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41 Years

Some people get depressed on their birthday. Not me. The fact that I turn 41 today is a freak of nature. But a year into my forties, I know I have more cleaning up to do.

Mood music:

Item: When I was sick with the Crohn’s Disease as a kid, I lost a lot of blood and developed several side ailments. I’m told by my parents that the doctor’s were going to remove the colon more than once. It didn’t happen. They tell me I was closing in on death more than once. I doubt it was ever that serious. Either way, here I am.

Item: When the OCD was burning out of control, I often felt I’d die young. I was never suicidal, but I had a fatalistic view of things. I just assumed I wasn’t long for this world and I didn’t care. I certainly did a lot to slowly help the dying process along. That’s what addicts do. We feed the addiction compulsively knowing full well what the consequences will be.

When I was a prisoner to fear and anxiety, I really didn’t want to live long. I isolated myself. Fortunately, I never had the guts to do anything about it. And like I said, suicide was never an option.

I spent much of my 30s on the couch with a shattered back, and escaped with the TV. I was breathing, but I was also as good as dead some of the time.

I’ve watched others go before me at a young age. Michael. Sean. Even Peter. Lose the young people in your life often enough and you’ll start assuming you’re next.

When you live for yourself and don’t put faith in God, you’re not really living. When it’s all about you, there no room to let all the other life in. So the soul shrivels and hardens. I’ve been there.

I also had a strange fear of current events and was convinced at one point that the world would burn in a nuclear holocaust before I hit 30. That hasn’t happened yet.

So here I am at 41, and it’s almost comical that I’m still here.

I’m more grateful than you could imagine for the turn of events my life has taken in the last six years.

I’ve learned to stop over-thinking and manage the OCD. When you learn to stop over-thinking, a lot of things that used to be daunting become a lot easier. You also find yourself in a lot of precious moments that were always there. But you didn’t notice them because you were sick with worry.

I notice them now, and I am Blessed far beyond what I probably deserve.

I have a career that I love.

I have the best wife on Earth and two boys that teach me something new every day.

I have many, many friends who have helped me along in more ways than they’ll ever know.

I have my 12-Step program and I’m not giving in to the worst of my addictions.

Most importantly, I have God in my life. When you put your faith in Him, there’s a lot less to be afraid of. Aging is one of the first things you stop worrying about.

So here I am at 41. feeling a lot better about myself than I did at 31. In fact, 31 was one of the low points.

But I’d be in denial if I told you everything was perfect beyond perfect. I wouldn’t tell you that anyway, because I’ve always thought that perfection was a bullshit concept. That makes it all the more ironic and comical that OCD would be the life-long thorn in my side.

I just recently quit smoking, and I’m still missing the hell out of that vice. I haven’t gone on a food binge in nearly three years, but there are still days where I’m not sure I’ve made the best choices; those days where my skin feels just a little too loose and flabby.

I still go to my meetings, but there are many days where I’d rather do anything but go to a meeting. I go because I have to, but I don’t always want to.

And while I have God in my life, I still manage to be an asshole to Him a lot of the time.

At 41, I’m still very much the work in progress. The scars are merely the scaffolding and newly inserted steel beams propping me up.

I don’t know what comes next, but I have much less fear about the unknown.

And so I think WILL have a happy birthday.

OCD Diaries

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You Can’t Be Everyone’s Friend

I once wrote about an obsession with the Facebook friend count. I worried about offending people who de-friended me. Lately I realize it’s ok if I can’t be everyone’s friend. I’m even warming to the idea.

Mood music:

I’ve always had this stupid idea that I needed to be everyone’s friend. Even when I was bullying someone, I’d turn around and try to be their friend. I always wanted everyone in my family to like me, even when I was busy hating them.

I’ve carried that into adulthood and got obsessed about it with things like Facebook. This morning I glanced at my friend count and it was 1,713. I could have sworn it was 1,715 a few days ago. So I started looking around to see who might have gotten mad at me. I noticed that three relatives had disconnected from me. A year ago that would have bothered me a lot more than it did this morning.

“At least my ‘friends’ seem to be sticking around,” I thought to myself.

