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Protecting Your Kids Isn’t Always Right

I’ve always been fiercely protective of my children. Part of it is that fear of loss. I’m like Marlin the clown fish in “Finding Nemo.” Like Marlin, I’m starting to realize I need to let the kids have some adventures.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/E5H8DwJI0uA

Any good parent is going to be over-protective to a point, and that’s how it should be. God gave us these kids to nurture, and we have to make sure they make it to adulthood and beyond.

But we’re also supposed to teach them how to survive adversity. For all my talk in this blog, I haven’t always done that part very well.

Some of it is my own background. Having watched my parents divorce, a brother die and a best friend commit suicide, I’ve had an overwhelming urge to shield Sean and Duncan from danger at all costs. That kind of compulsion is tailor-made for someone with OCD, because we drive ourselves mad trying to control all the things we are absolutely powerless to control.

I’ve gone crazy over all the usual things. I see a mosquito bite or two on their legs and I go into a fit of lunacy because mosquitoes can carry dangerous diseases. Letting them out of my sight would fill me with dread.

But I also remember something else from childhood: After my brother died, my mother, who was already overbearing, became absolutely suffocating. I think she wanted me to stay in whatever room she was in straight on through adulthood.

Naturally, I rebelled.

Thank God I did, because without taking some chances in life and breaking free of your protective sphere, you amount to nothing.

I can’t put my kids through the same thing, no matter how much I worry about them.

Learning to better control my OCD had been helpful. When I learned to break free of the fear and anxiety, I stopped going crazy over the little things.

This summer I’ve suddenly realized how far I’ve come.

Sean and Duncan have a couple new friends from the neighborhood. One boy’s family runs the farmland all around us and is accustomed to exploring all the woodland trails. Sean and Duncan now run off with their new friends, hanging out in a secret fort they built in the woods and digging holes in the mud by the culverts.

A funny thing has happened here. I find myself kicking the kids out of the house on sunny days, telling them to go explore and enjoy the outdoors.

A couple years ago, the prospect would have terrified me. Now it feels natural.

This doesn’t mean I no longer worry about my kids being in danger. I worry about it all the time. I don’t think that’s the OCD. I think it’s the normal reaction from a parent who adores his children.

But now, when I get uncomfortable about it all, I remember a scene from the movie I mentioned at the beginning of this post: Marlin and Dory are inside a whale, and Marlin laments that he failed to keep a promise to his son. The exchange went something like this:

Marlin: “I promised I’d never let anything bad happen to him.”

Dory: “That’s a funny thing to promise. If nothing ever happens to him, then nothing will ever happen to him. Not much fun for little Harpo.”

Kids need adventure. They even need to experience adversity. That’s how they learn to be good, strong adults.

That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway.

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A Personality Defect We All Share

When you hear about people with conflicting personalities, the image of an insane asylum patient comes to mind. If that were indeed the accurate picture, we would all be committed.

Mood music:

The truth is that we all have more than one personality. We can be one person in one group setting, then go to another group setting and become somebody else.

I don’t think that’s such a bad thing, either.

This all came up a couple weeks ago as I had coffee with my friend Audrey Clark, a Marblehead, Mass. native and singer-guitarist for The 360s. We were talking about how we can be at ease and talkative in a one-on-one setting or in a small group, then go off to another group setting — in this case, a crowded rock club where the lighting is dim or nonexistent and people don’t look like they do on Facebook.

For me the multiple personalities are something I treasure.

I consider my multiple personalities a strength, with a bunch of recovery tools rolled up into one happy mess.

On one side of my brain is the metal head. The guy who used to sing in a band and who to this day listens to all the hard-edged music he grew up on.

There’s the history nerd who has his work stations at work and home festooned with busts of historic figures, old news clippings and framed copies of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg Address and a variety of nautical artifacts. The guy who put his family in the station wagon last year and drove to Washington D.C.for a private tour of the White House West Wing (a friend works there).

