — to repeat dangerous behavior even though you know what the likely consequences are.

It’s the weirdest irony there is.

But when you start to fight your demon head-on, you do become super-aware of your own vulnerabilities. For awhile, I became paralyzed by mine. Then I figured out how to get beyond it. But it took a lot of dirty work.

In his book, “Symptoms of Withdrawal,” Christopher Kennedy Lawford writes that after he kicked drugs in 1986, it still took him awhile to actually become a good person.

Those around him weren’t always happy he was sober, especially since that meant he couldn’t make the cocktails at family gatherings like he used to.

He writes about having to learn how to be a decent human being and be clean at the same time. You would think it’s easy. But it’s not.

In the book, Lawford writes:

“There is another great fiction of recovery — that is, once you stop using your life becomes a bed of roses. Anybody who has stayed sober for any length of time knows that living sober is about learning to live life on life’s terms and a good part of life is painful. When I got sober someone said to me that I would get to realize all my greatest fears in sobriety … You know what? He was right, and it’s not half as bad as I imagined.”

The man speaks the truth. And, by the way, I highly recommend his book to anyone struggling with addiction as well as the clean up:

I had a lot to learn, and I’m still learning. Learning how to be completely honest with my wife and drop my emotional wall was hard. I’m much better at it than I used to be, but I still have a lot of work to do there.

Being more disciplined with money is something I need to be better at. After all, spending is also an addictive behavior.

The list goes on.

But while the work goes on — and will continue to go on — there’s an important point to be made.

Somewhere along the way, I learned to like myself.

Today, I can honestly say I’m happy with the man I’ve become, even if I’m still pretty damn far from perfect.

But then perfect people don’t exist. If they did, they’d be pretty boring.

self_hatred_ii_by_xiaod-d37rb3k — self hatred II by ~xiaoD

February 22, 2010

Outing Myself

The author on why he chose to “out” himself despite what other people might think.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:1Qdnvn4XlmZANCVy3XjrQo]

A couple friends have asked why I “outed myself” in this blog. Wasn’t I afraid people would blackball me at work? Don’t I worry that I’ll be defined by my struggle with OCD above all else?

It’s a fair question.

First, let’s get the notion of “courage” and “bravery” off the table. Some have used those words to describe what I’m doing, and I appreciate that. But I really don’t think it’s that. Like I’ve said before, my grandfather parachuting behind enemy lines at the start of the D-Day invasion was courage.

I’m doing this more because the point arrived where, for the sake of my own sanity, I had to start being myself as openly and honestly as I can. Honesty can be tough for people who deal with mental illness and addiction. [More on this in “The Liar’s Disease“] But I decided I had to do better.

Admittedly, some of the motivation is selfish. We OCD types have overdeveloped egos and tend to go digging for attention. It’s hard to admit that, but it’s the truth. Being open about that forces me to keep myself in check. It’s also an invitation for those around me to call me out on acts of ego and selfishness.

The biggest reason for doing this, without question, is my Faith. I realized some time ago that when you rip the skeletons from your closet and toss them into the daylight, they turn to dust. Big sinister stigmas become very small indeed. Then you can move on.

I didn’t arrive at that viewpoint easily. It took many years of dirty work.

With my Faith comes a need to do service for others. In this case, I accumulated experiences that might be of help to other sufferers. Sharing wasn’t exactly something I wanted to do. It’s something I HAD to do.

We’re all in this together. Many good people have helped me along the way. Trying to help someone else is the very least I could do. In the final analysis, we all help each other.

Getting it all out of the head and into this blog has certainly been helpful, so thanks for indulging me.

Was it a risk to my career to do this? I don’t think so.

I don’t think I’d be doing this if I still worked for The Eagle-Tribune. The culture of that newsroom wouldn’t have allowed for it when I was there. I have no idea if the culture has changed, but I suspect not.

I’ve gotten a ton of support from those I work with now. I’m definitely lucky to work with the folks in this office.

Does that mean everyone should put their demons out in the open as I have?

Difficult to say.

