The OCD Diaries

May 26, 2010

Just a Little Patience

I recently stumbled upon this live version of GnR’s “Patience” and wanted to post it here because it’s always been an inspirational song to me.

Being an OCD-wired control freak with a knack for impatience and endless attempts at recovery before I finally pulled it off, patience was a virtue I simply did not possess. It would be a stretch to say I’ve mastered it at this point in my life, but I at least appreciate it more than I used to.

I used to drop F-bombs to myself while driving every time I saw those bumper stickers that say things like “Easy Does It,” “One Day at a Time” and “Let Go and Let God.” Already seething in whatever traffic jam I happened to be sitting in at the time, those sayings would raise my anger level into orbit.

Years later, I understand those sayings and appreciate them in a way I never thought possible. My favorite is “Let Go and Let God,” just as the Serenity Prayer is one of my favorite prayers.

Anyway, I hope you get as much out of this song as I do:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjto02iDNZA&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

May 26, 2010

It’s a Disease, Not a Choice

An open letter to those who are angry with a loved one whose addictions are off the rails.

Mood music:

This is one of those posts where I’m leaving names out to protect privacy. Still, the person this is meant for will know it’s for them, and he/she will be pissed at me. But that’s OK, because I’m saying something that needs to be said.

Right now, someone close to you has relapsed into alcoholism. This time it’s bad. You’re hurt and mad as hell because you remember a childhood where this sort of thing was a constant.

You might feel like hating this person right now because his relapse feels like a betrayal against you and you alone.

You’re wondering how the hell he could do this when he has so much to live for: grandchildren as far as the eye can see, a lot of the gifts he found a few years back when he got sober. It doesn’t make sense.

Here’s an attempt to explain it from someone who has been there. My problem was binge eating and a growing dependence on wine, further complicated by the variety of pain pills I was prescribed for the aches and pains caused, ultimately, by my bad habits. I was a less-than-ideal husband and dad. I couldn’t be relied upon.

I’d sneak around feeding my addiction and then cover my tracks. Sometimes I would blatantly lie about it. [See “The Liar’s Disease“] I didn’t lie to be evil. I did it because the shame was too much for me to handle.

You might also say I didn’t know any better.

One thing’s for certain: I didn’t wake up one morning and decide it would be a laugh riot to slowly destroy myself and hurt everyone around me in the process.

To you, looking at this loved one who is in relapse, you might feel that way. How the fuck could HE/SHE do this to YOU?

But here’s the ugly truth: Alcoholism — addictive behavior, period — is a disease. Nobody chooses it. They are chosen instead. It controls you like a puppet. You know as you’re doing that addictive action that it’s wrong and you hate every second of it. But your motor skills have taken over and you CAN’T stop.

Sure, we can shake it in time and find recovery, but relapse is a natural part of the disease. In fact, relapse is something I probably worry about the most, because I’ve been relatively lucky up to this point in my 12-Step program.

I know it can creep up on me and regain control at any moment, before I know what hit me.

In one of my favorite TV shows, “The West Wing,” Leo McGarry describes where the mind goes:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma3d-YdLjCs&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

“My brain works differently,” he says, followed by,” I don’t get drunk in front of people. I get drunk alone.”

It’s the same way for a food addict. You can’t have just one slice of pizza. It has to be the whole box. I once joked to a friends that I can’t eat just five. And when I really wanted to numb my frustrations in a bag of junk, I always went peddle to the metal out of sight from others; typically when I was alone in my car.

Yeah, the addicted brain works differently.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is this: Don’t hate the person who has fallen into relapse and disappointed you so badly. The person didn’t choose to be this way. He developed a disease a long, long time ago. And diseases have a habit of reasserting themselves from time to time. Sometimes the victim is not able to shake the relapse this time and it becomes the person’s demise.

It sucks. But it’s how it is.

Be mad. Be frustrated and hurt. But try and remember this person didn’t set out to hurt anyone.

Go easy on him/her, and yourself.

May 24, 2010

Pills Can’t Kill Pain at the Source

The author has written much about his binge-eating addiction, but not so much about the pills — until now.