Sarcasm aside, I do think I’m turning a corner with this whole like-dislike thing. Slowly, it’s sinking in that I need to do a better job at listening to my own words. At the beginning of this blog is a post called “Being a People Pleaser is Dumb.” I wrote about how I wanted to be the golden boy at work more than anything back in the day, until I realized it was absolutely impossible to please everyone all the time. In fact, some people are unworthy of the effort.

I’ve had to learn that lesson all over again in the social networking world.

When people walk away from me online, I figure it’s because they don’t particularly enjoy this blog. So be it.

You can’t be everyone’s friend. You shouldn’t be everyone’s friend.

I’m slowly warming to the idea that if some people don’t like you it’s because you have the stones to take a stand on the things you believe in.

You either like me or you don’t. It’s all good.

I’m connected to a lot of people I’m not particularly fond of these days. It’s nothing personal. I just find find the whiny, woe-is-me status updates grating. Facebook is full of that stuff, along with all the self-righteous, pre-manufactured statements people wrap their arms around.

But it’s your profile.

Do what you want with it, and I’ll do what I want with mine.

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I Pet My Peeves Until They Become Triggers

I really hate all those pre-written, self-righteous Facebook posts. I told Erin I was going to write a post flaming all those stupid sayings.

Mood music:

“Tell me what that has to do with OCD?” she asked, giving me that stare she gives me when she’s certain that I’m full of shit.

“It’s a trigger,” I said, not really meaning it.

“It’s not a trigger. It’s a peeve. You going to go pet it now?” she asks, still giving me that stare.

She’s on to something, though.

Before I go further, let me share some of the Facebook blurbs that set me off this morning. Hold your nose and read on:

“I was RAISED, I didn’t just grow up. I was taught to speak when I enter a room, say Please & Thank you, to have Respect for my elders, lend a helping hand to those in need, hold the door for the person behind me, say Excuse me when it’s needed, & to Love people for who they are, not for what you can get from them! I was also taught to treat people the way I want to be treated! If you were raised this way too, please re-post this…sadly, many won’t, because they weren’t, and it shows~Thank you”

Then there’s this little chestnut:

I may not be the most beautiful girl or the sexiest girl nor do I have a perfect body. I might not be everyone’s first choice, but I’m a great choice. I do not pretend to be someone I’m not, because I’m good at being me. I might not be proud of some of the things in my past, but I’m proud of who I am today. So take me as I am, or watch me as I walk away! ? 

OK. I’m walking away now.

When people post this stuff, it’s like they’re telling the rest of us that we don’t respect our elders and don’t love the right people.

OK. I pet the peeve. On to Erin’s point.

I do sometimes obsess about peeves until they become OCD triggers. I think a lot of people do, but since this blog is about my own blemishes, it seemed like a good idea to put this one in the archives of insanity.

Have a nice day.

http://youtu.be/_7EQlfprV9E

OCD Diaries

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‘The Real Supermum’ blog worth a look

I’ve been quite taken with a blog called “The Real Supermum: Parenting Behind Closed Doors, The Good, The Bad & The Ugly.” Any parent will find it interesting.

It’s written by Emma White, mother of 6. She writes extensively about the ups and downs of parenting and, to make things even more interesting and challenging, the author suffers from bipolar disorder.  Have a look.

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I Thought I Was Perfect. I Was Just Stupid

Let me tell you about the time I wanted to be perfect, how the urge nearly ruined me and how I learned to accept — if not embrace — my flaws.

One of the great delusions an OCD sufferer labors under is the notion that he/she can achieve absolute perfection. Maybe the goal is to be the perfect employee. Maybe it’s to be the perfect parent and spouse. In some cases, the goal can even be to be the perfect addict.

The suicide drive for perfection is closely tied into the OCD case’s compulsion to control as much of their environment as possible.

Why yes, everything you’ve heard about OCD and control freakism is true. People like us crave control like a junkie craves a shot of smack to the arm. It grabs us by the nose and drags us down the road until our emotions are raw and bleeding.

That’s why I used to be such an asshole at The Eagle-Tribune. Every story I edited then went through three more editors and then to the page designer. Along the way, everyone after me had to take a whack at it. I’d hover over the poor page designers because it was the closest thing I had to control. Ultimate control would have meant laying out the pages myself. That would have been a stupid thing to do, mind you. I couldn’t lay out a news page to save my life.