There’s the security scribe who writes about the world of hackers, security vendors and government cybersecurity officials for CSOonline and CSO Magazine. On this one I actually have multiple personalities within multiple personalities.

Many of my friends in the security industry are a colorful mix of characters. Some are the hacking types who dress like rock stars and share my musical tastes. Others wear a suit and tie every day and work for multi-billion-dollar corporations and government agencies, and they often share my love for history. I float easily between both camps.

Then there’s the Catholic.

Faith is connected to everything I do. I live for God — or try to — and in all my other pursuits that’s what drives me. I’m active in my church community, getting up and doing readings at Mass and helping out with programs like RCIA. My personality is much different from that of my fellow parishioners, but we get on well, bound by a love for our families, children and God.

Finally and most importantly — I actually consider this central to my Faith journey — there’s the family man, the one who adores his wife and children and tries hard to make decisions that put them before work. I don’t always pull it off, but in the end, they are THE MOST IMPORTANT forces in my life. Well, God is, but my Faith does compel me to put family first. It’s complicated, I know, but I’m sure most of you understand.

All these things make for a challenging life. But I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Ever since I lifted the chains of depression, OCD, fear-anxiety and addiction off of me, I’ve loved all the jagged pieces of my life all the more.

So if you have multiple personalities, don’t hide them. Don’t run from them. Embrace them.

As long as those personalities aren’t dominated by the darker forces of human nature.

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I’m a Narcissist (And So Are You)

Someone asked me when I reached a point in my recovery where I stopped being self-absorbed. I told her I never stopped. But when you think about it, you’re not much different from me.

Mood music:

As I’ve said before, people with obsessive-compulsive tendencies are basket cases about being in control. Maybe it’s simply control of one’s sanity. Usually, it’s control of situations and people you have no business trying to control.

Part of it, to be honest, includes an obsession with how people perceive you. All it takes is a couple of people telling you you’re “awesome” to send your narcissistic side swelling out of control.

My ego is a nasty beast. I do battle with him every day because I don’t want to be focused on me, myself and I. Many days I lose.

We all do, of course. Tell me you’re not carrying at least a little narcissism in you and I’ll tell you you’re full of shit.

Yesterday was an example of how my own tendencies can get the better of me.

I went looking for a definition and found this on Wikipedia:

Narcissism is the personality trait of egotism, vanity, conceit, or simple selfishness. Applied to a social group, it is sometimes used to denote elitism or an indifference to the plight of others. The name “narcissism” was coined by Freud after Narcissus who in Greek myth was a pathologically self-absorbed young man who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool.

So, let’s see…

I’ve never fallen in love with my reflection. Usually, when I look in a mirror, it’s to make sure I don’t look too fat, though that too is an act of vanity. I don’t get people who insist on having their bedroom or bathroom fitted with wall-to-wall mirror. I’ve also gone through long periods of hating myself.

But I am guilty of thinking I’m better than the guy sitting next to me. I probably think I’m a better writer than I really am. There are days when I think a little too highly of myself.

And I care way too much about how many followers/friends/circles I have in the social media world. I don’t want to care. I’ll tell you I don’t care. But I do.

I have the highest friend count I’ve ever had on Facebook — 1654 — and I have nearly 2200 Twitter followers. But when I discovered a long-time Facebook friend had ditched me yesterday I started going through my list to see who else dropped me. Then, the inevitable wondering why.

If it sounds stupid, that’s because it is.

Despite my posts about how you shouldn’t friend me if you’re not finding my content useful, there I was, bumming that someone didn’t like what I was pushing.

That’s how I roll. It aint always pretty.

I know I shouldn’t be this way. Maybe I’ll figure out a way to stop.

In the meantime, I have the comfort you get in knowing you’re not alone — the “misery loves company” syndrome.

That’s right, I’m staring at you and suggesting that you have a bit of narcissism in you as well.

I don’t mean it as an insult. I’m simply making an observation.

