Erin had an audio conference to record Thursday morning, so to ensure a quiet house, I put the kids in the car and went to Revere Beach, the scene of my tumultuous, painful, angry yet beautiful upbringing.
I’ve written a lot about Revere in this blog. How could I avoid it? But I’ve been short on photos to show you. I fixed that problem with this latest journey back in time. Sean and Duncan had a field day picking up shells and jumping in the water — things I took for granted at their age.
The most striking thing about visiting my old home is that as a whole, Revere Beach is a far more beautiful place than I remember growing up. Part of it is because there was a massive renovation of the beachfront in the 1990s. Pavilion roofs ripped off in the Blizzard of 1978 were replaced, sidewalks were extended to the entire length of the beach and, most importantly, the Deer island sewage treatment plant has cleaned up the ocean considerably.
Here’s the rocks behind Carey Circle, just footsteps from my front door. I used to hide here during moments of anger and depression, chain smoking Marlboro Reds:
The house on the right is where Sean Marley grew up. My house was two doors down. During my teenage years, I spent more time in the Marley house than I did in my own. The house on the left is where Sean moved in after he and Joy got married. It’s also the house where his life ended:
My house, dead center, as seen from Pines Road, across the street:
A lot of dead jelly fish used to wash up on the beach. Here’s the private part of the beach, where the bored among us would blow up the dead fish with firecrackers and, on the fourth of July, the bigger explosives.
This is the first house after Carey Circle, where the Lynnway becomes Revere Beach Boulevard. Me and my siblings used to hang out in this house in the 1970s and play with the kids who lived there. Their father allegedly had ties to the mob and, sometime in 1978 or 1979, he was gunned down in the kitchen. It was believed to be haunted after that, but I never really took that seriously. The house did creep me out, though:
The mood music today is especially fitting for the topic. Like the addict who is bored, the OCD case who is bored gets an itch and restlessness that causes you to search and destroy.
I’m a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm I’m a runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb I am a world’s forgotten boy The one who searches and destroys
The opening lyrics apply. For the OCD sufferer, the heart full of napalm is the uneasy, anxious feeling that comes over you in the absence of activity. It makes you search and destroy — in my case, I search for things to worry about. The root of the problem is an OCD sufferer’s inability to live in the present.
This shouldn’t surprise readers of this blog. I’ve described it before. OCD is very much about worry spinning out of control. If it’s something routine, like sending an editor a flawless story, it’ll eat away at a lot of precious time. I used to write a story, read it back aloud, polish it, read it aloud again, then I’d still be afraid to file it for fear that it wasn’t absolutely perfect. I got home late many nights and lost a lot of sleep because of it.
When it was about health, I’d make myself sick for real by fixating too hard on what MIGHT happen. That’s when the anxiety attacks would come. In 1991, after a colonoscopy to monitor the Crohn’s Disease, I was informed that my colon was covered with hundreds of polyps — more scar tissue than polyps, but something that had to be kept an eye on. I was advised to get a colonoscopy every year to ensure it didn’t morph into colon cancer unnoticed. Good advice. So I let more than eight years pass before a bout of bleeding forced me to get one. Until then, I wasted a lot of time in fear that every stomach cramp, however small, was colon cancer. I’d spin it in my head repeatedly, rationalizing why I shouldn’t get the test. Just following doctor’s orders in the first place would have saved me a lot of over-thinking. That was clear when I had the test and found out everything was fine.
I can remember being a kid, always daydreaming about the future: what I’d look like and how cool my life would be if I were thinner, the clothes I would wear, the girls I would date and the music I would write.
As I sat in my basement pondering such greatness, I’d be binge eating, drinking and smoking and wasting the moment.
I’ve spent too much time thinking about plenty of other things. It ages you.
Boredom is a major troublemaker because left with nothing to do, you start thinking about everything that can possibly go wrong with your life. I would get into the negative thinking described above during the busiest of times. You can imagine, then, what happens inside my head when I’m bored.
I’m irritable and sick, going through all the aches and pains that surface when toxins start to drip from the pores.
I’m coming up the stairs from work, anxious to get all the chores that await me over with.
I open the door to find Duncan sitting in his chair at the kitchen table.