When I was the assistant news editor for the paper’s New Hampshire editions, I was out a week when my son Sean was born. I came in one night to catch up on e-mail and saw the message where my boss, Jeff McMenemy, announced my son’s birth. In it, he joked that I probably stood over the doctor and told him how to deliver the baby.

I wanted to punch him.

I saw red.

Because I knew that was something I could easily be pictured doing. It hit too close to the truth.

All along, I just wanted to be perfect. The perfect editor, in the latter case.

I wanted to be the perfect family man and thought the way to be it was to do as many chores as I could. The problem was that I wasn’t there for my family emotionally. That still happens sometimes.

The drive for perfection always takes me to the brink of disaster.

But all the treatment I’ve received for OCD and addiction has cooled down that compulsion. It still surfaces from time to time, but it’s no longer a feeling that stalks me every minute of every day.

Sometimes my work gets sloppy, but most of the time I do a better job than I used to because I don’t try to get it perfect. As a result, I enjoy what I do more, even if it gets messy sometimes.

Erin has noted a few times that I’m more of a slob now that I’m better. I leave books, socks and gadgets lying around the house.

Somewhere along the way, it stopped being about perfection.

Now I just do the best I can and hope it’s enough most of the time.

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A Lesson About Life From Roy Blount

I went with Erin to Concord, N.H. last night to hear a talk from writer and humorist Roy Blount Jr. Some of you might recognize the name from the NPR news/comedy quiz show, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! 

Mood music:

Truth be told, Erin is a bigger fan than I am. But I enjoyed his talk. Especially when he offered advice to a guy in the audience who sought advice for his son, an aspiring writer.

Blount’s advice went something like this:

Go see something of the world. Experiences are more important to a writer than a big degree in writing. In fact, he seemed to discourage the man’s son from going to a university in search of what he needs.

Also see: Writing to Save My Life

Instead, he should experience life among the commoners, Blount said. The kid could get a job as a hair dresser and learn more that way, he suggested.

That kind of comment feeds my personal bias, because for years I’ve been telling college kids that the only way to be a good writer is to experience the world.

I didn’t pursue a journalism degree in college. I was an English major, which amuses the hell out of people who have heard me talk. In school, I spent more time in the newsroom of the college paper than in the classroom. I learned how to be a journalist by diving in and being a reporter. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, mind you, but covering campus politics and life in general was a better education than learning about the reverse pyramid style of news writing.

After college I wrote for and edited several weekly papers. Immersing myself in the experiences of those doing the living and dying in places like Stoneham and Lynn was crucial. I covered drug overdoses, drownings, political dog fights. And I slowly realized that the more detail I could cram in about a person’s struggles, the more valuable the writing.

I learned a lot less about people in the four and a half years I spent as night editor at The Eagle-Tribune. That paper has been on the front lines of some huge stories, including the drowning of four kids in the Merrimack River in 2002, the Malden Mills inferno of 1995, and 9-11-01. A number of Merrimack Valley residents were on the doomed planes that morning.

Huge as those things were (though Malden Mills was before my time there), I wasn’t the one out there interviewing people. I waited for stuff to come into the newsroom, and that stunted my growth. It didn’t have to be that way, but I was too self absorbed to do the things that mattered.

When I left there in 2004 and started writing about information security, the world was cracked open in front of me. I started talking to people from around the globe about things that were a pretty big deal compared to what I was used to: Data security breaches, government security activities, etc. I did learn this much from the Eagle-Tribune, though:

It’s not enough to just write about the technology and legalese. There’s always a human experience to be found behind the machinery.

I’ve had my fair share of personal life, death and adversity to build on as well, but the great thing about journalism is that it’s largely a study of other people — people you might not otherwise identify with.

My thanks to Blount for the reminder.

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Marital Differences in Style, Part 2

Last week, my wife Erin and I shared some dirty laundry about our differences in writing styles. We’re back for round two. This week isn’t as removed from my usual subject matter as last week, because my approach to writing today is far different from the days when my OCD ran out of control. See Erin’s full post on her blog, “The Writing Resource.”

