For a variety of reasons, I’m starting to wonder if it’s time to pull the pin on this grenade. There are good reasons to do so.
Mood music:
I started this blog to come clean about my demons and break all the stigmas attached to them. But I’m at the point where I’ve said about all I can say about it.
–The emotionally-scarring back story? Check.
–The story of how I used to be and how I got to where I am now? Check.
–The tools I use to keep addictions and depression at bay? You’ve read about it a million times.
–The adventures of living with OCD? Well, that is how this sucker got started.
Here’s the problem: No matter how good your intentions are, the more you keep writing about the past and the ticks you have as a result, the more you’re doomed to repeat all the mistakes and relive all the suffering. That’s what I worry will happen, anyway.
The other problem is that I’m in danger of being defined more by my demons than everything else. I’m in a better place than I used to be in, and I’ve learned and experienced a lot. But when you read a blog like this, it’s fair to wonder if I spend every waking moment obsessing about my disease and nothing else.
I don’t, actually. But I’ve formed an image to the contrary.
I’m not contemplating an end to personal blogging. I’m just thinking of tying a bow on this one, leaving it in cyberspace for people to read as needed, and start something else.
I want to be able to write about whatever I please without always having to tie it back into the OCD theme.
This blog was never just about that anyway.
This has been a blog about life, really: Learning to overcome all the challenges God throws at us. It’s been a much broader case study into human nature — mine and yours — than the title suggests.
I don’t intend to stop doing that. I’m just thinking of doing it differently.
It won’t happen overnight. But change is inevitable — as it should be.
My interest in football is minimal. I love a good story of athletes overcoming the odds and showing us that anything’s possible. In that regard, Tom Brady is a hell of a role model.
I’m also not a fan of the Patriots quarterback’s wife, Gisele Bundchen.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/ekr_3T-7cU0
It’s nothing personal. The world of professional modeling and fashion bores me, except for the occasional episode of Project Runway. And that’s just to see the train wrecks.
As for all the money they have, I don’t hold it against them. I know rich people who are miserable and poor people who are happy. And vice versa. I know rich people who are giving, beautiful souls and poor people who are self-absorbed assholes. And vice versa. The good and not-so-good exist in both worlds.
Now that I’ve clarified things, let’s turn to the public outrage of the week.
A lot of people are furious with Gisele for some sore-loser verbiage following the loss of her husband’s team in the Super Bowl.
On the way out of the stadium, someone heckled Gisele with this:
“Eli owns your husband.”
She responded, within earshot of the TV mics: “My husband cannot (expletive) throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time.”
What outrages people most is that her comment essentially blames the rest of the team for coming up short. Teams are supposed to succeed and fail together, right?
It’s unfortunate that she said that. She should apologize to Tom’s teammates.
But in all the angry comments everyone is making on Facebook, Twitter and the news media, an important truth has been kicked to the curb: Gisele is human. All us humans say stupid things on a daily basis, especially when we’re getting defensive about someone trash-talking about a loved one. But we don’t have a camera on us to capture the moment.
It doesn’t matter if we’re swimming in money and mansions or living on the streets: We have our good moments and pathetic moments. Since Gisele is human like the rest of us, I’ll give her a pass on this one.
Super Bowl Sunday offered a telling glimpse into the Brady/Bundchen household. Our suspicions may be true.
It was never Tom’s idea to dress like a girl in headbands with hair down his back.
Or buy a $1,000 Toto toilet with water jets and blow dryers.
Or ride a bike through town with Gisele’s 5-pound ratty dog in his front basket like a teeny, tiny, nasty ET.
At least Tom put his foot down when Super Gi had the Super Idea to name Super Baby Benjamin … River. “Something always flowing, immortal,” blogged Super Gi after her Super Pregnancy and Super Childbirth in the tub, where she meditated for 8 hours. And don’t forget: She wanted a law requiring all mothers to breast-feed and claimed she’d potty-trained Benjamin by six months.
I mean, beyond nauseating.
None of that stuff is my cup ‘o joe, either. I prefer the simpler life of old jeans, broken-in leather and old-fashioned toilets you can sit on without being fondled by mechanical doo-dads.
But Tom did ask for all that. That’s the woman he chose to marry. In marriage husband and wife merge their lives in a blender, and the end result sometimes looks strange.
That’s beside the point, though.
We all do and say things that are nauseating. I’ve read and liked Eagan’s columns for years.
It’s a common pain in the ass when a couple is planning their wedding: Someone threatens to boycott the event unless so-and-so is uninvited.
Mood music:
In the run-up to my wedding in 1998, a close cousin pulled this when he got into a fight with my aunt — his mom. She went to the wedding and he skipped it. I haven’t seen or heard from him since then. Erin and I were paying for most of the wedding ourselves and were determined to keep the guest list small. That led to all kinds of hurt feelings about this one or that one being invited while someone else was excluded.