How many of you put new pictures of yourself on Facebook daily, usually snaps you took of yourself while sitting in the car? Quite a few of you, from what I’ve seen on my homepage.

How many of you fill your status updates with quotes others have made, figuring that since your name is over it you’ll look super smart? I’ve done it. I’ve seen you do it, too.

To be fair, not everyone carries on like this. Some people despise themselves too much to be seen or heard, which is also unhealthy — and goes to show that sometimes you just can’t win.  Others hate themselves and tell the world about it on every social network they have access to. They do it to make themselves feel better. But since they obviously hope someone is reading and caring, they too are engaging in a little bit of narcissism. Somewhere there’s a balance. I haven’t found it yet.

It’s been said that the first step in tackling your problem is admitting you have the problem in the first place. Or, as the first of the 12 Steps says, “We admitted we were powerless over (insert addiction — Here’s mine), that our lives had become unmanageable.”

Then there’s the fact that “we’re all in this together.”

We can go down together, or we could help each other stand up. To be honest, I don’t know how we do the latter. Maybe, if we see a friend carrying on with a bloated ego, a good start is to nudge them in private and suggest a different approach. That person may be insulted, but chances are at least 50-50 that they’ll get over it.

Unfollowing can send a message too, though it’s better to back up the action by explaining to someone why they have become too much trouble to associate with.

Narcissism is an ugly word and an ugly truth. It might be the hardest challenge of all.

url

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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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You Can Change Your Name, But You Can’t Hide Who You Are

An epilogue to yesterday’s post about Lynn, Mass.: A reader reminded me yesterday of the time some Lynners tried to get the city’s name changed so the “Lynn, Lynn city of sin” insult could no longer apply.

Mood music:

From my friend Katherine Doot: “Thought they wanted to change the name to Ocean Park some years ago? So it was Ocean Park Ocean Park never go out after dark?!”

I had forgotten about that, but it’s true. That was one of the movements afoot the year I covered the city as a reporter in 1997. I thought it was a stupid idea from the start, and I’m glad most people didn’t take it seriously.

My first concert was a festival headlined by Motley Crue in 1985 at Manning Bowl in Lynn. That was at the start of the band’s “Theater of Pain” tour. I have fond memories of singer Vince Neil badly mispronouncing the city’s name as “Leeeee-innnnn!”

If the city had been named Ocean Park, he might have pronounced it correctly and I wouldn’t have that fun memory of mangled language today. That would suck.

My main point is this, though: You can change your name, but it isn’t going to change who you are or who you should be.

If you don’t like yourself or your city, a name change is a stupid and ineffective way of trying to hide in plain sight.

You want real change for a city, you have to change the politics and clean up the streets. I think Lynn has made good progress on both fronts.

If you want real change for yourself, you have to identify what you don’t like and rebuild yourself.

Lynn Shore Drive

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I Hung Out In Lynn, Mass. What Can I say?

In this corner of the planet, Lynn, Mass., is the city everyone likes to pick on. One barb I do agree with is the saying, “Lynn, Lynn, city of sin. You never come out the way you came in.”

But I don’t see that line in the spirit in which it was intended.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/1tp4srXRZDI

It is a city of sin, but every city is a place of sin. We all sin, so it’s wherever we go — even in the little towns with the white picket fences and bunny rabbits hopping around freely.

Me? I’m a better person for having spent a lot of time in Lynn.

Lynn is as much a part of me as Revere. The neighborhood I grew up in, the Point of Pines, is the last stop in Revere before you cross the General Edwards Bridge into Lynn. The house I spent my boyhood in is on the Lynnway, which stretches from the edge of Revere Beach Boulevard to the edge of Lynn Shore Drive.

As a boy, my father would take me to the Osco Drug store in Lynn to buy Star Wars action figures and coloring books, followed by a trip to a nearby Friendly’s Ice Cream shop.

Since there was nothing to do in the Point of Pines, me and my friends walked across the bridge into Lynn, where we would hang out in a Building 19 and flea market just over the border.