He’s wearing a bib and a bowl of soup is in front of him. It’s button soup, he tells me. He made it in school (Pre-K) after being read the book of the same name, in which “Daisy tricks her stingy Uncle Scrooge into making enough soup for the whole town–using just one button.”
“Daddy, have some button soup. It’s on your diet!” Duncan says as I come into the room.
He’s got that big, gaping smile of his, excited as hell because in the magic of the classroom, he discovered something his Daddy could eat. He knows his father needs encouragement, and he’s eager to deliver.
When you really become serious about kicking addictions, God puts the right people in front of you to make the cold turkey period a little more bearable. I truly believe that.
It’s the Grace that helps you move those one, two or three steps at a time.
Former first lady Betty Ford has died at age 93. I wanted to honor her here, because her honesty and bravery about her own battles with substance abuse went far in smashing the stigma attached to addiction.
ABC News said it best in its obituary:
She lived in the White House in an era during which she was expected to simply serve tea and host luncheons but instead, she fought for women’s rights and spoke openly about her battle with breast cancer.
She was best known for her willingness to go public about her dependency on prescription medication and alcohol — and her determination to help others with the same problem.
There’s still a lot of work to be done. Stigmas still surround mental illness and there’s still much people don’t understand about addictive behavior.
But thanks to Betty, we are in a much better place.
The title of this post is a popular saying among those who use the 12 Steps to bring their addictive behavior to heel. It’s a good line to keep in mind when you’re ready to lose patience with yourself and slip into self-loathing.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/jYpydtdlWxA
There’s a lot about myself that still has to change. I still get angry too easily. I still get self absorbed. I still give in to OCD thinking and actions, even when I know better. I still suck at saving money. Little problems still turn into big crises in my head.
But I don’t see a reason to beat myself over it, because I used to be much, much worse.
A temper today involves angry thoughts and self pity. As a young punk a temper meant punching dents into walls (I lacked the muscles to make a hole), flipping off people on the highway for cutting me off or, worse, getting touchy when I cut them off. It also meant unleashing a torrent of verbal vitriol.
Getting self absorbed back then meant spending what I wanted, eating what I wanted and making the decisions I wanted with no regard for anyone else. I still fall into that behavior, but I catch it more quickly than before and correct myself as much as possible. Doing service has been good for me because it gives me fewer opportunities to stray. Being a husband and father has helped, too.
Giving into OCD today means I may go on a cleaning spree at the moment I need to be doing other things. It means I may check and re-check my laptop bag to make sure the machine is inside, dooming myself to a longer, more traffic-laden commute in the process. It means I’ll occasionally run short on patience. But back then, it meant being blinded to everything around me by obsessive worrying about things that in hindsight were a lot of nothing. Which, in turn, led to the selfish behavior.
I bring this stuff up because everyone has a cross or six to carry on a daily basis, and it’s easy to give in to the worst kind of thinking and write yourself off as a failure.
In times like this, it’s also helpful to remember what Clarence the angel scribbled in the book he gave George Bailey at the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life” — “No man is a failure who has friends.” I used to think I had no friends. Then I realized the problem was that I was ignoring my friends in favor of isolation.
We all have something to offer and to live for. We’re all screw-ups — nothing like the people God wants us to be.
But if we’re just a little better than we once were, that’s huge.
I’m going to keep working on being who God wants me to be. It’s an almost impossible task, because how do you ever really know what God wants you to be (until you’re dead and he tells you directly, anyway)?
He always leaves clues, though. So instead of feeling sorry for ourselves we can simply do the best with the clues we’ve got.
Addicts often become the way they are because they suffer from severe social anxiety. To carry on in a large group setting is as painful as having a leg sawed off while wide awake.
I know the feeling very well.
Item: It’s December 2001 and I’m at the home of the big boss for the annual Christmas party. I skipped out on this celebration a year earlier because talking to co-workers about anything other than the work at hand terrified me. I came up with a good excuse, though I can’t remember what it was. I couldn’t get out of two in a row, so off I went with Erin to the party. For the first hour I stood there like a stone, not knowing what the hell to say to these people, many of whom I was butting heads with at the office.