At my sister‘s wedding in 1996, a whole section of the family — led by my mother — boycotted the event because they were not fans of the groom. That they were ultimately right about the guy is beside the point. They could have given her love and support anyway, but chose not to. I don’t really fault them in the end. We’re all human and our emotions often get the better of us.
But to the couple getting married, this sort of bullshit is the stuff of terrible anxiety and lost sleep. They’re trying to make their loved ones part of their special day, then someone decides to make it about them and start dictating the terms of their attendance.
A bright exception was my cousin’s wedding last summer. A lot of family members who aren’t on speaking terms stuffed their attitudes in their pockets and behaved on what turned out to be a wonderful occasion. At the time I gave my mother a lot of credit for being cordial on that day.
After the wedding my mother called and asked if we could try to heal the rift between us. Since then I’ve invested a lot of effort and emotion into doing so. Along the way, I unblocked her from Facebook. Trust me: It took a lot for me to do that.
She found this blog, as I intended. I knew it would be hard for her to read, but I was hoping she could get past some of the more unpleasant childhood memories I shared and see the bigger picture — that I had forgiven her and taken responsibility for my own mistakes; and that my head was in a much healthier place then it was the year our relationship crumbled. That’s the whole point of this blog, really, that a person can overcome a lot of ugly emotion and turmoil and discover real joy.
Unfortunately, she missed all that stuff and zeroed straight in on what she saw as my distorted picture of her. Over several conversations and blog posts directed right at her, I tried to steer her toward the right perspective.
But like she has done so many times before, she emerged with a picture of herself as the victim of someone else’s torment. First she unfriended me on Facebook. Then she called me and suggested that I was a deeply disturbed mental case in need of emergency treatment.
And now we’ve come full circle:
My sister is getting married again and my mother has threatened to skip the wedding unless me, my wife and kids are excluded.
Like so many times before, she is making it about her grudge instead of someone else’s happiness.
It’s sad. I feel for her, because I want her to be in a better mental place. But I guess that’s not going to happen.
I’m going to have to put this relationship back on ice. I don’t regret trying, though. It’s better to try and fail then to do nothing.
I’m a big fan of the honey badger, widely regarded as the most fearless creature on Earth. In my efforts to spit in the face of fear, there has been no better role model. Behold:
It’s been said that the honey badger doesn’t give a shit about anything. Some would say that’s not a positive attribute. But I choose to look at this with some tunnel vision.
Anyone with a soul — good or bad — cares about something. If you’re selfish you care about the things you want. If you’re better than that, you care about the people around you and do kind things every day. I sometimes slip into the former pattern, but I always try to set the latter example.
Still, there are things not worth caring about:
–How fat or thin someone is (unless you’re concerned for their health)
–Whether someone is gay or straight
–Whether someone is rich or poor
There are plenty more examples, but you get the picture.
I have my own list of things to not care about. It may not work for you, but it works for me:
–Whether or not the groundhog saw his shadow: It’s early February. We have six more weeks of winter no matter what the rodent sees.
–Who wins the Superbowl: If you’re passionate about football, more power to you. It’s never captured my affection, though. Whoever wins or loses, life will go on.
–Who wins the next presidential election: The older I get, the more I realize it doesn’t matter who gets elected. The only change that matters starts within you.
–Whether the priest is boring: My faith is in Jesus Christ. I’m not about to let the failings of human beings shake that. If I go to church, it’s to be with my God, not to be entertained by a priest, though an entertaining priest can be a good thing, too.
–Whether you like the new Van Halen album or not: I like it. That’s all that matters to me.
A confession that probably won’t shock you: I used to turn into a pile of jelly each year when it was time for the job performance review most employed people endure every 12 months.
Mood music:
I bring this up because my annual review is Monday. Today I’m supposed to turn in my self-evaluation. And I feel an absolute lack of drama about it.
Overconfidence? Perhaps.
Apathy? Definitely not.
It’s just another indication of where my head is today compared to a few years ago.
It all goes back to the habit I used to have of trying to please everyone. I wanted to be seen as the golden boy in any job I took on. I took constructive criticism as a stab to the gut — a sign that nobody liked me and I was good for nothing.
This feeling really took on monstrous proportions when I worked for TechTarget as senior news writer for SearchSecurity.com. TechTarget is very big on goal setting and having different teams compete with each other. That’s really not a bad thing, but for me — a complete mess of OCD, fear and anxiety at the time — it was like poison.
Every December, as review time drew closer, I’d become a nervous wreck, unable to think about anything but how I would do on the review. Juicing up my sorry state even further was that December was award-submission time. TechTarget gives out these awards called the Bull’s-Eye. I felt enormous pressure to win at least two a year. I wrote about this sorry phenomenon in an earlier post called “The Agony Of Awards.”
Like many of the things that drove my fear and anxiety, the review-time breakdown stopped at some point. I can’t exactly remember the year. Like everything else, I chalk it up to years of therapy, medication and spiritual growth on the path to getting my OCD under control.
So now I sit here, ready to write up my self evaluation. I’m thinking of just writing “I am awesome. Give me more money.”