Mood music for this post: “I Don’t Like the Drugs But the Drugs Like Me” by Marilyn Manson:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EefPcht54c&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

A fellow addict in OA recently asked me how pills fit into my overall haze before I found recovery. She asked because when sharing my story I mention how taking Prednisone as a kid for Crohn’s Disease started me down the road to a food obsession.

Truth is, I never think of pills as part of my core problems in the past. But in hindsight, they certainly do play a role.

In addition to the mental pain I’ve had my share of physical pain. Migraines have been a frequent companion. So has back pain.

A lot of my troubles on those fronts were in my head; anxiety attacks and depression made me feel all kinds of aches and pains, including migraines and sensations in the chest I was convinced were heart attacks. They weren’t, but I could believe just about anything when the fear and anxiety took over.

The back pain was very real. One time in 2003 paramedics had to cart me from my house because I was in so much pain that I couldn’t get off the sofa in our third-floor loft. I spent much of that week out of work and on the couch. The OCD and depression were already starting me on the deepest slide of my life and I was missing a lot of work anyway, but that’s the only time I can remember taking a ride in the back of an ambulance.

I would spent a lot of time incapacitated from lower-back pain, and one specialist after another would fail to pinpoint the problem until I found a chiropractor who within a day had pinpointed the source of my problem to three rogue vertebrae in the mid-back that kept closing shut on the nerves that are threaded through the middle. The pain would collect in my lower back, which left other doctors looking in the wrong place.

Since then, I go to the chiropractor every other week. He mashes the vertebrae back into place with his elbow and it’s all good from there.

But during the worst of the back pain I was on all kinds of pain medication. And naturally, they were addicting.

The doctors had me trying so many things I can’t remember most of the names, though one was Celebrex and another was Flexeril. The former was basically the equivalent of four Advils and the latter was a muscle relaxer. Taken together, they send you to la-la land.

At one point, I was on those two pills and a third, the name of which I can’t remember. I’d drive to work before taking them, because I noticed that when taken together with coffee, the mixture was buzz the hell out of me. It was a functional buzz that allowed me to do my work, but like all buzz-inducing fixes I found I needed it long after the drugs stopped working on the back pain.

I gave myself what in hindsight was an amusing panic attack once when, during a morning of house cleaning, I thought it would be an excellent idea to make the best of having to do chores by downing a Celebrex with two glasses of wine. I was buzzing nicely by the time I was scrubbing the counter in the upstairs bathroom. Then I remembered that there had been recent news reports about Celebrex carrying a heart-attack risk.

I freaked out, convinced I was going to be found dead on my bedroom floor. Erin was at her friend Sherri’s house at the time, and I called over there, remembering that Sherri is a nurse. I told Erin what I did and she asked Sherri for an opinion. Sherri said I’d be fine and to get back to cleaning. That’s what I did.

After going on Prozac I had some surgery on my throat to control snoring that was fed more by my obesity than my any problem in the throat. They gave me Vicodin do get through it and I would lie on the couch in bliss while under it’s spell. But I learned something that week: Pain meds can screw with the Prozac and keep the latter drug from working.

That led to a couple bad months of depression that took me into the Christmas season, which always screws with my head without chemical help.

I often wonder how much of the pain was depression induced — in my head, as my father-in-law might say. The reason is that in recovery I haven’t needed any of those pills.

In fact, one day I decided to clean out the cabinet where we keep most of our medication and I found several bottles of the pills I had been given for back pain. One of them had morphine in it, and when I chose to stop taking that one I remember lying on the couch in agony with withdrawal (and that was only after a couple weeks of taking it). The pills I found were mostly expired. Throwing them in the trash was a wonderful thing. It was like breaking out of a cage I never thought I’d be able to leave.

Today I only take one drug: Prozac. Yes, it works for me, though I believe it wouldn’t be working as well had I not gone through all the therapy and development of coping tools first.

