Yup.
To A Woman Under Attack From Crohn’s Disease
A friend asked me about good Crohn’s causes she could donate to because a friend of her daughter is gravely ill from the disease. I shared my thoughts, but wanted to reach out directly to the person suffering.
Mood music:
I hear you are really going through the meat grinder right now and that you face life-threatening surgery. I’ve been there, so this is my attempt to give you some peace of mind.
I experienced all the things you are now — the massive loss of blood, the knifing pain in the gut, sleepless nights in the bathroom, and more blood. But looking back, I must say that in the long run it’s been more damaging to my mental health than my physical health.
It screwed up my brain and pushed me toward an adulthood of addictions and other hangups. I had a couple transfusions in the late 1970s. This left me scared to death in the 1980s and 1990s about AIDS, because many people got it from tainted blood transfusions. Fortunately, I’ve been tested many times for it and that didn’t happen. I was lucky.
A couple times, I’ve been told, the doctor’s came close to removing the colon. Too much of it was under siege and they didn’t know where to start in terms of targeting it. But it never came to that.
The pain was pretty intense. I really don’t know how my parents were able to get through it. I think it would cause me more anguish to see one of my kids suffer than to go through it myself. That had to hurt. Especially since they lost another child along the way. It also couldn’t have helped that I would be in the hospital for six-week stretches in 1978, 1979, 1980 and 1981.
As you have probably discovered by now, the most popular drug to treat it is Prednisone, which comes with a long list of side effects. In fact, the drug screwed with me much more than anything else. More on that in another post I wrote called “The Bad Pill Kept Me from the Good Pill.”
But I’m here to tell you there’s no need to write yourself off as doomed. There’s the spiritual argument for this, where you put all your trust in God. I’m a true believer and subscriber of that argument. I also know that in your darkest moment, there are always people to help you through it.
A lot of people helped me survive a childhood of brutal Crohn’s Disease: My parents, great doctors, school friends who helped me catch up with my schoolwork and rooted for me whenever I got out of the hospital, and a great therapist who helped me sort through the mental byproducts of illness.
I think you’re going to get through the current attack and that you will be able to move on to a better life. Again, I lean on my personal experience.
I’m probably one of the luckiest Crohn’s patients on Earth. The last bad flare up was in 1986 and I haven’t had once since. I still go through frequent periods of inflammation, but nothing that requires drugs or hospital stays. The colon is checked out every other year to make sure the layers of scar tissue don’t run wild and morph into cancer.
Had the doctors removed the colon when I was a kid, I think things still would have worked out. I would have learned to live with it. Whatever you have in front of you, I think you can make the best of it and push through.
Good luck and God Bless you.
–Bill
THE OCD DIARIES, Two Years Later
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.
Thanks for reading.
Working In Fast Food Doesn’t Make You A Failure
An old friend of mine suggested the other day that her life has been a “full-circle fail” because she works for a fast-food chain. Here’s why I think she’s anything but a failure.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/7B–3cId-YE
One of the things I admire about my friend is that she’s so dedicated to her kids. When she suggested in a Facebook post that she has wasted the last several years caring for her kids and parents and was working for a fast-food chain as a result, I immediately thought of two wise comments from two different people:
If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much.
Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis
“Experience life among the commoners. Get a job as a hair dresser and learn more that way.” Writer-humorist Roy Blount Jr., in response to someone at his July talk in Concord, N.H. who asked about studies his son should pursue to sharpen his writing chops.
As a dumb 20-something, I labored under the delusion that certain jobs were beneath me. I was a writer and was therefore too good to work in a coffee shop or a shoe store. Only the little people did those things, I used to think.
Talk about bullshit thinking.
Truth be told, I would have been a lot happier in my 20s had I worked in a coffee shop. I could have started my caffeine addiction sooner and maybe avoided all those years I spent lost in the haze of more harmful addictions.
Or not.
One thing is clear to me though: If you spend all your time on your children and end up working in a fast-food restaurant to help pay the bills, you are not a failure.
In fact, you are heroic.
A Word About Christmas Gifts
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:
–That this Christmas season I’ll be free of the blues that almost always plague me this time of year.
–That some old friends who have lost someone special this year find peace and solace in those around them.
–That a friend who is killing himself with food can see the light and change his ways.
–That I’ll have the wisdom to keep being the husband and father I want to be.
–That my current Prozac dosage will continue to be enough.
–That my father continues to make progress in his recovery from 2 strokes.