I’m offered a glass of wine. I suck it down in two gulps and start to loosen up. So I have another. And another. And another. Conversation becomes easier, so I have another.
I walk away realizing that enough alcohol will numb that itchy, edgy feeling I get around people. So getting drunk becomes standard operating procedure.
After awhile, the social settings are no longer enough. I need to numb myself every moment of every weekend, then every night after work. When I’m back on the newsroom night desk I stay up late on Sunday nights watching TV. Wine is a necessity, followed by a nice food binge.
Item: I leave that job and go to a company full of young, just-out-of college party hounds. The company likes to have long offsites where the free booze flows like tap water. Being an addict, I make sure to get my fill, followed by my fill of food. There’s nothing quite like a food binge when you’re drunk. For someone like me, it’s heaven for the first hour, followed by shame and terror over my utter loss of control. I gain up to 50 pounds in this job as I binge my way through the social discomfort I feel in a setting like that.
Item: It’s 2009 and I’m several months into my abstinence from binge eating. I’ve dropped 65 pounds on the spot and my head is clearer, but the defect in my head is still there, so I go looking for other things: Wine — lots of it. It becomes a necessity every night with dinner. I get itchy when the supply is cut off. By Christmas I realize wine is no longer compatible with a clean life — the kind I have to live, anyway. So I take my last sip on New Year’s Eve and put it down.
Two things are worth noting here:
1. I was never a fall-down drunk. There was always a line I refused to cross, to that zone where you become stupid and incoherent. But I needed to have some. Not having some led to that feeling like your skin is either two sizes too loose or too tight. The OCD behavior worsens, and I’m twitching, pacing and bouncing off walls and furniture until I have some. THAT is addiction. You don’t have to be smashed and stoned 24 hours a day to qualify. All you need is that unquenchable thirst; the kind that drives you mad until it’s fed.
2. My need to fill the hole in my soul with food and drink has almost always been connected to social anxiety. It’s not just the big work party settings. It’s the small family settings, where I feel the pressure to say something useful every two minutes. I stopped drinking and binge eating, but other crutches have emerged to take their place. I stare at my Android phone or flip through a book. I break off and take walks to be alone for a few minutes. I don’t think it’s awful behavior. It’s certainly better than what I used to do. But it goes to show that you never heal 100 percent.
I’m much better with people settings than I used to be. One reason is that in recovery I’ve come to enjoy people more. I even enjoy watching a little dysfunction.
I can speak in front of a room full of people and often do for work. That’s better than when I would be terrified to do so. I can certainly express myself in writing in ways I could never have done a few years ago. But when I’m at a family gathering or with friends I haven’t seen in awhile, the social anxiety still sets in.
I know a lot of people with social anxiety. Some think they are freaks. Others think they’re either too intellectually inferior or superior to those they are with. Others don’t beat themselves over it. It simply is what it is.
The key is wanting to get better, then doing whatever it takes to get there.
I’m better, but I still have a lot of work to do.
It’s like they say in the halls of AA and OA: I’m not yet the person God wants me to be, but I’m not the person I was, either.
Just got to my hotel in Santa, Clara, Calif., with a few random memories shifting around in my head — memories that illustrate who I was and who I am now.
Mood music:
It was July 1991 and I was 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 h0t 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.
I remember the plane going in for a landing. I looked out the window and saw the Bay Bridge below. It was a gorgeous sight from that height, with the bay glistening in the summer sun. I saw the same view this morning and felt warm and energized. Back then was different. I thought of the Bay Area earthquake two years before, with TV coverage that included a live shot of a piece of the bridge collapsing and a car driving off the newly created edge into the abyss.
I knew we’d be driving over that bridge at least twice.
Terror.
I was afraid of talking to strangers. I was afraid to go to clubs at night for fear we might get mugged so far from home.
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, too, 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.
Thank God I’m done with that shit.
I’ve made this flight many times since then, always on business. But I’ve gotten the chance to enjoy the surroundings and experience the culture along the way.
In small steps, I’ve tried hard to make up for lost time. That gets me in trouble sometimes, because I forget to pace myself. That happened last time I was here in February, and my family paid the price.
Let’s see if I can do better this time.
And maybe one of these days, instead of coming here for work, I can come here for fun. Maybe Erin will live out of a rental car with me for 10 days.