Mood music (“Right Write Now,” Van Halen):

Like last week, I’m pulling out parts of Erin’s post, which you can find on her blog, “The Writing Resource.” Her parts are in italics.

4. Outline your idea.

I know, outlines are tedious. Outlines are what your sixth grade English teacher made you do for your essay assignment. At this point, though, you should have tons of notes on your idea. If you start writing now, you might quickly get lost in the process: Which idea is most important? What do you think about this point or that argument? What do I really think about what I’ve learned?

I’m pretty sure Bill would say he doesn’t use outlines. Writing one or more stories a day, you train yourself to organize your ideas quickly in your head. It may not be something he writes down, but you’d better believe he’s got some idea of how he’s going to tell his story before he starts writing it.

Five years ago I was a relentless outline writer. I would approach them like a draftsman would approach the design for a house. I would rewrite the outline two to four times. I would send my editors each version, to the point where their eyes probably glazed over.

I’m not sure when I stopped doing outlines, but I’m a lot happier as a result.

Today, when I have an idea or the research and reporting to put a story together, I dive right in. Call it the “ready, fire, aim” approach or the “shoot first, ask questions later” tactic, but that’s how I roll.

I type furiously, heavy metal music grinding away at my ears (I always have the headphones on when I write). Then I go back and see if I left behind any typos and other mistakes. I clean those up and that’s that.

It’s not that I see outlines as a useless exercise. I don’t. It’s that I no longer see the need to write out the outlines. Once I’m ready to write, I already know what my lead paragraph is, and the rest flows from there.

It may be that outlining was a compulsion that went away as I got a grip on the OCD. Or it could simply be that I’ve been doing this for 17 years and I can pretty much write in my sleep.

5. Write your first draft

If you’ve been following this process so far, you’ll actually be writing the fifth draft of your idea. See how far you’ve come in your writing already?

 The more work you put into the first four steps, the easier this step will be. Again, you may not use everything in your outline. You may go back and grab something from your notes. You may discover a hole you hadn’t seen before, and do more research. All of that is fine. Writing can be circular sometimes.

For me, once I’m writing a draft, I try to write it all at once, making notes of where I need to go back if necessary. Everything’s fresh in my mind, ready to jump onto the page. This is where I get really irritated if I’m interrupted. Yet if I’ve got a good outline and I do have to break away from the writing, I’m fine. It might take me a little bit to reorient myself, but I’ve got the road map to get me where I’m going.

Erin and I aren’t that much at odds here. The differences is that once I start writing, I don’t approach it as a draft. I’m going for the kill. I’m writing what I expect to be the final version.

Obviously it doesn’t always work that way, because on the first read back I see things to fix. But most of the time, particularly with hard news stories, there’s a formula that’s etched inside my skull: There’s the lead, the nut graph and the rule from there is that every paragraph that follows must relate back to the nut graph, which the more academic among you might call the thesis paragraph.

6. Read through and rewrite.

Don’t think that because you now have sentences and paragraphs that you’re done. If you can let your draft sit for a day or even an hour, do so. Taking a break will help you see your draft with fresh eyes.

 Read through your draft, and then start rewriting. This is where the art comes is and is what most people think of as writing. Sharpen your focus, tighten copy, play with word choices, question whether you need a comma here or there, think about sentence breaks. Put your words into their best clothes, wash their faces, comb their hair.

How much should you rewrite? Until you’re satisfied with it or until you run out of time. Deadlines can be a great motivator for getting the work done, and they can also tell you when you’re done.

Actually, if I have sentences and paragraphs I am pretty much done. As Erin says, deadlines can be a great motivator and I’ve been living with deadlines since the beginning. Even when there isn’t a real deadline, I write as if there were. When I set a time limit for myself, I’m more likely to bang out cleaner copy the first time around.

There’s no science to this. It’s simply how it works for me.

I do engage in a little rewriting. Typically it involves scouring for basic typos and finding passive sentences to turn into the active voice. But that’s it.

Once it’s out of my head, it’s done.

That either makes me freakishly polished as a writer or just plain reckless.