Which sort of summarizes the big lesson for me: You can fill the hole in your soul with all the food, booze and pills you can get your hands on and the numbing part feels nice at first. But then you learn that nothing can dull pain that starts in the soul for long.

The only way out is to take the fight directly to the source of that hole.

May 23, 2010

Hitting Bottom: Songs and Backstory

Hitting bottom is the moment of truth for an addict, whether the shackles are made of heroin, booze or food. I’ve been there. You have a choice: Clean up your act or die a painful death that can be either quick or slow.

People ask me all the time about my big moment. The answer is that there wasn’t that one dramatic moment of hitting bottom.

It was more a series of bottoms. It was a multi-staged crash.

One crash was a couple months after my best friend took his life. I was binge eating with more zeal than ever, and I don’t think I cared at that point if my heart gave out. I was too crushed to care much about anything.

I had just been handed the job of editor for the Lynn Sunday Post, a paper that was already dying. I would be its pallbearer. The job included double duty as a writer for North Shore Sunday. I worked 16-hour days, six days a week.

Work was all I had at that point. Erin and I were engaged (realizing life is too short, I proposed a month after Sean died), but I was still trying to please my masters, so work came first. On Sundays, my only day off, I was sleeping through the entire day.

By the summer of 1997, I realized I had to push back or end up in an institution somewhere. Fortunately, my boss at the time saw that I was physically deteriorating and stepped in.

In December 1998, I was 285 pounds and collapsing under the weight. My father was too, and wound up getting quadruple bypass surgery. That was another slap in the face to warn me that I had to clean up. I lost 100 pounds, though I did it through unhealthy means that would explode in my face several years later.

In late 2001 I realized that I was never going to please the managing editor I worked for at The Eagle-Tribune. He was forcing me to be the type of manager I didn’t want to be — an asshole. So I told him I was going higher up the food chain to get reassigned. And that’s what I did. They put me back in the night editor’s chair, which helped for a short time.

By late 2004 I was out of The Eagle-Tribune and in a job I loved. But I was putting enormous pressure on myself and the physical toll was showing. All my personality ticks were in overdrive: the obsession with cleanliness. The paranoia over my kids’ safety. A growing sense of fear that kept me indoors a lot.

That was probably the deepest bottom to date, the one that made me realize I needed to get help from a therapist; help that led to my OCD diagnosis.

The next bottom was in late 2006, when I had developed many of the mental health tools I use today. But my brain chemistry was such a mess I couldn’t get past the fear and anxiety attacks. That’s when I decided to try medication, which has worked far better than I ever thought possible.

The last bottom was in the summer of 2008. I was finally finding some mental stability, but I surrendered to the binge eating during therapy and was back up to 260 pounds. And it was hurting my health in a big way. I kept waking up in the middle of the night, choking on stomach acid. I couldn’t find clothes that would fit me. I was getting depressed again.

And so I started checking out OA and by October was headlong into my 12-Step Program of Recovery.

I immediately dropped 65 pounds, and have maintained the same healthier weight of 198 pounds for more than a year.

All these events were bottoms.

I hit bottom for different things.

Hopefully, I’m done.

The whole back story is here.

One thing I do to remind myself of why I never want to go back there is listen to songs about hitting bottom, coming clean and getting punched in the face by the truth. Here are four favorites:

“Cold Turkey” by Cheap Trick (covering John Lennon):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e04OBJzbvc&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

“Girl With Golden Eyes” by Sixx A.M.:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKPbi-K6nNQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

“Under The Bridge” By Red Hot Chili Peppers:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsaubMAVHV8&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

“Coma” by Guns N Roses:

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

May 17, 2010

The Brenners Invade The White House

The author on returning from a journey that would have been impossible a few years ago.

It’s 5:30 a.m. and I’m running on less than four hours of sleep, so excuse any typos that follow…

I’m back in my “sunrise chair” the morning after returning from one hell of a road trip that included a private tour of the White House West Wing, a stay at buddy Alex Howard’s place and a stay with our wonderful Maryland relatives, Charron, Steve, Stevie and Maggie.