“One day at a time? You wouldn’t believe the crap that swirls around my head one day at a time.” –Anonymous
Recovering addicts have a saying burned into their brains: “One Day at a Time.” It’s important wisdom to live by. But when the recovering addict has OCD, there’s a big problem.
Mood music:
Let’s look at the meaning of “One Day at a Time.” In the world of 12-step recovery programs, the idea is not to be overwhelmed. Instead of trying to get your arms around everything necessary for recovery a week into the future or a month or year, we subscribe to the idea of just focusing on what we have to do today. Doing this a day at a time makes the clean-up tasks seem a lot less overwhelming.
The problem with an OCD case is that the disorder forces you to do nothing BUT stew over the future. You look at the next week or month and relentlessly play out the potential outcomes of that space of time.
The first time someone told me to take it a day at a time, my first instinct was to punch him in the face.
I had a business trip three weeks away to worry about.
I had a medical test planned for the following month and had all kinds of potentially grim outcomes to worry about.
That’s how guys like me roll.
So how have I managed to keep my addictions largely at bay for well over two years? Simple: I remembered another 12-Step saying (OA saying, more specifically): Fail to plan, plan to fail.”
I imagine that this is the very first slogan that found it’s way into the original Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Can’t you just picture a frantic newcomer talking about how difficult he (and yes, it was only men in the beginning – and the men didn’t think women could be real alcoholics, which is another story…) he was finding sobriety?
I can almost imagine the conversation:
Newcomer: What am I going to do? Next week I have to go to the office Christmas party – how will I ever stay sober there!
Oldtimer (early on, he might have been sober only a week): Slow down, it’s not next week yet. Take it One Day at a Time!
And a slogan is born – because it’s got some real wisdom in it. For in truth, each one of us has only one day at a time – or one hour or one moment.
Abstaining a moment at a time
In the first few rocky days of recovery, just abstaining for that moment, hour, etc. is truly all we can do. If we can’t do that, there’s no point in worrying about tomorrow, or next week, or whenever.
The One Day at a Time philosophy has benefits far beyond the early days in recovery. It can keep us grounded in the present – that Holy Instant that is so easy to miss in a busy and productive life.
Planning is okay
Unfortunately, some in 12 Step Groups have taken the philosophy to mean we shouldn’t plan. This is patently false. A major promise of the Program is torestore us to sanity, and that includes the very human blessing and curse – planning. We need to set goals, to make appointments, to design our lives.
But planning doesn’t mean we have to leave One Day at a Time behind – the trick is to watch for expectations.
It’s one thing to plan and quite another to demand that the plan work out the way we require it too – in that we have no control at all. When our plans bring unintended results – and the often do – all we need do is reevaluate, accept where we are in this moment, and start anew.
There are a lot of contradictions when you put the sayings “One day at a time” and “Fail to plan, plan to fail” together. It’s like a warm front running into a cold front. You get thunder, lightening and worse. Cars are picked up and wrapped around trees.
So even when the OCD in me is planning, planning, planning, I do remember to take my recovery — especially the food plan that helped me break the binging spell — one day at a time.
I can digest life much more fully when the pieces are broken up.
But the push and pull still makes for plenty of confusion.
For mental defects like me, a lot of what goes wrong is driven by fear. One thing I’ve learned in a 12-Step program for addiction is that the root of many fears is resentment.
Mood music:
You don’t have to be an addict to have resentments, of course. Most typical families, work environments and fellowships come packed with people you’re inevitably going to clash with. The more you disagree with someone, the more you’ll resent them.
Then, whenever you face situations where the one or more people you resent are present, you’ll be filled with fear: Fear about potential arguments, fear over whether you’ll look “normal” enough to avoid their ridicule, fear over how you’ll perform in public.
I have plenty of my own examples.
–Fear of arguments when dealing with my mother got so bad I had to put the relationship on ice for the sake of my sanity.
–Fear of getting jumped and kicked around kept me from continuing my walks along Revere Beach in my early 20s, after the October 1991 incident.
–Though I’ve gotten very close to my stepmom in recent years, we used to clash all the time, which gave me a fear of any family event that required me to be in her presence.
