Posted on

One Slip Of The Tongue Can Ruin Your Whole Day

I long ago lost count of how many times I’ve gotten in trouble for letting bad words spill from my mouth in a split second of carelessness. I’m from Revere. It happens.

When you run off at the mouth, people can be quick to judge you and label you for life. But those who judge forget how easily verbal gaffes happen. I saw a video clip on Youtube yesterday that reminded me of this. It’s from three years ago. Susan “Sue” Simmons, the lead female news anchor at WNBC in New York City, is heard dropping the F-bomb live on the air, and she’s forced to apologize after the commercial break:

I’ll admit that I laughed hard and replayed it many times over. In my defense, I was sitting in the airport bored and tired.

It’s hard for me not to sympathize with Simmons. Sure, it was unprofessional and offensive. But it was human and we’ve all done something like it. The difference is that she’s got a microphone clipped to her collar.

It only takes a split second to embarrass yourself.

Something to remember next time we feel like ridiculing someone for doing the same thing.

http://youtu.be/T28PTWGmdYw

Posted on

Paranoia Was My Destroyer

There’s a particularly insidious side of my OCD that I have to fight hard to contain, because it’s the thing most likely to destroy me. This is a story about paranoia.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/_WJ6FbcWYRU

Let’s start with a definition from Wikipedia:

Paranoia is a thought process believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs, or beliefs of conspiracy concerning a perceived threat towards oneself.

Anxiety and fear once played a major role in how my OCD manifested itself. I would become so full of fear about people, places and things that I would see conspiracies against me around every corner.

My time as night editor of The Eagle-Tribune is a perfect example.

Working the night shift and then waking up after only a couple hours of sleep each night to spend time with the children eroded my sanity to the point where I was absolutely convinced that the day staff was conspiring against me.

I’d sit at home working the scenarios over and over in my head. I was certain that anything that went wrong with the morning deadline cycle would be blamed on me because of something I may or may not have done the night before. That turned into a constant feeling that a conspiracy was afoot to get me fired.

I would think about it day and night, ruining God knows how many precious moments with my wife and kids. I was right there with them at home or on family vacations. But mentally I was somewhere far away and dark.

Going further back to my late teens and early 20s, I would grow obsessed about what people thought of me: how I looked, how I talked and walked. I lost a lot of sleep worrying about something I took as a certainty: that people were talking about me behind my back, making fun of my mannerisms.

My mind would spin and spin until I was too much of a wreck to do anything but sleep.

I haven’t suffered with this stuff nearly as much in recent years because of all the work I’ve done to get my OCD under control. I’ve faced a lot of fears and killed them in the process. That has made me far less anxious, which in turn has made me far less paranoid.

But once in awhile, especially if my sleep is off, some of it will nudge its way back into my head. Not fear or anxiety, but a nagging feeling that somewhere people are talking about me, complaining about something I may have said or did.

I have to be on constant alert for those moments. You could say I have to be paranoid of the paranoia.

I’ve found some valuable weapons in the fight against this demon:

–I try most nights to be in bed as soon as the kids are in bed, so I can read or just fall asleep. When I get enough sleep, a lot of the wreckage in my head is cleared out.

–I hang on tight to a diet devoid of flour and sugar. The main reason is to control a binge-eating disorder. But as a pleasant byproduct, the absence of these things from my body has also had a clarifying effect.

–I’m always working at prayer. I don’t do it nearly as much as I should, but when I do, God finds a way to set my mind at ease.

–I make time to talk to fellow addicts and mental illness sufferers because when I help them sort out their emotions, I have less time to drown in my own mental juices. Besides, a lot of people do the same for me and giving it back is the least I can do. This is a double-edged sword though, because when you let enough people vent their emotions on you, the load can get heavy indeed.

–I have regular visits with my therapist, though I often suck at remembering when my appointments are.

What I’ve just mapped out isn’t perfect. Sometimes it’s very easy not to do the things I know I should do. In fact, that’s happened more in recent months.

But it’s like any kind of self improvement. You don’t have to perfect everything all at once. You can take baby steps and get to where you need to be.