There’s a lot about the trip I’m still stunned about. I’m still in awe of the fact that I got to poke my head in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room and that I got a quick peek inside the Situation Room when a staffer was leaving the main room (the Situation Room is actually made up of several rooms).

I’m very thankful for Howard Schmidt for giving us the tour and for Alex for letting the whole family stay in his cramped but very cool townhouse on Capitol Hill.

I’m also thankful for the level of recovery I’ve achieved, because without it I never could have done the trip, especially with the whole family on an 8-hour drive down and a longer, 12-hour drive home Sunday (lots of traffic).

I’ll be honest and tell you I wasn’t perfect this trip. Friday morning we got a late start to the day and I found myself in an OCD-enhanced mood dive. It was a classic control freak out: I wanted to show Erin and the boys EVERYTHING. But with two small kids with shorter legs than their Dad, you can’t do that. And for a few hours Friday afternoon, as we walked from the Lincoln monument to the Museum of Natural History, I was in that brain-clouding mood I used to live with 24 hours a day.

But it was still a good day, and an even better night. Being in the West Wing of The White House, where every president of the last century has toiled away (some for the good, others for the not-so-good), was just magical for a history nerd like me. And I’m grateful my wife and children got to see it all.

It was a joy the next day to spend time with our Corthell cousins on the Maryland coast: Charron, Maggie, Steve and Stevie. Such a wonderful family. Charron took us to a maritime habitat that included time out on the water and inside a really cool lighthouse.

I especially enjoyed watching Maggie and Duncan bond during the boat ride.

So why wouldn’t this trip have been possible a few years ago? For starters, driving ANYWHERE outside the comfortable confines of the north-of-Boston area used to send me into panic. My fear and anxiety extended to a terror over getting lost. Even getting lost in Boston was cause for fear.

This trip, I did the whole drive down and back with none of that. I even enjoyed the journey.

I also wouldn’t have had the guts a few years ago to inquire about a White House tour. Too much work and I’d have to actually talk to someone with a big title. That would have been too intimidating.

I also would have been afraid to take the time off from work, since being a people pleaser was more important than living back then.

My 12-Step recovery program helped a lot. It kept me from wasting time and energy on binge eating and so I got to experience more from the journey. My Faith also helped, because I know now that the key to everything is to Let Go and Let God. I worked my tools, and everything was fine.

Not perfect. I feel like an idiot for taking that mood swing Friday afternoon. I also realize now more than ever that I’m addicted to computer screens. Erin decreed that we leave the laptops behind and I’m glad we did. But man was it hard to not run to a computer and upload those White House pics right after taking them. That’s something I still have to work on.

But then I knew I was still a work in progress. I always will be.

But I’m a grateful, lucky work in progress.

May 12, 2010

How a Binge Eater in Recovery Packs for a Trip

The author’s program of recovery from addiction makes travel more interesting. Here’s how.

Mood music for this post: “White Trash Circus” by Motley Crue:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w5eegIa97s&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Traveling was easier when I had my face in the junk food. I would just buy whatever poison I wanted to binge on and that was that. Of course, in doing so I had practically no drive to get out there and live.

A couple years into my 12-Step Recovery program, there’s a lot more preparation to be done on the food front. Breakfast and lunch for each day of the trip gets packed in advance. I’ll do the restaurant thing at dinnertime each evening, but my choices will be limited to my plan.

Otherwise, my meals look like this:

BREAKFAST FOR EACH DAY OF TRAVEL:

8 ounces of Greek yogurt

2 Ounces of granola

1 bannana

LUNCH FOR EACH DAY OF TRAVEL:

–10 ounces of vegetable (6 ounces cooked, 4 ounces raw)

–2 ounces of potato

–4 ounces of protein (meat)

Clean livin’ aint easy, my friends. But it beats the hell out of the alternative.

May 12, 2010

Road Kill (a Family Adventure)

The author on why he’s taking the family on a 10-hour car ride.

Mood music for this post: “Heading Out to the Highway” by Judas Priest:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoDbAd4fYBA&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

A few years ago, this would have been impossible.