When I was 11 a huge chunk of downtown Lynn went up in flames. I could see the reddish-orange glow of the fire from my neighborhood. They built a campus for North Shore Community College where the burned out buildings once stood, and that’s where I spent the first three years out of high school before transferring to Salem State. I used to laugh as I watched the campus security officers aim the parking lot surveillance cameras at a gay bar next door called Fran’s Place so they could watch the drag queens going in and out of the place.

At the community college, I met Mike Tranfaglia, a mullet-headed, foul-mouthed kid with Lynn coursing through his blood stream. He smoked and said “fuck” a lot, so we got along famously. We’ve been friends ever since. He was in my wedding. He’s a Freemason now, and Friday night he invited me to the lodge, practically next door to the Osco that supplied the childhood Star Wars toys I eventually burned when I went through my pyro maniac phase.

At the lodge we ate steak and smoked high-end cigars. The smoke brought a lot of memories wafting back at me. Memories painful and comforting at the same time.

When I went into newspaper reporting in the 1990s, I covered Lynn for a year. I worked six days a week for two publications and nearly had a breakdown from the exhaustion. It was also soon after my friend Sean Marley took his life, so my emotions were raw and bloody.

But the job put me in contact with some of the most colorful characters I ever met. The politicians were cartoon characters, some of them corrupt characters, some of them crazy, including a city councilor who patrolled the ward he represented on his bicycle with a gun strapped to his side.

I covered a murder my first day on the job, a kid who was gunned down outside a nightclub. I’d cover plenty more murders after that.

That year I started working closely with Peter Sugarman, who would take Sean Marley’s place as my best friend until his own death in 2004.

Peter ate, drank and breathed Lynn. He introduced me to the people that formed the spine of the city — including a tough little Greek woman who ran a corner fruit stand and fought with the politicians over any number of things for sport, the folks from the art scene, and the aging WW II veterans.

I even have fond memories of the police station visits on Saturdays at 6 in the morning. It was in the old police station that was standing by sheer habit at that point. There were always homeless people sleeping in the entry way and the smell of piss hung in the air like a toxic cloud. But the cops were always nice to me as I stood there reading through the police logs.

When I left that job, Lynn ceased to be a second home and became the place I had to drive through to get to wherever else I needed to be.

But it was nice to spend a couple hours there Friday night, remembering old times. Thanks for the invite, Mike.

I didn’t come out of Lynn the same person I went in as, but that’s fine by me. The people I met and befriended there made me a better person.

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I Talk To Myself. So What?

I talk to myself all the time. Sometimes I get caught, and it embarrasses me. But over the years, the habit has served its purpose.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/IKpEoRlcHfA

I know I look ridiculous when I do it. Maybe I even look a little crazy, though much less so since the invention of the Bluetooth ear device. One morning in New York City, I was walking down a street chuckling over all the people with Bluetooth devices in their ears, looking dead ahead while flapping their lips.

“I’m cooler than they are,” I thought to myself. “I don’t need a funny-looking thing in my ear to talk to myself.”

I’m the type who will talk to myself loudly while walking around in public. I’ve gotten stared at plenty of times for that. I’ve also been known to read news articles back aloud to myself, whether they’re articles I wrote or was editing.

Past colleagues have gone nuts over the habit, especially the editors I worked with at The Eagle-Tribune.

What do I talk to myself about? Usually I’m planning all the things I have to do during the day ahead. Or, after work, I’ll list all the important tasks I took care of that day. Back when my OCD, fear, anxiety and depression burned out of control I would talk aloud to myself about all kinds of worries. Those conversations would go in endless circles and wipe me out.

I know I look like the crazy guy on the street when I do this. But I can’t help myself.

But it’s better than it used to be.

For one thing, I don’t read stories I’m writing or editing back to myself aloud anymore. I did that because I lacked confidence in my writing and editing abilities, and was terrified of turning in work that was less than perfect. I still turned in a lot of crap, so in hindsight I wasted a lot of time.