The paranoia, like one’s addictions, will always be doing push-ups in the parking lot.

Sometimes, it will sneak up behind you and kick your ass.

But if you kick its ass more than it kicks yours, you’ll be winning the war.

Posted on

Let’s Stop Calling It Ground Zero

I’ve written a lot about 9-11 in this blog. How could I avoid it? Nothing has fueled the fear, anxiety and depression of a nation like that terrible day. Whenever I’m here, I visit Ground Zero.

Part of it is a need to pay my respects to all who died there. Some of it is an obsessive-compulsive impulse. A lot of it is that whenever I see the construction workers hauling ass down there, it inspires me.

Mood music:

I’m here for my company’s annual Security Standard event in Brooklyn. Before setting my sights on the work at hand, I dumped my luggage and sprinted over the Brooklyn Bridge to Lower Manhattan.

Last year at this time, you couldn’t really see the scene taking shape at the WTC site from the bridge. Now you can. Walking over the bridge and looking to the left, there it is, rising up like a middle finger in the Manhattan sky:

One World Trade Center is taking shape. They’ve made major progress on it since I was here last September.

We’ve all been calling this Ground Zero since 9-11, but I don’t think it’s appropriate any longer. Too much life has returned to this place to keep calling it that.

I find the site extremely symbolic of the human condition at the heart of this blog.

We go through parts of our lives walking tall and feeling indestructible, just like we once thought the Twin Towers were impervious to life’s cruel twists of fate. Then something unexpected happens and we end up in ruins.

Then we have a choice to rise from the ashes and start over, or just go away.

I’d like to think I rose from the ashes of my earlier years. Crohn’s Disease and mental illness have taken their best shots at me and I’ve been reduced to rubble more than once. But I got up and I’m still standing.

I’m no special case. We all take our blows and most of us get back up.

Terrorists took their best shot and knocked those buildings to the ground, snuffing out thousands of precious souls in the process. But this city got back up and started over. Now new buildings are rising up, hopefully stronger than what was there before.

It’s like that Metallica song. We rise, we fall, we’re down and we rise again.

Perhaps I have a hyperbolic brain. But when I visit this place, that’s how it makes me feel.

Posted on

I’m Told I Repeat Myself A Lot

Update March 19, 2012: I touched on this issue in today’s Salted Hash blog post on @CSOonline. There has been some good discussion on the matter of how often to tweet and how best to achieve variety. After reading this from my friend @Beaker, I remembered that I had indeed touched on the issue here as well…

I’m asked a lot lately why I push out multiple posts through the day and why many of them are repeats. Here’s what it’s about — and what I’m trying to do about it.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/7v4umdrtWtg

There’s a professional and personal reason behind it. The professional part is that as someone who works in the media-publishing business, a big goal is always to get your content in front of as many eyes as possible.

I don’t apologize for a few reasons. One is that I don’t write this stuff so it’ll sit there unread. The other is that in the world of social media, people are coming online at different times of day. If you only post something in the morning, you miss the evening readers and vice versa. That’s why with new posts I typically post thrice daily: In the morning, around lunchtime and in the evening.

Social media is also like a rushing river. Especially Twitter and, to a lesser extent, Facebook. You put something in the water and it’s immediately flushed miles out of view by all the other waves people make. Some call it an echo chamber where you have to yell to be heard. That’s an accurate description, too.

As for the repeats, I do that because many of the posts in this blog are meant to be lessons you can retell when they can do the most good. At other times I like to think of them as songs worth replaying when the right mood strikes.  Also, sometimes people will see a post for the first time months after it was first written.

Now for the personal side: It’s not your imagination. You ARE seeing one of my OCD ticks in action. Someone once called me an obsessive poster, and they were right. I’ll post things repeatedly just as someone with OCD might check a door lock or wash their hands repeatedly.

What am I trying to do about all this? The simple answer is that I’m working hard to post less each day. If I write something new, it runs three times, spread out as I described above. But I’m throttling back on repeats of the older stuff, because I do take your feedback to heart and want to do the right thing.