–That some relationships continue to mend, and that those involved be patient about the slow pace of recovery.
–That friends who are going through a divorce find love again.
–That my coffee cup will never run dry.
–That my program of recovery from addictive behavior continues unbroken and gets stronger.
–That everyone else gets what they want for Christmas, and that those wants are something deeper than anything sold at Target and Best Buy.
Slaying Old Fears In The Hollywood Hills
This week I’ve been in Los Angeles on business. But I’ve been slaying some old demons while here.
Mood music:
Let’s go back 20 years — July 1991 — when I came out here with Sean Marley on my first trip to the west coast. I didn’t really want to go because I was afraid of everything and everyone. But Sean was red hot about the idea, and back then I was always out to impress the man. So off we went, on a 10-day California trip that would take us as far north as Eureka and as far south as Los Angeles. We lived in the rental car the whole time except for L.A., where we stayed in a friend’s apartment.
In L.A., we hooked up with a guy who used to live in the Point of Pines in Revere. I didn’t remember him, but he and Sean were tight as kids. Michael was his name. Michael took us to visit a couple of his friends who were living the stereotypical Hollywood lifestyle. They had a band, but sat in their cramped bungalow all day, surrounded by towers of empty beer cans and cigarette boxes, watching all the bad daytime TV they could feast their eyes on.
One of them asked me where we were from. The Boston area, I told him.
“Dude,” he said through the cloud of cigarette smoke encircling his head. “That’s a pretty long way from here.”
The statement filled me with more terror.
A pretty long way from here. From my safe place in the basement apartment at 22 Lynnway, Revere, Mass.
Terror.
That’s pretty much what the trip was. Sean ate it all up and had the time of his life, despite me.
I didn’t know back then that I suffered from OCD-induced fear and anxiety. I was still many years away from the therapy, medication and spiritual conversion. I had no idea what the 12 steps were when I was 21. Too bad, because I SHOULD have had the time of my life on that trip, too.
But that’s what fear does. It robs you blind. Robs you of everything that should make life worthwhile.
Fast-forward to the present. I’m back in LA on business. But I decided I was going to do a few things I couldn’t do last time I was here because of the fear.
I rented a car and drove all over Los Angeles and went as far south as Orange County, using the same freeways that scared the daylights out of me back then.
I took walks all over the place and mingled freely with people — something else I was afraid to do before.
I went deep into the Hollywood Hills and drove to some old murder sites because as a kid these places left me obsessed and afraid. The Manson Murders was particularly scarring on my young mind. From the first time I saw the TV movie “Helter Skelter” in the late 1970s through the first time I read the book from beginning to end in the 1980s it’s been the stuff of nightmares. That has fed the obsessive part of me. I read that book two or three times a year and knew exactly where every murder scene was before setting foot on the plane.
So I traveled to Cielo Drive, where Sharon Tate and her friends were murdered, and Waverly Drive a half-hour away, where Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were murdered the following night.
I also visited the scene of the Wonderland Murders.
Along the way, I visited the Sunset Strip, the cradle of Rock ‘N Roll History.
Driving in strange places scares me less and less the more I do it. This was a big step in slaying the old fears.
The scary glow of the Manson Murders was also dimmed considerably this trip. When you look across the canyon to where the Tate-Polanski house once stood, the scene is peaceful. Driving to the gate of where the murders happened killed the mystique for me.
I think I’ll put the old “Helter Skelter” book away now.
The lesson of this post is that facing fears is sometimes the only way to slay them. I did the hardest work on myself long before this trip. But the journey has been the icing on that cake.
When you learn to manage your fears, a whole new world is opened up before you.
When Being Smart Becomes A Burden
Our oldest has an intellect well beyond his 10 years. He absorbs details with little effort and I can’t remember the last time he DIDN’T achieve high honors. But sometimes I forget that he’s still a kid.
Mood music:
He likes to tell us he’s a tween. To that, I tell him he’s more like a half tween.
But he is mighty mature for his age, nothing like the immature, messed up kid I was at 10. I’m proud as hell of him for that, but I think I sometimes put to much pressure on him as a result.
We spend a lot of time working with Duncan to manage his ADHD. Making matters more complicated, Duncan recently broke his arm, which means even more attention for the younger brother.
I sometimes wonder if, in that craving for order I sometimes get when my OCD is running hot, I put the greater burden on Sean because getting a mess cleaned up quickly is more important to me than making sure they each do their fair share. Since it can be hard sometimes to get Duncan to do what I want when I want, I immediately turn to Sean.