I never would have put the whole family in the car and driven 10 hours south to Washington D.C. Too scary. Too much planning. Someone might break into the house while we’re gone.

Well, the house part is a valid concern. So before anyone gets any bright ideas, I should note that I have someone staying here to look over the place while we’re gone. My neighbors are keeping an eye on things as well, and you don’t want to piss them off. Trust me. I write about security for a living, so I always plan these things out.

So we’re going to the nation’s capital because a friend works in the White House and we’re getting the tour. It’s also high time we took the kids to the Smithsonian museums. Meanwhile, Duncan thinks the Lincoln Monument is part of the White House and doesn’t believe me when I tell him that’s not the case. So I have to show him the evidence.

Living on a tight budget, we’re driving down and staying at a friend’s house and then a cousin’s house. We’re packing lunches to take along instead of buying restaurant food.

I’m grateful to the folks who are making this trip possible, because this will be something that the kids remember forever. Pictures will follow.

I should also point out that I won’t be posting anything new here until after the trip. My laptop is staying behind.

So here’s another reason this trip will be so special:

Back when I was tight in the grip of fear, anxiety and depression, the mere thought of embarking on something like this would have been too frightening. The work involved. The planning. Leaving the house. All notions that were too terrible to contemplate.

Now I realize how Blessed I am that I can do something like this for my family.

And I’m looking forward to the ride down almost as much as being at our destination. I used to hate long drives. Today I love a good road trip. The planning is a lot of work, but it doesn’t take the wind out of my sails like it used to.

I’ve done this run a couple times now on the RV to the ShmooCon security conference, though I wasn’t driving.

This is what you can do in Recovery.

Seize it.

May 7, 2010

Shakin’ the (Empty) Money Maker

The author on keeping sane when you gotta make do with less.

Mood music for this post:”What’s It Gonna Take” by Motley Crue:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wredTXeMS64&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

It’s easy to come undone when the money supply tightens up.

Just about everyone I know is feeling the financial hurt these days. In our case, we chose to take on the world of financial hurt. Erin has a cool editing business that deserves a chance to flourish and we had to take a chance for that to be possible. I don’t regret it for a second.

Success isn’t for those who play it safe.

But it can be a bitch when you have an addictive personality like I do. I put down the addictions that were going to be the death of me, but the trouble is that to keep the most destructive addictions at bay, people like me latch onto other vices. One is spending money. Not the crazy spending on fancy cars and clothes, mind you.

It’s the little things. The spending you do when it’s the path of least resistance and maximum comfort.

Buying dinner instead of cooking what’s in the fridge. Getting one of the high-octane coffee drinks at Starbucks when I should just stick to the coffee supply I have at home. Spending money on desk trinkets and books when I’m on vacation.

I do much better at keeping these habits in check now than I used to. I don’t really have a choice right now. But sometimes I do something stupid, like download new music from iTunes. When the Slash solo album came out, for example, I pressed the download button. Instant gratification. It didn’t even register in my head that the action mean Apple would be taking its money from one of the credit card numbers stored in the system.

Or when fueling up the car, I might grab a Red Bull without thinking. Red Bull is expensive, by the way.

Next week I’m taking the family to Washington DC, and we’re doing a lot of things to save money. Driving down instead of flying. Staying with a friend instead of paying for a hotel. Packing a lot of meals to have on the road instead of eating every meal in a restaurant. Given my most destructive addition, that would be a bad idea even if we were flush with cash.

But with two kids in tow, it’s going to make things a lot harder than it would be otherwise.

Though our financial burden is something I worry about, I’m not coming undone like I would have a few years ago. I would have stayed in bed or on the couch, binge eating on everything in site and drinking wine from the bottle. My brain would spin the problem around over and over and over again, with no solution at the end. I would punch walls and drive with all the road rage I could muster.

Those things aren’t happening, and for that I am grateful.

We have a roof over our heads and we’re in no danger of losing it. We still get the food on the table. Our clothing and medical needs are met. Most importantly, we have each other and God.