But when all is said and done, I will never be able to please everybody, nor should I try. I do what I do and if people want what I’m pushing they’ll stick around. Those who don’t want it should just unfollow or defriend me.

Or, as they used to say when all we had was radio and TV, if you don’t like what’s on, change the channel or turn it off.

Posted on

Losing Friends

I find myself worried this morning that, by opening up in this blog, I’ve lost another dear friend.

That’s the challenge with expressing one’s feelings publicly: Even when you think you’re taking care to protect one’s privacy, leaving out names and such, you find a way to hurt someone anyway.

Writing this blog has been a lifesaver most days. A lot of people have told me it helps them.

But sometimes I curse the day I started this thing.

For now I just have to walk away and hope time heals another wound.

Posted on

A Relapse Isn’t The End Of The World

When a person relapses back into addictive behavior, it seems like the end of the world. Everything they’ve worked for is in ashes, and they embrace their old demon with reckless abandon.

It shouldn’t have to be that way.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:1JKiRbc7uA6B9QrO3I1zZH]

I’m thinking hard about this because I came close to a relapse recently, and a friend now finds himself in a full, free-falling backslide.

A lot of people have a hard time seeing compulsive binge eating as an addiction on par with alcohol and heroin. But it’s just as effective at destroying a man’s life and health as those other things. And since you still need to eat to survive, there’s a lot of fear around this type of relapse, because it seems to suck us in deeper more quickly.

Anyway, this post isn’t meant to convince the skeptics. It’s directed specifically at those who have relapsed to their addictions, whatever the substance. It’s the same message to be had in today’s mood music, from the Sixx A.M. “Heroin Diaries” soundtrack:

You know that accidents can happen

It’s OK, we all fall off the wagon sometimes

It’s not your whole life

It’s only one day

You haven’t thrown everything away.

The best thing to do is accept the relapse and start over. But when the feeling of failure overwhelms you, it’s easier said than done. The point was brought home to me the other day when talking to my friend who relapsed.

He noted that this is his third relapse, and that he wasn’t sure if he could return to the halls of Overeater’s Anonymous. He correctly noted that there are some people in the program who look at relapse cases as pariahs. Most people will embrace you and try to help you regain your footing. But the ones who look at you like an exploded zit can be overwhelming and keep you from going back.

Shame takes on a lot of insidious forms for the relapsed soul.

Talking to this fellow makes me realize just how lucky I was this time. I came to the brink and started getting sloppy. But I pulled myself back before falling off the cliff and going on a binge. A lot of good people aren’t so fortunate.

I really feel for my friend. He’s stuck down the hole and doesn’t know if he can ever find his way back out. He says he’s knee deep in the food and won’t leave his house because he’s putting on weight so fast that he doesn’t want to be seen.

That is one of the shittiest things about compulsive binge-eating: You can’t hide it because your behavior is obvious in the fast weight gain. This disease hangs off our belly like a sack of shit. And when it keeps you from leaving your house, you are in a very bad place. I know, because I spent a lot of years avoiding people because I didn’t want them to see the mess I’d become.

Hell, in my journey to a near-relapse, I didn’t gain weight but still felt bloated and didn’t want to be around people.

In the week since I realized how far to the edge I’d come, I’ve tightened the bolts on my program considerably. I’m starting to feel better, and I’m close to having a new OA sponsor. Like I said, I was lucky this time.

But I feel a little anger toward some of the people in this program for making my friend feel so ashamed. We’re supposed to help each other up when someone falls, not treat this like some powder puff popularity club where the folks with long term recovery are rock starts and the fallen are zeroes.

I shouldn’t feel the anger, though, because that kind of behavior is just another part of this disease. None of us were playing with a full deck to begin with, and even in recovery, it can be hard not to be an asshole.

But as I told my friend: “Fuck them. It’s not about what they think. It’s about what you do to get better.”

Posted on

I Miss The Fighting

In yet another sign that I’m not playing with a full deck, I realized this morning that I miss the fighting between my best friend and his father.