Now I read it back silently with metal music blaring in my headphones. It’s a lot more fun that way.

People who talk to themselves are usually considered crazy. I think of Crazy Mike of Haverhill and a lot of characters I used to know in Revere. But they are usually harmless. They’re so wrapped up in the conversations they have with themselves that they don’t notice the people around them. They’ve never bothered me. I do feel for them, because I’m sure some of it is loneliness. No one else will talk to them. It’s tragic, really.

I’ve always been more fortunate. Even when I’ve weirded people out, they still talk to me.

As annoying as it can be to others, I think talking to yourself is actually one of the sanest things you can do. It can be painful when taken to excess. I speak from experience. But it’s also a good way to clear the mind of cluttering thoughts.

It’s like everything else in my OCD-infested world. I’m forever trying to figure out how much is too much or just enough to keep my brain working.

If that means I’m still crazy, so be it. I’m in good company, at least.

OCD Diaries

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Facebook Changed My Social Dysfunction

Going to see The 360s last night drove home an interesting point for me: The Facebook world and the real world are indeed two different places. And it may have made my social dysfunction worse.

Mood music:

First, I want to thank The 360s for a great show last night. When I leave a show with my ears ringing, feeling like I’ve been kicked in the gut, I know I’ve had a good, healthy dose of rock n roll. I need that sort of thing every day.

Here’s what was weird for me, and it’s nobody’s fault, really. Heck, it’s not even necessarily a bad thing: I’m connected with all the band members on Facebook. Seeing their status updates every day makes me feel like I really know them. But in person, we’re strangers.

I approached the band members, who looked at me puzzled, trying to figure out who I was. Once I introduced myself, they knew who the strange guy in front of them was and they were very friendly. Some of them read this blog, but in real life, in a dark club, I don’t really resemble the cartoon logo people associate me with. And outside of Facebook, we’ve never really talked to each other in a room.

And so I come off as the typical hanger-on at rock shows, the guy in the room who sucks up to the band so he can tell people he knows them. That’s not my goal, but I can see how I might come off that way. I can be a real train wreck sometimes.

In a way it’s kind of cool, because it goes to show that you can’t replace the real world with something found in cyberspace.

That’s actually a relief, because I sometimes worry that if I get too good at the social media thing, I’ll forget how to function when face-to-face with someone.

Actually, let me correct that: I’ve never really understood how to function when face to face. And that brings me to the main point of this post.

Even though I can comfortably give a talk in front of an audience and share my most embarrassing truths in writing, I remain socially dysfunctional.

I lose the ability to distinguish what I see in the people I share a room with from people I share a Facebook page with. So, once off Facebook and back in the real world, I forget how I should act around people.

I’ve gotten better at this stuff since crawling out of the black hole that is OCD and addiction. But I suppose I’ll always be fighting the battle at some level. And that’s OK.

My social awkwardness didn’t get in the way of what was a great night out with my wife. I had fun, and look forward to the next concert. I also didn’t need to feed my addictive side with binge eating or booze to get through the night. That’s some pretty good progress.

I just need to work on my real-world people skills. But then doesn’t everybody?

OCD Diaries

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Does This Post Offend You?

This is a first: I was re-posting a piece of content on Facebook and got this push back: “This message contains blocked content that has previously been flagged as abusive or spammy. Let us know if you think this is an error.”

Mood music:

The post was about some old elementary school pictures that show the year-to-year effect of the Prednisone I took for Crohn’s Disease. In the post, I express gratitude for the support I got from classmates back then. I do mention one kid in the photos who grew up to be a convicted pedophile, but that’s been a matter of public record for many years now.

So I’m curious as to who got offended and why. I make no apologies for the post. Those who find it offensive are free to defriend me on Facebook or block my news feed. No one HAS to read what I write.

But people do get set off for different reasons, and I don’t want to be a trigger for someone else’s pain. Sometimes it can’t be helped, but it’s something I want to avoid as much as possible.