It’s not going to be the right decision for everyone to make. There are a lot of honorable reasons for people to keep their demons private. In many cases, the veil is what you use to protect others as well as yourself.

But my veil blew away in the storm that was my life. Walking forward without it was all I could do.

February 20, 2010

Another Reason Addiction-Depression Stinks

I’ve mentioned before that one of the inspirations for this blog was a book called “The Heroin Diaries” by Nixxi Sixx, bass player and lyricist for Motley Crue. It’s a book of diary entries he wrote from late 1986 to late 1987, at the time the “Girls Girls Girls” album was recorded and the band toured the world to support it.

At the time, he was in the tight clutches of a heroin addiction that would nearly kill him by December 1987. He was in fact dead for a few minutes, but a needle to the heart brought him back to life.

Last night I was flipping through the book again and noticed that Sixx often went days without showering. If he took a shower, it was a good day.

His girlfriend at the time, Vanity, is also described as being a mess all the time because she was too high to notice.

As a former manager for Motley Crue put it, when you’re strung out the first thing to fall by the side of the road is personal hygene.

From my experiences with depression and addictive behavior, I can tell you there’s a lot of truth to that statement.

In my early 20s, when I was binge eating in the basement of the house in Revere, I would go days wearing the same gym pants and bath robe without taking a shower. I was so depressed I just didn’t care.

Besides, it’s not like I was having much luck finding girlfriends when I was clean.

My friends were often just as bad, especially Sean Marley, who at the time was descending into his own little hell and was running sleep-deprivation experiments on himself.

The hang-ups weren’t unique. I’d obsess about finding a girlfriend, which I couldn’t do because I was trying too hard. I was also going through my parental hatred phase. In hindsight I was an ungrateful slob. After all, they did let me have the entire basement apartment as a bedroom and let be throw parties at will.

Later on, after I met the love of my life and started getting serious about my journalism career, I made more of an effort at personal hygene. I showered more often, anyway.

But my weight was piling on as I dove deep into binge eating. Marley had recently died and I was doing an editing job that was killing me because of the hours I was putting in. I showered so I wouldn’t offend anyone, but I would wear the same clothes days at a time. I figured if I wore the same pants every day nobody would notice because I’d change the shirts. I’m sure some people noticed.

The good news is that I got over this sort of behavior as I went to work on the root causes of my OCD and related addictions.

So don’t worry. I’ve had my shower and a fresh change of clothes.

But if you’re standing next to someone in the elevator and they just happen to reek, go easy on them. They’re probably just going through a rough time.

With any luck, it’ll pass.

February 17, 2010March 16, 2015

Addicted to Feeling Good: A Love-Hate Story

Every now and then, it’s useful to look back at who I used to be so I can appreciate who I am today.

I do it partly to laugh at how — in many ways, despite the progress I’ve made — I can still be as stupid in adulthood as I was 20-plus years ago.

As I write this we’re halfway through Lent — a time to sacrifice habits you love — or, in my case, habits you’re addicted to.

Giving something up always brings back acute memories of some of the dumber things I’ve done in the compulsive-obsessive drive to feel good.

Indulge me as I take inventory.

Mood music:

Age 18: I’m living off 8 cups of black coffee and a mug of Raisin Bran a day in an attempt to be rock-star thin. I discovered an after dinner drink — Haffenreffer Lager Beer. There were little puzzles on the underside of the bottle caps, and your ability to solve them would steadily decline — or increase — depending on how drunk you were. Being addicted to instant gratification, I’d suck down three bottles in quick succession so I could immediately enjoy feeling like I had just absorbed half a keg of lighter beer.

Age 21: I’m pacing up and down the driveway of the old Revere house in a blue-green polka-dotted bathrobe I used to own. I’m freaking out because I’ve just consumed two beers and an entire stick of marijuana by myself in the concrete storage room beneath the front patio.

The fellow who gave it to me was about 500 pounds and wore a black trenchcoat, even during the summer. He died Valentine’s Day 2009 of a heart attack. I lost touch with him as I became focused on career and learned after his death that he had led an admirable life of aiding the mentally disabled. Anyway, I was freaking out because, in the midst of lying on my bed enjoying the high, I suddenly got the idea that I just might have a heart attack. That’s one of my earlier memories of an anxiety attack.