Mood music:

It’s another stray memory that came to the surface as I went to the wake and funeral for Al Marley. Al and Sean used to have some blistering arguments at the dining room table over religion and politics, appearances — you name it.

At the funeral this morning Father Dick mentioned how he used to have a lot of conversations about faith with Al. One of those talks was about Sean’s tendency to dye his hair multiple colors. Al was conservative and dressed that way. Sean was the opposite. Father Dick said it took a few conversations to convince Al that Sean’s hair dye was no big deal.

Erin suggested I have a sick sense of humor — which I do — because it takes a sick person to enjoy a situation where two people are erupting into anger.

But here’s the thing: To me, it was always a lovable anger, the kind you might identify with friends and couples who bicker constantly but hug and smooch afterward.

Al and Sean used to have a battle of wits. Did they often get angry at each other? Absolutely. But their love and respect for each other was always there on the surface.

One afternoon during the 1988 presidential election season, Al looked at me with those intense, sparkling eyes of his, took a drag on one of the many cigarettes he’d smoke in one sitting, and warned that Michael Dukakis would be as disastrous a president as Jimmy Carter.

“Carter didn’t do what he had to do during the hostage crisis,” Al said. “He just sat there in the Rose Garden wringing his hands.” Al rubbed his own hands together for emphasis.

“That’s total bullshit,” Sean bellowed from the other side of the table. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I don’t remember the rest of the conversation. But the next hour they were hugging, laughing and bantering about something else. They always made up.

The arguing was always over meaty subjects. Religion was another one they would get into intense debate about. Al was a traditional Roman Catholic, but Sean liked to challenge all the traditional beliefs. He just loved to pick an argument over the deep stuff.

Looking back, I think that sitting there watching the arguments made me smarter. It definitely inspired me to do a lot of research and challenge conventional wisdom. Watching two sharp guys go at it is a good educational experience. It’s one of the many gifts those guys gave me.

I’ll bet they’re going at it right now, and loving every minute of it.

I hope so.

Posted on

Deal With It, Get Over It And Get Out Of My Way

It’s been an emotional few days. I came to the edge of a relapse. A father figure died. Then there was the 9-11 anniversary. This stuff can burn a person down to nothing. But I don’t burn like I used to.

Mood music:

It’s funny how people react not only to their own adversity, but that of others. Some people become incapacitated with grief when a pet dies and some of us want to say, “Fuck, man. It’s a pet. Get over it and stop crying in front of everyone.” But that’s just us judging someone without all the facts.

When I come up against difficult things, I write about it. One now-former reader lamented that my blog is “soooo depressing” that she can’t read it anymore. That suits me fine, because she was the type that had all the answers and told you how you should live. She was an expert in everything, but she never really understood the purpose of this blog, which is to stare the horrors of life in the face, describe it honestly and deal with it. Life is full of depressing things, but when you can face those things head on, there’s a ton of joy and beauty on the other side. That’s my experience, so I try to share it without telling you what to do.

And that’s what this post is about. Dealing with adversity and learning to get over it.

Yeah, I came close to a relapse last week. I did what every addict does — I reached a point in my recovery where I got so comfortable and felt so in control that I started getting sloppy. It’s funny how this happens, because when we feel in control it usually means things are falling apart behind the scenes. In my case, my father having three strokes tired me out enough that I started forgetting to do the things a person in recovery is supposed to do.

I went to a 12-Step Big Book study last night and the chapter of the night was perfect for me. It was about people who relapse because they think they have their addiction licked. They have that one weak moment that sends them back down to hell.

Going to a meeting the night that chapter was on the table was a classic case of God trying to tell me something. That something goes like this: Life is full of the good and bad. Deal with it and get over it. And, above all, don’t binge over it.

I write this stuff down and share it because we all have moments where we need that kick in the ass. My ass stings pretty good right now, but I’m feeling very grateful for it.

When you become paralyzed by the hole in your soul, the thought of dealing with it is terrifying. But when you finally take that next step, it’s one of the best, natural highs out there.