We’re very creative at finding things to do on the cheap or for free. We have a ton of wonderful friends and I’ve reconnected with some people who have been very important forces in my life. A friend who works at the White House is giving us a West Wing tour. That will be a huge experience for my kids, and it’s not costing a dime.

There are a lot of people out there who aren’t so lucky, and I really feel for them.

So I’m going to keep taking it a day at a time, and while it sucks being broke sometimes, I know things will work out.

They always do.

May 3, 2010

Birthdays of the Dead

The author observes another birthday for someone who isn’t around to celebrate.

Mood music for this post: “On With The Show” by Motley Crue:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyapJ9iCWxA&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

I’m a lot better at remembering the day someone died than the day they were born. I guess that’s understandable. Birthdays come and go. Death dates for those who are close burn a scar into your brain that makes the moment feel like it only happened seconds ago. Even if its 14 years later or 26.

Today would have been my brother Michael’s 44th birthday. He died at 17. Sean Marley’s birthday is around Oct. 7 and I almost always forget until a week later. He died at 30.

It creeps me out to think that I’m almost 40, much older than two people who were always the older brothers I looked up to.

But for whatever reason, I woke up remembering that it’s Michael’s birthday.

The night he died — Jan. 7, 1984 — I remember clearly. He had had another bad asthma attack and we were used to them. When someone is having a major asthma attack in your presence, it’s a scary fucking thing. One of his attacks happened a year before his death while we were in a movie theater watching the James Bond “Octopussy” film. We never saw the end of it because we had to rush him to the hospital.

To this day, I have no interest in rewatching that film.

But on this night I wasn’t there. An ambulance was called in and I’m told he walked onto the back of the ambulance on his own. A couple hours later he was dead in Lynn Hospital, currently the site of a Super Stop & Shop. It shouldn’t piss me off to think he died in what is now the cereal aisle or the deli counter. But I guess it does a little bit.

Strangely enough, the memory of the day Sean Marley died is much more painful to think about, probably because I was grown up by then.

On Friday, Nov. 15, 1996 I was having a good day in the newsroom where I was writing for the Stoneham Sun. Sean had been spiraling downhill and I had last spoken with him around the previous Tuesday. He was pretty depressed during that call, and still I was too stupid and self absorbed to realize I should be taking the short walk down the street to his house to just be there for him. But I had a busy work day the following morning, and I just hung up the phone and shook my head.

So that Friday I get back to the office after attending a co-worker’s birthday lunch. The day was brilliantly sunny. Then my mother called. She was driving past Sean’s house and saw police, firefighters and an ambulance, all kinds of commotion and someone lying on the ground with EMTs standing over him. I knew at that moment it was the end. I called the Marley’s number and Sean’s wife, Joy, got on and told me he was dead.

Blog rewind: Lost Brothers

It’s been so long since Michael was with us that it’s sometimes hard to remember the exact features of his face. But here’s what I do remember:

We fought a lot. One New Year’s Eve about 30 years ago, when the family was out at a restaurant, he said something to piss me off and I picked up the fork beside me and chucked it at him. Various family members have insisted over the years that it was a steak knife, but I’m pretty sure it was a fork. Another time we were in the back of my father’s van and he said something to raise my hackles. I flipped him the middle finger. He reached for the finger and promptly snapped the bone.

We were also both sick much of the time. He had his asthma attacks, which frequently got so bad he would be hospitalized. I had my Chron’s Disease and was often hospitalized myself. It must have been terrible for our parents. I know it was, but had to become a parent myself before I could truly appreciate what they went through.

He lifted weights at a gym down the street from our house that was torn down years ago to make way for new developments. If not for the asthma, he would have been in perfect shape. He certainly had the muscles.

He was going to be a plumber. That’s what he went to school for, anyway. During one of his hospital stays, he got pissed at one of the nurses. He somehow got a hold of some of his plumbing tools and switched the pipes in the bathroom sink so hot water would come out when you selected the cold.

He was always there for a family member in trouble. If I was being bullied, he often came to the rescue.