Writing is a lot of work, and what most people think of as writing is just a small part of it. If you go straight from the idea to rewriting, you’ll end up frustrated and with nothing to show for it. Dig in and do the work, and you’ll be much happier with the results.

It is a lot of work, but the notion that you’ll end up with zero if you go straight from the idea to rewriting doesn’t work for me. I do agree you have to dig in and do the work. You have to do your homework on the subject matter before you write.

If you start writing based on an idea that’s not backed up with solid research, you won’t have much worth reading.

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Marital Differences in Style

I interrupt the usual theme of this blog for a little discussion on writing style and technique. To make things more interesting, my wife, Erin, is coming along for the ride.

Mood music (“You Know You’re Right Write” by Nirvana):

http://youtu.be/QhpdR-vgKVs

It’s appropriate that we do this now, because it’s been a year since I wrote about why writing is so important to my sanity and survival.

Now, Erin and I have our differences like every couple. One is about writing and editing. We’ve decided to do what any good couple should do to iron out differences. We’re going to talk it out. Or, in this case, write it out.

Call it a marital point-counterpoint.

We’ll do this in two parts — or four actually, since we’re each doing two posts apiece. Her take on writing and editing appears today in her blog, “The Writing Resource.” Follow the link I just gave you to see what she has to say, then read the rest of mine. Or vice versa.

The technician and the bull in a writing shop

We have enormous respect for each others’ writing and editing abilities. But on certain matters, we just don’t see eye to eye.

Example:

I’m looking over the draft of the blog post Erin has written for this project. I like what I see, except for one thing, which I share:

“My blog title is in all caps: THE OCD DIARIES,” I tell her in the calmest tone I can muster.

“You can’t be serious,” she responds in the tone she uses whenever I’ve done something stupid.

“Of course I’m serious, and you have to follow the style of the publication,” I tell her.

“I don’t think so,” she says. “I go by The Chicago Manual of Style.” Then, she sneers, “All caps. That’s so pretentious.”

I bristle. Not because she just called me pretentious, but because she’s throwing her style book around.

That’s probably the first difference: She’s deadly serious about following whatever style guide a particular project calls for. I toss the style books to the ground and stomp on them in self-righteous fury. I put dashes and hyphens wherever the hell I want them. I love the occasional all caps statement. I’m as loud in style as I am in the mood music I put at the top of almost every post.

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking by now: She’s the sensible one, the type of sensible editor the world needs to tame bull-in-a-china-shop writers like me.

Here’s a surprise for you: I agree.

I may have a looser, more rebellious style of writing, but Erin and I agree on the fundamentals. Let’s go deeper. The stuff in italics is what I blatantly ripped from Erin’s post. It’s her thoughts, followed by my responses.

1. Bam! You get an idea.

You’re a writer, and your job is to communicate something to your readers. Maybe you get an assignment, maybe you have a story you just have to tell. Either way, you have to have an idea. It swirls around your brain, demanding to be let out.

I approach this part differently between this blog and the writing I do in my day job for CSOonline.com. For the work stuff, my company has a special style guide we’re required to follow. It’s in the personal blog where I choose to throw style to the wind.

But the brainstorming process is about the same. I might be in the shower or driving to the office. An idea comes to me and I start to get revved up. I can’t contain myself and need to get to the computer. or, as Erin notes in her post, I’ll write ideas down on whatever is available (the inside of a package of cold medicine, in the case she mentions).

2. Brainstorm your idea.

So you have this idea. What are you going to do about it? That’s the next step: brainstorming, prewriting, gathering, call it what you will, it’s all about putting everything you know about your idea onto paper.

What do you have to say about your idea? Who will you say it to? What else do you need to know to say what you want? You’re starting to plan what you want to say and who you want to say it to. Check out Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab for more questions to help you define your audience and the scope of your idea.

For work, I know who my audience is: The information security professional, from the top-level execs to the hackers working away in their basements.

For THE OCD DIARIES, my audience doesn’t fit any one demographic. The common cause of my readers is that they, like me, live a life full of struggles, and they come to see what my take is on those struggles.

In the latter case, I don’t dwell on who I’m writing for. I guess that’s because I’m writing for myself in the end. People will relate, but the posts deal with all the things I’m experiencing and feeling.