That might be a career-limiting thing to do, though, so I will play it straight.
I just got a promotion and a raise. Playing it straight is the least I could do.
It saddens me to see that three people — one a 12-year-old boy — chose to end their lives in recent days.
Most of you heard about legendary “Soul Train” creator Don Cornelius. The other suicides are Mike Kelley, a famous artist who worked with the band Sonic Youth, and, most heartbreaking to me, 12-year-old Clifford Rodrigues of New Bedford, Mass.
Mood music:
According to WCVB Channel 5 News, emergency responders found Clifford Rodrigues, 12, unconscious. An uncle said family members tried to revive the boy after he was found hanging upstairs. EMTs also tried to resuscitate the boy, but he was later pronounced dead at St. Luke’s Hospital.
I share the sentiments of my friend Joe Yuska, who wrote on Facebook, “I don’t care if he was bullied. I don’t care if he was gay or straight. It just tears me up inside to think that someone at that age is in a spot where that seems like his only option.”
First, for those who tell you suicide is a trip straight to hell, here’s a little clarification. 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.”
In other words, when a person chooses to end it, they are usually in a place where the brain has ceased to function in a way where they are capable of rational thought. That’s the sickness. The suicide is where the victim succumbs to the illness.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, here’s something for those left behind. It’s a list of things to keep in mind as you move forward and try to make sense of what has happened.
–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.
“Fact: Energy powered by asshole fumes is unsustainable.” — Bill Brenner
I get self-righteous in how I look down on people for trolling — throwing cryptic statements on the social networks that beg for attention. But I’m guilty of it, too.
Mood music:
I can’t help but think of the Stooges song “Trolling” — especially these lyrics:
You can’t tell me this is not a suave thing to do You can’t tell me ’cause I know you’d do it too
When it comes to feeding the egos of people who lack self confidence — or have an overabundance that needs constant stroking — social networking is as addictive as any other narcotic.
I tend to look down on people for doing this stuff, especially when they make these kinds of statements:
“Unbelievable.”
“Well, my day just turned to shit.”
“Some people need to get a fucking life!”
The deliberate lack of information on who is sparking this emotion and why ensures that the poster will get a flood of comments from the curious. There’s some debate over whether the above statements technically fit the definition of trolling, but to me they fit the criteria of people dropping a fishing line in the water hoping someone will bite.
On further reflection, I realize that headlines are designed for the trolling effect. Since I write many headlines a day as a writer and editor, I have to take responsibility for that. Some headlines are designed to grab your attention and make you curious enough to click on the link. It’s Journalism 101 stuff. But it can be as bad as the cryptic attention-seeking posts.
Also annoying but universal are the posts that involve inflammatory, bomb-throwing statements designed to spark a furor.
Let’s stop for a second and look at some definitions. First, this definition from Wikipedia:
In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.
Actually, I prefer this definition from Urban Dictionary:
Being a (expletive deleted) on the internet because you can. Typically unleashing one or more cynical or sarcastic remarks on an innocent by-stander, because it’s the internet and, hey, you can.
Guy: “I just found the coolest ninja pencil in existence.”
Other Guy: “I just found the most retarded thread in existence.”
When is it useful to be a troll and when is it not? Here’s how I see it right now: Going on a tirade about a particular company or individual isn’t bad in itself. Some entities won’t do a thing to improve their behavior unless they become the focus of negative torrents of tweets. It’s sad, but that’s the reality. But trolling gets ugly when it involves name-calling and attacking a person’s character.
After reading a draft of this post, my wife noted that the dictionaries she consulted put an almost universally negative spin on the word.
The poisonous trolling is like porn: You know it when you see it.
I went looking for examples of good trolling vs. bad trolling, with the hope that we all might learn something.
I spent a long time going in and out of different forums where people opined about good trolling vs. bad trolling, but found all the usual responses. A good troll puts things out there to make us think about how to do things better. A bad troll is just someone who tears people down to get a reaction.
Those examples probably oversimplify the two sides, though.
The best “good troll vs. bad troll list” came from a site I had never heard of before. As far as I can tell, the site is about body building.
Since that’s a different topic and culture than what I cover here, I was reluctant to use their example. But despite the ridicule I’m probably opening myself up to, I like this list quite a bit, so here you have it — some of the examples from a website called Testosterone Nation:
(1) A good troll causes readers to think, or to laugh.
(2) A bad troll makes people mad for no reason.
(3) A good troll makes people mad for a good reason, usually by challenging their cherished beliefs.
(4) A bad troll never works out.
(5) A bad troll uses personal insults instead of wit.
(6) A good troll is very subtle, so that people are not quite sure if the thread/post is genuine or trolling.
This post won’t do much to change online behavior, including my own. But who knows — maybe it’ll make us think a little bit more about what we’re saying before we hit “post.”
Or it’ll just force us to admit that we’re all trolls.
Or, equally useful, it’ll make us revisit how we define all this stuff.