Last week I started to deal with things. I told my wife about my sloppiness and decided to declare myself in breach of abstinence and sobriety. I decided to tear it down and start over.

Yesterday I left my sponsor a message telling him I was sorry for being such a lousy sponsee. Now we’ll see if he wants to stick with me or if I need to find someone else. At least I took that step.

This evening I’m going to go to the wake for a man I looked up to, and it will be with a sense of celebration, not sadness. He lived his life as we all should: To the full. He earned a ticket straight to Heaven, and that makes me happy. I’ll admit I’m a bit nervous about seeing his wife and daughter for the first time in many years. They haven’t been happy with me in that time and tonight probably won’t change things. I don’t want to be an uncomfortable presence. I’ll just do the best I can.

I have all the coffee I need and I packed three abstinent meals for the day. I guess you could say my pistol is fully loaded and I’m ready for what comes next.

I have a busy work day, and I couldn’t be happier about that. I do, after all, love what I do.

I have to deal with my feelings about ending the estrangement with my mother. This week, I’m going to talk to Erin and carve out an action plan.

If you see me twitching and talking to myself, don’t worry. I’m dealing with life and getting over things I can’t control or undo.

Out of my way.

Posted on

My Brain Is On The Pavement. But At Least I Showered

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment my recovery started getting wobbly and I started getting sloppy. I don’t know if it’s fully accurate to call this a relapse, but it’s pretty damn close.

Mood music:

One thing is certain: I’m in a shaky place lately, and this is as good a place to sort things out. Talking is always better, but sometimes I have to write it.

I’ve been very tired lately, and in my fatigue, my recovery program from binge eating and other addictions has gotten sloppy. Twice in as many weeks, I’ve forgotten to pack an abstinent lunch before leaving the house. When you’re recovery is on sturdy ground, that’s a mistake you NEVER make.

I haven’t been making it to many 12-Step/OA meetings of late, and I can’t remember the last time I called my sponsor. I guess I’ve been too tired and short-fused to go over the same bullshit, over and over again.

I haven’t gone on any binges, thankfully. But I know how it works. I’m not stupid. When you start getting careless, you open yourself up for the crash.

I’ve been going over the last few months in search of the moment things started to go wrong.

My father having three strokes was certainly a factor. It’s hard not to worry all the time when the guy who has been the strong man in your life is suddenly in a wheelchair, not able to do much for himself. But I decided early on to be strong, cool and rational for other family members.

To do that, I guess I felt I needed a crutch. I didn’t want to binge eat or drink, so I smoked. Then Erin found the cigarettes I was hiding, and I resolved to quit that, too. Then and there, much of my patience for people went down the garbage chute.

I won’t lie: It still pisses me off that I had to stop smoking. Sure those things give you cancer. But to me it seemed much safer then the other things, which leave me in a mental state that disrupts everything, even my ability to dress myself. And so I start wearing the same clothes repeatedly, so I don’t have to think much about my appearance.

And, in the last week, I’ve been quietly re-assessing the status of things with my mother. I think I’m finally ready to reconcile, though it’ll never go back to the way it was. It can’t go back to the way it was. And so I have to think carefully about how to do this. That makes me even more tired.

At least I haven’t stopped taking showers and brushing my teeth. I’ve done that before, and it’s not pretty.

My next actions are clear:

–I’m going to consider all this a break of abstinence and go back to square one.

–I’m going to get a new sponsor. The current one has done his best with me, but I haven’t returned the favor.

–I need to start getting to more than one meeting a week. Actually, one a week is a good place to start.

–I need to make an action plan to deal with my mother.

–I need to start being honest with myself and stop pretending I have perfect control over everything.

I’ll come out of this. I always do. This is part of managing my life. You go through periods when everything is running like a Swiss watch. Then there are times when the machinery falls out of its casing, scraping your wrist on its way to the ground.

Venting here is how I deal with it and keep upright. I do it publicly because there are many people like me out there, who have no answers and are looking for a place to start.

Take it from me: Writing it out is a great place to start.

From there, realize you can’t fix yourself without help. Next, go find that help.