I don’t have time to ponder who the audience will be. Priority one is to get what I’m feeling onto the page.

3. Research and develop your idea.

At this point you should have a fair idea of what you want to write about, what you know about it, and who your audience is. Now it’s time to build on your knowledge. What else do you need to know to grow that iceberg toward the surface?

For example, for this post I knew the steps I use for writing, but I wanted to know how other writers approached the process. I looked to other writers who write or talk about writing. I took lots of notes about the writing process as understood by others. Most of what I learned is still in my notes, building on the base of the iceberg I’m creating. Some of it will end up above the water, where you can see it shimmer in the sunlight, such as this thought from columnist John Clayton: “It’s better to over-research and write from abundance. Then you can leave out the less-interesting stuff.”

Even if everything you research doesn’t end up in the final product, what you learn will affect what you have to say.

I pretty much agree with this, especially that last point. You can’t write about something with any credibility if you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.

When I write about information security, I do constant research and interview many, many security professionals.

But when I blog for CSOonline, the style calls for more attitude and opinion based on personal experience in covering the topic.

In that case, I just fire away. I tell people what I think about a particular security matter based on several years of covering the news and talking to the people in the trenches. In this blog,  the research is my life’s experience with OCD, addictions and all the drama that goes with it. I do some research along the way, and present much of what I find verbatim, naming the source and linking to it.

The rest of the time, I make it clear to people that I’m not a doctor. I’m just sharing personal experiences that are sure to be quite different from the next person’s experiences.

I call this the fire-away model.

Next week: Erin and I trade views on doing outlines, writings drafts, and doing rewrites.

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Mark Twain And The Brenner ‘Curse’

My father had a minor stroke Sunday while Erin and I were off exploring the home of Mark Twain. The two seemingly unrelated events have me thinking strange things.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/RFsOwnZkIm8

I’ve always wondered if there’s a curse over my family, given our tendency to embrace our destructive impulses and pay the consequences.

At the end of the day, I know it’s not a curse. We choose to behave a certain way and we pay the price. I paid for years of compulsive binge eating by swelling to the upper 200s on the scale and puking up stomach acid in my sleep before I started treating it like the addiction it is with a 12-Step program.

In my father’s case, he apparently spent the weekend pushing himself too hard physically. With a bad leg, bad back and high blood pressure, he should know better. With heart trouble, diabetes and a history of hardened arteries in the Brenner family history, he SHOULD be afraid to eat the wrong things. But he does it anyway.

Much of that behavior was passed down to my brain, where it mixed with OCD, depression and other nasty byproducts. I do therapy and go to 12-Step meetings.

That’s not my father’s style and never will be. I think in his mind, he’s going to do what he’s going to do and when God calls his number, so be it. In that regard, he reminds me a lot of my maternal grandfather. Papa defiantly smoked his cigars until the end, and I don’t think he would have had it any other way.

Lucky me. A fatalistic tradition coming at me from both sides of the family tree.

The thing is, while fate handles people like us accordingly, others get off scot-free. Going through Mark Twain’s house Sunday brings that to mind now.

Mark Twain's house in Hartford, Conn.

I identify with Twain on several levels. The obvious one is the writing. Another thing is the dark humor. Another thing we have in common, which I got a better picture of Sunday, is that he, like me today, was madly devoted to his wife and children, and that he had a habit of pissing his wife off anyway with his cussing and avoiding phone calls from people he didn’t want to talk to. According to one story, his wife took him down a few pegs for paying a visit to their next-door neighbor, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” author Harriet Beecher Stowe, without wearing the proper attire.

Home of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain's next-door neighbor

One other, important thing I identified with: Twain reveled in his bad habits. He smoked 20-40 cigars a day and loved to have a drink or five. Everywhere in his house is evidence of his constant smoking: the smoking table next to his chair in the library, the cigars and pipes strewn about in the study-billiards room where he wrote such masterpieces as “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Prince and the Pauper.”

It all made me want to smoke a big, fat cigar. I enjoy the occasional smoke, though nothing remotely close to how Twain did it.

Twain was a lot like my father. He was going to do what he did, and that was that.