We partied a lot in that basement. It was the scene of many impressive and entertaining mood swings.

I called my friend Danny Waters and asked him to come over. He did, and found me pacing up and down the driveway in my bathrobe. He took me down the street to Kelly’s Roast Beef and got me an order of chicken fingers to munch away the anxiety. Kelly’s was always a favorite place for me to binge eat away my troubles. It was as good as any drug or liquor store.

Age 29: I drop 100 pounds of fat I packed on while binge-eating my way through the middle 1990s. I’m inspired by the quadruple bypass surgery my father has recently had. I lose the weight by pigging out Thursday through Saturday and starving myself Sunday through Wednesday. The binge eating continues through the next few years but I manage to keep the weight down, fooling most people.

Age 33: Around this time, the binge eating gets a new playmate in the form of red wine, which I decide I can’t live without.

Age 39: No more binge eating — not today, anyway. No wine. I work the 12-step program of recovery.

Age 44: I’ve had my slips along the way, but I continue working to give up my bad habits for good.

February 16, 2010

What Kind of Day It Has Been

The author’s day has not gone as planned. He’s OK with that, though he wasn’t always.

Mood music for this post: “Adrift And At Peace” from NIN:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMnv8zrmAyU&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

This day has not gone as planned.

I wanted to be in the office today plowing through some work. But another winter storm forced me to work from home.

Some would say it’s great I can do that, and it is. But when there’s a lot on the plate, I prefer to be in the office. Especially when the kids are home from school for February vacation. At least in the summer I can write from the back deck while the kids play in the field behind the house.

This time of year we’re all indoors and the kids are loud.

A few years ago the snow, the change in schedule and the kids in my workspace would have unhinged me.

I’d get a story written. Maybe three. But I’d be a puddle of lava by day’s end, good for nothing except sleep.

Not so today.

I’m enjoying the cozy chair by my living room window, watching the snow fall.

I’ve gotten as much writing and editing done from here as I would have from the office.

The kids were indeed loud and distracting, but I enjoyed that, too. What used to be stress is now comic relief, especially when Sean tells Duncan he looks adorable when he cries and Duncan responds by pouncing on his older brother, yelling, “Who’s crying now?!”

I smoked one last cigar before Lent begins tomorrow, since that’s one of the things I’m abstaining from until Easter. It was a Cuban stick at that. Thanks to my friend Bob Connors for parting with it.

The coffee is French-pressed and bitter. Just the way I like it.

A much different day than what it would have been five years ago, before I gained the upper hand over the OCD.

Days that don’t go as planned are especially difficult for people with OCD. We do, after all, crave control over everything we can control. And we badly want to control things we can’t, like the weather.

Forget about the small stuff, like checking a doorknob seven times or tapping your feet to the count of 60. A carefully crafted schedule in shambles is the big stuff; hell for a sick mind.

That’s when someone like me turns to the food or the booze to comfort the troubled mind.

But the food is well under control today, and bottles of wine that once taunted me from a kitchen counter rack have gone unnoticed in the corner.

I’m not the same man I used to be.

Credit the therapists, the Prozac, the religious conversion or all of the above.

Whatever it is, I’m grateful for it.

February 13, 2010

In Defense of Patrick Kennedy

The youngest son of Edward M. Kennedy has often been criticized as a lightweight Congressman who gets away with things other people would get arrested for. But the author salutes him anyway. Here’s why.

Patrick Kennedy, the youngest child of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, announced yesterday that he won’t be running for re-election to the Congressional seat he has held since 1995.

US Representative Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island announced that he will not seek reelection, capping a 16-year career in politics. Patrick, the son of the late Senator Edward M. 'Ted' Kennedy, said his father's death caused him to do some soul-searching about his future. With Kennedy's departure, this will be the first time in more than six decades the Kennedy family will not have a member in Washington. Scroll through this gallery for a look at how the Kennedy lineage has impacted politics and public life.