I’m starting to see it for the unfairness that it is.
Ironically, though I had nowhere near the intellect Sean has, I can still relate to the very pressure he might be feeling.
I started my life as the youngest of three kids, the proverbial baby of the family. Michael was the oldest, and in the Brenner family much has always been expected of the oldest son.
My father was the middle child of his generation, but he was the only son. My grandfather, who came off a boat from the former Soviet Union with all the typical old-school values, expected the world of my father. As my grandfather descended deep into old age and illness in the mid-1960s, my father became increasingly responsible for the family business.
Growing up, my older brother became the one my father leaned on the most. Michael was encouraged to chart his own course and was studying to be a plumber. But he was expected to help out with the family business and do a lot of the grunt work at home.
I was the baby, and a sick and spoiled one at that. I came along almost three years after my sister Wendi, and by age eight I was in and out of the hospital with dangerous flare ups of Crohn’s Disease. I got a lot of attention but nothing hard was expected of me. I was coddled and I got any toy I wanted.
The result was a lower-than-average maturity level for my age. At age 10 I acted like I was 5 sometimes. I would crawl into bed with my father for snuggles, just like a toddler might do.
During Christmas 1980 — the first after my parents’ divorce — I wanted it to look like Santa had come, even though I knew by that point that he didn’t really exist. I clung hard to the delusion, because my parents played Santa all the way up to their last Christmas as a couple, when I was nine. So on Christmas Eve 1980, I took all the gifts I had already opened and arranged them as if Santa had dropped them in my living room. I even wrote a “To Billy from Santa” note. Christmas morning I got up, went in the living room and expressed all the excitement of a kid who discovers that the jolly fat guy had come overnight.
My maturity level hadn’t changed much by the time I hit 13. I probably regressed even further right after my brother died. But as 1984 dragged on, I was slowly pulled into the role of oldest son.
All the stuff that was expected of my brother became expected of me, and I wasn’t mentally equipped to deal with it. My brother had a lot of street smarts that I lacked.
So I have to shake my head and wonder if I’m causing history to repeat itself.
I hope not.
I am indeed proud of Sean for all he is. But I don’t want to force him to grow up too fast.
Keeping Up With The Joneses
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.
Is It Bad That Two Family Members Are In Therapy?
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.
The therapist I see now is a God-send. He was the first therapist to help me understand the science behind mental illness and the way an inbalance in brain chemistry can mess with your thought traffic. He also provided me with quite an education on how anti-depressants work. Yes, friends, there’s a science to it. Certain drugs are designed to shore up the brain chemicals that, when depleted, lead to bi-polar behavior. Other meds are specifically geared toward anxiety control. In my case, I needed the drug that best addressed obsessive-compulsive behavior. For me, that meant Prozac.
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.
Pepperspray, Waffle Makers And Other Black Friday Stupidity
This post is all about the folks who make it hard for me to keep my faith in humanity. Consider it a momentary indulgence where I give thanks that for all my screw ups, I don’t behave like this.
I spend a lot of time in this blog looking at the brighter side of human nature — examples of people rising above the odds and living to the fullest despite the hand they’ve been dealt.
This is not one of those posts.
Really, people — you’re acting like apes throwing feces over a waffle maker. This is the problem with Black Friday. We spend the day before giving thanks for all the things we have. Then at midnight we go out and resort to greed-driven animal behavior.
I’ll give you this — you’re making me feel pretty good about myself right now. I may struggle with OCD and addictive behavior, I may have trouble expressing my emotions and I may be a bit of a control freak.
But I will never go out at midnight and dive into a quivering mass of angry humanity over a waffle maker.
Damn, I’m thankful.
But the waffle fight wasn’t even the biggest low.
One asshole shot a shopper who wouldn’t relinquish his purchases outside a San Leandro, Calif., Walmart store, leaving the poor guy hospitalized in critical but stable condition.
The Washington Post and the AP report that at another Walmart in a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles, a woman trying to get the upper hand to buy cheap electronics unleashed pepper spray on a crowd of shoppers, causing minor injuries to 20 people, police said.
That’s some interesting behavior in a country where much of the population is supposedly out of work and unable to afford the products they’re fighting over.
To be fair, there ARE a lot of people out of work who can’t afford these things. But, fortunately, the majority appear to have more self control than these other Black Friday kooks.
Here’s hoping that yesterday was just a freakish blip on the screen in which the human experience is played out.