I mentioned to Erin how funny it is that some folks, like Twain, can do what he did without consequence and live a long life (Twain died at 74), while someone like me has to pack it in and change my ways earlier in life. Then there’s my father, who is nearly 66 and has gotten that far despite his habits. Papa died a few months shy of his 71st birthday. Since 70 seems to be the new 40, that doesn’t seem like much longevity in this day and age.

Of course, medical treatments back then weren’t what they are today either, so whatever.

“You’re an addict,” Erin said. “Was Twain an addict?”

“Not sure,” I said.

“Either way, it’s still destructive behavior that affects you and everyone around you,” she said.

That was true in Twain’s case. Learning to live with a guy like that couldn’t have been easy for his wife.

Learning to live with a guy like me certainly hasn’t been all fun and games for Erin.

And living with my father probably hasn’t been without bumps for my step-mom.

History has it that Winston Churchill smoked cigars nonstop and was perpetually buzzed on every kind of alcohol there is. He lived to be 90.

I know from the history books that he was no fun to live with.

I can’t speak for my father, but for me one of the challenges is to remember to be me and not try to do self-destructive things because some of my heroes did them.

I tried hard to be my brother after he died. It didn’t work.

I tried hard to be Jim Morrison at one point because I thought he was cool. That didn’t work, either.

And sometimes, when I’m doing something that’s bad for me, I feel like Mark Twain, Winston Churchill and other big guys from history would approve.

There’s just one problem: I’m not them.

I try to be like my father in many ways because he’s a great man. But in other ways, I need to break the self-destructive cycle we seem to embrace.

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You’ll Bitterly Disagree With Me Sometimes

A couple days ago, in the security blog I write as part of my day job, I did a post about folks in the security community who consider themselves curmudgeons. As expected, some folks passionately disagree.

Mood music:

I knew when I wrote it some people were going to be pissed off. That’s how it is when you write an opinion piece: You’re inevitably pissing in someone’s bowl of Wheaties.

I don’t do it to tear people down. But when I think we could all be doing something better, I’m going to say it. People will rage at me in return and that’s OK. I respect that.

I also readily admit that what I write isn’t THE RIGHT ANSWER. It’s simply how I feel about something after being immersed in the culture and details for an extended period of time. My take is my take, and I’ve gotten it wrong on occasion.

That’s why I welcome feedback, however negative it might be. That’s how we learn: Different sides present a viewpoint and the truth usually lies somewhere in the middle. The subject of security curmudgeons is no different.

And I feel the same way with the stuff I write about personal struggles in this blog.

After 17 years in journalism, I like to tell people I’ve developed a thick skin. And I have in one sense, because back in the day, I would never take issue with someone’s specific viewpoint or lifestyle for fear that my targets would come back and tear me to pieces, either physically or in public writing.

But in another sense, my skin is as thin as it was the first day I ever walked into a newsroom.

I’ll take on an issue, but sometimes I’ll be terrified of the response. The big fear is that someone will come back with an overwhelming, ironclad stack of evidence that I’m merely a misguided idiot who has no idea what he’s talking about.

But somewhere along the way, I realized that to truly bring something to the table and contribute to my industry and society as a whole, I have to occasionally risk pissing people off and getting it back in heavy doses. So I do.

When doing so, my biggest fear is that I’m going to hit too hard and leave someone deeply hurt. I don’t ever want to make anyone feel worthless.

If I’ve learned anything in battling my own demons, it’s that we’re all a little or a lot broken. We all shoot our mouths off and say stupid things sometimes. We all hurt each other along the way, and we can all be better.

When writing the curmudgeon post, a point I tried to make but probably failed at is that we all have our justifications for approaching our professions cynically from time to time, and there’s a time and a place to get our more negative views across. But at some point we have to evolve and take it to the next level. If we’re going to talk about why something sucks, we should move on to talking about how we’re going to make it suck less.

I know of at least one person who was personally insulted by my post. She vows to write a response and it will no doubt nail me to the wall. I’ll respect that.

Whatever comes of that, I just want her to know that I don’t think she should go away, which she has threatened to do in the past. I just think she should take her act to the next level. Rage is an emotion that has it’s place. But too much of it will burn a person down to nothing.

Nobody wins when that happens.