So have a look at the post and tell me what’s abusive or spammy about it:

A Boy’s Life on Prednisone: A Class Photo History

Posted on June 6, 2011

I’ve mentioned before that I had to take a lot of this nasty drug called Prednisone as a kid, and how the side effects were almost as bad as the Crohn’s Disease flare-upsthe drug was meant to snuff out.

Well, my old elementary school friend Myles Lynch posted some class pics on Facebook that show the physical impact. Looking at them brings back memories good and bad.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQPJYnr48yU&w=584&h=463]

Let’s start with first grade, before the disease surfaced. I’m dead-center in the back row, looking like a normal kid:

By the time the second-grade class photo is taken, I’ve been diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease and I’ve spent six weeks in the hospital. The results of the Prednisone on my face are pretty clear. I’m second from left in the back row:

By the time the third-grade pic is taken, I’ve been through my second flare-up and six-week hospital stay. I’m in the back row, two kids to the right of the teacher, Ms. Cole:

I’m not in the fourth-grade class picture, because as the photo is being taken, I’m in the middle of a third six-week hospital stay for another flare-up. The disease usually struck sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving. This time, it waited until spring.

By fifth grade I’m back in the class photo, and I’ve been off Prednisone for a while. You can see it in my face, back row, far right:

There are a few things worth noting about the other kids in these pictures. First, look to the kid at the far left in the front row of the last image. That’s Mark Hedgecock, one of my best friends during childhood. Last time I checked about 10 months ago, he was a thrice-convicted sex-offender living on the streets of Boston. I have a hard time accepting that he’s a pedophile, because to me that’s one of the worst crimes a person can commit. But he too is an addict who doesn’t want to be that way, so I try hard to look at him in a forgiving way. I’ll let you know if I ever get there.

The other kids have had their own challenges and joys in life. I’ve kept in touch with some of them. But here’s the important thing: Back then, when we were a small, close-knit community, before the puberty-driven bullying of middle school, these kids did all they could to make me feel better. When I was in the hospital they would send hand-made get-well cards. When I’d get out of the hospital, they would give me a warm, cheerful welcome back.

Those acts of kindness are something I will never forget.

The pictures also remind me a lot of what life was like in the hospital. Those hospital wards were like little communities, where the young patients would try to find ways to pass the time. We shared each other’s toys and watched the same TV shows. I always seemed to be the only Crohn’s patient on a floor full of kids with Cystic Fibrosis. Treatment for that disease was nothing like it is today, and many of the friends I made in the hospital died before they got to adulthood.

I lost a lot of blood back then, because I had a colon full of holes. But compared to my lost friends, I got off lucky.

I owe that to God and all the helpers he put in my path.

Whenever I’m having a bad day and I start to get cranky and impatient with people, I try to think back to those days. Doing so makes me remember how blessed I am, and how I should stop wasting time on hard feelings and earn that blessing by spending my life as one of those helpers.

I’ve been walking past Children’s Hospital these days on the way into the neighboring hospital my father has been in since suffering a stroke last week, and the memories come flooding back of the time when I was a frequent resident there. And seeing my father, with his eye patch and slackened mouth, makes me remember the things he used to do to keep me going.

During one stay, I was obsessed with getting a talking View-Master, where you put in these paper disks and look through a view lens at the scenes that blow up larger than life on a screen inside the gadget. The taking variety was all the rage in 1979, and I bellowed about it like the spoiled brat I was. You get very spoiled and miserable to be around when everyone is tending to your every need.

My father got me the talking View-Master, and bought me a new Star Wars action figure each week, followed by a trip to Friendly’s for ice cream on those occasions where I was allowed to have it.

The more emotional variety of affection was something he always struggled with, though in his way, he was doing all he could to show his love.

Amazing, the things that come back to you after looking at a few childhood pictures.

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Social Anxiety, Alcohol And Whatever Else Numbed Me

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.

Progress is progress.