Some will tell you it’s just as well. The Congressman, after all, hasn’t done much except for living off his family name and crashing cars into roadside barriers while high on narcotics. That’s often what I hear from my more conservative friends, who hate everything having to do with the Kennedy name.

Stew Milne/AP Photo

But as someone recovering from OCD, depression, a binge-eating disorder and other addictions, I have plenty of reason to defend this man.

In my view, this fellow has gotten some pretty unfair treatment. Let’s start with Laurence Leamer’s book, “Sons of Camelot.”

In this book, Patrick is described as a spoiled kid who has accomplished nothing in Congress other than repeatedly winning re-election. He’s described as someone who blindly follows the Democratic leadership.

Some of that may be true. But Patrick has done some courageous service for those who suffer from mental illness.

Kennedy has been open about his own struggles with bi-polar disorder and the addictions that go with it. He has been in and out of addiction treatment centers and once noted how his addictive behavior could latch onto anything from pain medication to something as simple as cough medicine.

What’s more, he did one of the hardest things people like us can do: He lived in the spotlight as a public servant, where critics can be cruel and a lot of people like to hate the Kennedys just for the hell of it.

Patrick has carried a lot of pressure being a Kennedy. There’s the pressure to match his father’s towering legislative record and live up to the legendary stature of his uncles.

Some would have dropped to the floor long ago, curled in a fetal position, over the pressure. Some would not have survived. One of Patrick’s cousins, David Kennedy, one of RFK’s sons, didn’t survive the battle with the demons. He died of a drug overdose in 1984.

RFK Jr. also struggled with addiction. So did Christopher Kennedy Lawford, who wrote an excellent book of his own on the subject: “Symptoms of Withdrawal: A Memoir of Snapshots and Redemption.”

I loved Lawford’s book for a variety of reasons. He recounted his sordid tale with humor and was brutally honest about something addicts are all to aware of: When you quit the thing you’re addicted to, it doesn’t automatically turn you into a good person.

In fact, recovering addicts often become big jerks before they find their footing. They’re learning how to behave in public without being drunk or high. A deep depression often sets in because years of abuse leaves the brain with deep chemical imbalances that hit you like a brick to the head once the booze, food or narcotics exit the picture.

Patrick has dealt with all of these realities and still carried on in public service.

He continued to show up for life when life was at its most unbearable.

It gave people like me a little inspiration when we needed it most. So as Patrick prepares to exit the public stage and embark on a new life, I thank him for his service and wish him the best.

It’s easy for people to pass judgment on him for his flaws.

But people who do so often forget about their own flaws.

None of us are truly without sin. But we like to cast the first stones anyway.

February 12, 2010

When Pain Drips from the Mind to the Body

The author on why it’s true that mental illness leads to physical sickness.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:24PttQAgkYLdpR4TOgdV4C]

I’ve heard a lot of people argue over whether this person’s or that person’s aches and pains were “all in their head.” You know the types: Never any real underlying disease, but they’re always calling out of work with a headache or some intestinal discomfort.

It’s all in their head, you say?

Well, yeah.

It’s called psychosomatic illness, when mental anguish leads to physical sickness.

I’ve been there. Migraines. Brutal back pain. A stomach turned inside-out.

But it wasn’t always clear that what ailed me was in my head. Childhood illness confused matters. A huge chunk of my digestive track was in flames and spewing blood because of Chron’s Disease. I’m told by my parents that the doctors came close to removing the colon more than once, though I don’t remember that myself; probably because the doctors had that conversation with the parents instead of the patient.

To throw it into remission, they used the maximum dose of a drug called Prednisone, which caused another kind of body blow in the form of migraines. You can read more about that in “The Bad Pill Kept me from the Good Pill,” but the bottom line is that these headaches came daily; always making me sick to my stomach.

Later in life, I developed severe back pain, the kind that would knock me onto the couch and keep me there for weeks.

All legitimate physical problems. But at some point my brain lost the ability to differentiate a real Chron’s flare-up or back spasm to an imagined one.