I miss him, and find it strange that he was just a kid himself when he died. He seemed so much older to me at the time. To a 13-year-old, he was older and wiser.

He was close to a kid who lived two doors down from us named Sean Marley. After he died, I quickly latched on to Sean. We became best friends. In a way, he became a new older brother. Sean died in 1996 and the depression he suffered has been one of the cattle prods — next to my own fight with mental illness — for this blog.

A year after Sean died, I found another, much older brother named Peter Sugarman. He died in 2004 after choking on food. His death sent me over the cliff with the OCD firing in every direction. That was the year I realized I needed help and started to get it.

Blog rewind: Marley and Me

Sean Marley, who introduced me to metal music, taught me to love life, and whose death has been one of the cattle prods for my writing this blog.

I had known Sean for as long as I could remember. He lived two doors down from me on the Lynnway in Revere, Mass. He was always hanging around with my older brother, which is one of the reasons we didn’t hit it off at first.

Friends of older siblings often pick on the younger siblings. I’ve done it. It happens.

Sean always seemed quiet and scholarly to me. By the early 1980s he was starting to grow his hair long and he wore those skinny black leather ties when he had to suit up.

On Jan. 7, 1984 — the day my older brother died — my relationship with Sean began to change. Quickly. I’d like to believe we were both leaning on each other to get through the grief. But the truth of it is that it was just me leaning on him.

He tolerated it. He started introducing me to Motley Crue, Ozzy Osbourne, Van Halen and other hard-boiled music. I think he enjoyed having someone younger around to influence.

As the 1980s progressed, a deep, genuine friendship blossomed. He had indeed become another older brother. I grew my hair long. I started listening to all the heavy metal I could get my hands on. Good thing, too. That music was an outlet for all my teenage rage, keeping me from acting on that rage in ways that almost certainly would have led to trouble.

We did everything together: Drank, got high, went on road trips, including one to California in 1991 where we flew into San Francisco, rented a car and drove around the entire state for 10 days, sleeping and eating in the car.

This was before I became self aware that I had a problem with obsessive-compulsive behavior, fear and anxiety. But the fear was evident on that trip. I was afraid to go to clubs at night for fear we might get mugged. When we drove over the Bay Bridge I was terrified that an earthquake MIGHT strike and the bridge would collapse from beneath us.

I occupied the entire basement apartment of my father’s house, and we had a lot of wild parties there. Sean was a constant presence. His friends became my friends. His cousin became my cousin. I still feel that way about these people today. They are back in my life through Facebook, and I’m grateful for it.

He was a deadly serious student at Salem State College, and his dedication to his studies inspired me to choose Salem State as well. Good thing, too. That’s where I met my wife.

In 1994, things started to go wrong for Sean. He became paranoid and depressed. He tried to hurt himself more than once. I didn’t know how to react to it.

That fall, he got married and I was best man. I absolutely sucked at it because I was so self-absorbed at the time that there was no way I could effectively be there for someone else, even him.

Over the next two years, his depression came and went. He was hospitalized with it a couple times. By the summer of 1996, he was darker and more paranoid than I’d ever seen him. But I was so busy binge eating and worrying about my career that I didn’t pay enough attention.

Those two deaths pushed me along the road to a very dark place.

A lot of my own depression would follow, as would a lot of self-destructive behavior.

Fortunately, I got therapy, medication and a 12-Step recovery program for compulsive binge eating. I also let God into my life.

All I want to do now is thank God for that and say Happy Birthday to my brother.

And get on with the show.

May 2, 2010

Hitting Bottom

The author didn’t hit rock bottom before he got help. He hit several bottoms.

Mood music for this post: “Coma White” by Marylin Manson:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQPJYnr48yU&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

You’ve heard a million variations of the story from people who have battled depression and addiction. At some point they hit bottom and have that moment of clarity when they realize they have two choices: Get help or die.

Nikki Sixx from Motley Crue’s moment of truth was in December 1987, when a dose of heroin left him clinically dead for minutes until an EMT plunged a needle into his chest and got the heart pumping again.