Those fears filled me with all kinds of resentment toward those people and situations. In response, I plunged into addictive behavior with ultra-reckless abandon.
Fear and resentment are what keeps the hole in your soul from closing up. Until you deal with it at the roots, you will never truly be free or sane. That’s why as part of working the 12 steps, we’re supposed to write down all our resentments and work to make amends whenever and wherever possible.
Chapter 5 of the AA big book covers this extensively. Here’s an excerpt, along with an illustration about resentments:
—————-
Resentment is the “number one” offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else. From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick. When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically. In dealing with resentments, we set them on paper. We listed people, institutions or principle with who we were angry. We asked ourselves why we were angry. In most cases it was found that our self- esteem, our pocketbooks, our ambitions, our personal relationships, (including sex) were hurt or threatened. So we were sore. We were “burned up.” On our grudge list we set opposite each name our injuries. Was it our self-esteem, our security, our ambi tions, our personal, or sex relations, which had been interfered with? We were usually as definite as this example:
I’m resentful at:
The Cause
Affects my:
Mr. Brown
His attention to my wife.Told my wife of my mistress.Brown may get my job at the office.
Sex relations
Self-esteem (fear)
Sex-relations
Self-esteem (fear)
Security
Self-Esteem (fear)
Mrs Jones
She’s a nut – she snubbed me.
She committed her husband for drinking.
He’s my friend.
She’s a gossip.
Personal relationship.
Self-esteem (fear)
My employer
Unreasonable – Unjust – Overbearing –
Threatens to fire me for drinking and padding my expense account.
Self-esteem (fear)
Security.
My wife
Misunderstands and nags.
Likes Brown.
Wants house put in her name.
Pride – personal sex relations – Security (fear)
We went back through our lives. Nothing counted but thoroughness and honesty. When we were finished we considered it carefully. The first thing apparent was that this world and its people were often quite wrong. To conclude that others were wrong w as as far as most of us ever got. The usual outcome was that people continued to wrong us and we stayed sore. Sometimes it was remorse and then we were sore at ourselves. But the more we fought and tried to have our own way, the worse matters got. As i n war, the victor only seemed to win. Our moments of triumph were short-lived.
It is plain that a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness. To the precise extent that we permit these, do we squander the hours that might have been worth while. But with the alcoholic, whose hope is the maintenanc e and growth of a spiritual experience, this business of resentment is infinitely grave. We found that it is fatal. For when harboring such feeling we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the Spirit. The insanity of alcohol returns and we drink again. And with us, to drink is to die.
If we were to live, we had to be free of anger. The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us. They may be the dubious luxury of normal men, but for alcoholics these things are poison.
We turned back to the list, for it held the key to the future. We were prepared to look for it from an entirely different angle. We began to see that the world and its people really dominated us. In that state, the wrong-doing of others, fancied or real, had power to actually kill. How could we escape? We saw that these resentments must be mastered, but how? We could not wish them away any more than alcohol.
This was our course: We realized that the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick. Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves, were sick too. We asked God to help us show them the same tole rance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend. When a person offended we said to ourselves, “This is a sick man. How can I be helpful to him? God save me from being angry. Thy will be done.”
We avoid retaliation or argument. We wouldn’t treat sick people that way. If we do, we destroy our chance of being helpful. We cannot be helpful to all people, but at least God will show us how to take a kindly and tolerant view of each and every one.
Referring to our list again. Putting out of our minds the wrongs others had done, we resolutely looked for our own mistakes. Where had we been selfish, dishonest, self-seeking and frightened? Though a situation had not been entirely our fault, we tr ied to disregard the other person involved entirely. Where were we to blame? The inventory was ours, not the other man’s. When we saw our faults we listed them. We placed them before us in black and white. We admitted our wrongs honestly and were willing to set these matters straight.
———————
I’ve done a lot of work to overcome my resentments and, at the very least, keeping those resentments from destroying me.
I’ve been able to path up a lot of relationships with old friends I had lost touch with after one petty falling out or another. I’ve worked at being a better arguer with my wife, though she’ll tell you — and I know — that i still have a lot of work to do. And I’ve done specific things to overcome fear: Getting on planes, walking alone in areas I had feared.