In the end, though, it doesn’t matter. It may as well have been one of those things. Because when the mind thinks it is, it has a habit of BECOMING real.

I found an article in About.com that describes the problem better than I ever could on my own:

Any illness that has physical symptoms, but has the mind and emotions as its origin is called a psychosomatic illness. Although you may be told that it’s “all in your head”, these illnesses are not imaginary. The aches and pains are very real, but because your doctor is looking for an actual physical cause, they are very tricky to diagnose and treat. The key is to look for a source of stress in the person’s life that the person is not coping with. By treating the underlying stress and depression, it may be possible to heal the physical problems as well.

For me, it was easy to separate the Chron’s episodes from the tricky stuff described above, since the disease was sitting there for the doctors to see. I was always told mental stress could trigger flare-ups and I guess they did, especially when my parents divorced 30 years ago and a lot of stress over custody ensued. I’m fairly sure the after-effects of my brother’s death set off the last real flare-up in 1986.

But the migraines and back problems seeped seamlessly into the things that were going wrong with me mentally.

Anxiety attacks felt essentially the same as a heart attack, complete with the pain shooting from the chest to the neck and down the arms. Migraines followed. Work stress often sparked migraines and back pain.

While it was difficult to separate other legitimate physical problems from those stemming from mental distress, I can tell you that dealing with my underlying OCD, depression and addiction made a lot of ailments go away.

I’m not sure I can credit it with ending the back problems. Though mental illness most likely enhanced the back pain, that problem was eventually diagnosed as three out-of-whack vertebrae the chiropractor knocks back into alignment every other week. No more imprisonment on the couch.

But these things have gone away — and have not returned — since I got a handle on the OCD and related binge-eating disorder:

–Puking up stomach acid in the middle of the night

–Numbing of the feet

–A strange poked-in-the-eye sensation that would hit me early mornings and leave me with blurred vision for a day or more.

–A dull ache in the left hand, which often got worse as my mind spun out of control with thoughts that it MIGHT be a heart-attack.

–Fatigue that would cause all my joints to ache unless I were to lie down and go to sleep.

–Heart palpatations.

All disappeared once I started to attack the core problem.

The ultimate take-away from all this is that something in your head can cause real, physical pain.

And when you deal with what’s in your head, the pain in the rest of your body can be eradicated.

February 9, 2010

OCD Diaries: The Office Mom

The author salutes Anne Saita, a former co-worker who showed me how to stand up to people and face down my fears — and whose blog is a must-read.

I’ve been reading the blog Run DMZ a lot lately.The main reason is that it’s chock full of excellent content on how to eat and exercise properly. The other reason is that the author is someone near and dear to me: Anne Saita, my former boss at SearchSecurity.com.

She’s an avid runner, an inspirational Mom to her two daughters and to people like me, and one of the best writers I’ve ever seen. [Side note: She sends Christmas cards each year featuring her daughters, and last time my six-year-old saw it he declared: “Wow. They’re really, really pretty.”] The boy is a flirt and knows what he’s talking about.

With her I’ve power-walked along Lake Michigan in Chicago and gallivanted with her on the rainy streets of San Francisco during security conferences.

She literally rescued me from a job that was killing me (because of the late-night hours and the still undiagnosed impact of OCD).

At SearchSecurity.com, she was a nurturing soul. She encouraged me to make time for family, something I wasn’t yet good at. She knew I feared travel at the time, but gently coaxed me into doing more of it. Now I love travel. She showed me what courage is by constantly standing up to the TechTarget/SearchSecurity brass when she felt the brand’s reputation was being compromised by stupid marketing ploys. At the time I often thought she was being stupid. But at the time I was also so obsessed with pleasing my masters that I didn’t know any better.

I always got a chuckle out of her gift for gab, especially when she was offering up explicit details on a medical procedure she was having.

Because of her motherly disposition, I was able to come clean with her in late 2004, when I was inches from a nervous breakdown and realizing for the first time that I needed some serious help. The morning after I had my first appointment with a therapist, I told her about it, along with the rest of my warped behavior. She didn’t flinch. She urged me on, and in the coming months, when I was pushing up against depression and emotional breakdowns, she gave me the room to fall apart and then pick up the pieces.

When I started to react to the pain of therapy and digging deep into a sordid past by embarking on the most vicious binge eating stretch of my life, she saw that the weight was piling on but didn’t shame me over it. I was feeling shame in her presence anyway, because she had once told me that when checking my references before hiring me, the deal was sealed when a former CNC co-worker told her about my singular determination to lose 100 pounds in the late 1990s.

That kind of toughness impressed her, and there I was, losing that toughness as I packed on each pound.

Unfortunately, I only started to gain the upper hand on my demons after she left SearchSecurity.com for another job.

But thanks to the Internet and our two blogs, we still keep in touch regularly.

She’s gone through a lot herself, with physical injuries that kept her from running, blinding headaches that came and went without explanation, and the loss of a job she loved last year, as the Great Recession gunned down millions of jobs.

But she always comes back. Stronger than before.

In the photo above: Anne at the right, with Dennis Fisher, another former [and good] boss and avid runner, after a run in San Diego.

If she didn’t know before how much her friendship means to me, I think she’ll understand after reading this post.

She may also yell at me for revealing a bit too much about her. But then I always did enjoy the motherly rebuke that only she can provide.

February 8, 2010

Sobriety vs. Abstinence

Whenever I share my experiences with OCD and the related binge-eating disorder [See: The Most Uncool Addiction], there’s a word I always refrain from using if I’m outside the safe confines of my OA group: Abstinence.

I don’t hate the word. But I don’t like it much, either.

All anyone ever thinks about when it’s uttered is refraining from sex or studying for the Catholic priesthood. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I am a devout Catholic, after all.)

Nevertheless, it’s a word I can’t get around any longer, so let’s talk about it.

In the world of a recovering food addict, abstinence means to abstain from eating compulsively. It’s the exact same thing as the word sobriety in the world of a recovering alcoholic.

Think of OA and AA as essentially the same thing, only OA folks are addicted to compulsive overeating to the point where they walk around dazed like zombies, unable to manage their lives. Ailments boil over and friends and family suffer with you.

I’m abstinent from binge eating, which means I eat nothing with flour and sugar in it and most meals are portioned out on a small scale. I’m sober, too. I used to drink a lot of alcohol when traveling. This weekend I spent a security conference sober. [See: ShmooCon and Snowmageddon and The Engine in Hyperdrive]

This weekend was challenging to be sure. It wasn’t always easy drinking club soda while everyone else drank wine, beer, etc. And while I kept it together with the food plan, being away from the normal routine makes it challenging to keep all the portions straight. I probably could have done it better, but I think things worked out pretty well on balance.

It was challenging at Christmas, too. In fact, that was probably the closest I’ve come to a relapse. Not helping matters is my tendency to come down with depression around the holidays, partly due to the lack of daylight. Thankfully, I managed to hit the breaks in time to avoid that.

Of course, other, smaller addictions try to reassert themselves [See: How to Play Your Addictions Like a Piano]. One of them is spending. I have a weakness for collecting political and historical knickknacks, especially when I’m in Washington D.C. That weakness is evident to anyone visiting my work space. [See: Someone to Watch Over Me (A.K.A.: Desk Junk] This time, I held back.

I also like a good cigar when traveling, and probably enjoy it more than I should. I’m going to abstain from the stogies during Lent, which starts next week. We’ll see what happens after that.

The Internet is an addiction, too, but it’s a hazard of my profession. Staying away would be like a miner trying to do his job without stepping into the mine. But I stay away from the porn sites and Facebook applications, which are as dangerous as they are dumb, in my opinion.

I drink a lot of coffee, but I’m not giving that up right now.

All in all, I have a lot to be grateful for.

For someone who lived at the bottom of the Dumpster inhaling the stench for as long as I did, abstinence and sobriety is the gift of all gifts.

But it will always be a work in progress, with good days and not-quite-as-good days; always with room for improvement.

That’s OK, though. It is a journey, after all. A journey that you have to take one day at a time.