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Using Mental Illness to Get Attention

I came across an interesting article on the AG News site listing 10 traits of someone who uses mental illness to get attention. A couple years ago it would have offended the hell out of me. But knowing myself as I do today, I see a lot of truth in there.

Mood music:

https://youtu.be/WEus6w9UlG0

People with big egos often think of themselves as supremely awesome and interesting, even when they’re not. As I’ve said before, we OCD cases have big egos. Of all the mental disorders out there, it’s probably the one that is most connected to attention seeking. (See “The Ego OCD Built.”)

As part of my recovery — and my larger faith journey — I’ve had to deal with this issue head on. It’s the most unsettling of truths: my mental disorder comes with a hole in the soul. Like anyone with this problem, I’ve tried to fill the hole over the years with addictive behavior.

In recent years, social media has become as addictive as coke and heroin. It’s so easy for people to spout off and get attention on Facebook and Twitter that once they get the ball rolling, it’s hard to stop. I’m as guilty of this as anyone.

By 2011, a lot of my writing was to get attention. Two years earlier everyone told me how brave I was for being so open about my mental illness, and that was as satisfying as any fix. I had to keep it going. People occasionally called me on it, but just as many people kept giving me the validation I wanted.

I started to realize that this wasn’t necessarily healthy. I started writing posts that explored whether or not I was a narcissist, and I had to admit there was definitely some of that in play.

Was I faking mental illness? Absolutely not. Was I using it as a crutch and tool of validation? To an extent, yes.

Fast-forward to 2016. I don’t write nearly as many posts here as I used to. Some of that is because I don’t have as much to say as I used to. Some of it is because my work-related writing responsibilities have grown. And some of it has been a deliberate effort to pull back and not be such a social media hog.

That last point is part of a larger realization: that while it’s healthy to talk about my mental illness, especially when it comes to sharing the coping tools that have helped me, it’s only part of who I am.

I don’t want to let my mental challenges define me. I don’t want to be the guy who uses them as an excuse when I screw up or fall short of a goal.

I’m glad more people are opening up about their own mental illness. When done right, it can inspire others to deal with their own issues.

But if you find yourself getting bummed out because people aren’t lining up to tell you how awesome you are, it may be a sign that you’re doing it wrong.

Looking Glass Skull

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OCD: A Researcher’s Best Friend

For all its insidious characteristics, OCD has it’s pluses. For me, one advantage is that when I grow obsessed about something, I research it to the ends of the Earth.

Mood music:

There’s the musical obsession: I’m currently locked on to all things related to Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys. An obsession with the likes of Van Halen, Ozzy, Led Zeppelin, The Doors and more led me to devour every book and album having to do with them.

As a result, I can tell you the names of each album in chronological order, the year they were released and, in numerical order, the track listings. I can tell you about the highs and lows of these musical acts and the stories behind the songs, because I’ve inhaled one book and documentary after another.

There’s my obsession with criminal history. I’ve read just about every book about the Manson murders, Whitey Bulger’s reign of terror in Boston and the Amityville murders. I’ve seen scores of documentaries about each and recite the dates of the murders, names of prosecutors and defense attorneys and names of victims.

That obsession has also led me to visit the crime scenes of the Tate-LaBianca murders and the Bulger killings and the Amityville house.

My broader obsession with history has led me to read pretty much everything about the Roosevelts, Abraham Lincoln, the White House and Boston’s past. I’ve been to Roosevelt homes in Hyde Park, NY, and on Campobello Island, and I’ve been inside the West Wing of the White House and seen the spot at Ford’s Theater where Lincoln was shot, as well as the room across the street where he died.

One might consider this a lot of useless information, but I don’t think so. In my work and personal life, I’ve been able to apply what I’ve learned about many of these things. And, if nothing else, the research has been fun.

Researching the idle curiosities has given me skills that come in handy with work research.

It all goes to show that if you can bring the destructive side of your mental disorder to heel, what’s left can be a gift.

Brain Sponge

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Of Fear and Duct Tape

I was anxious, jumpy, and panicky when I was younger, fear making me do the damnedest things. My sister loves to repeat the story of one of my more embarrassing freak-outs. It used to piss me off, but now I can sit back and laugh with everyone else.

To that end, let’s review the morning a hurricane was coming and I completely lost it.

Mood music:

https://youtu.be/sxdmw4tJJ1Y

First, some history.

Before I got my OCD under control, I was always full of fear and anxiety. It robbed me of a life that could have been better lived. I hid indoors a lot. I favored the fantasy of TV over the real world. And when the weather got hairy, I overreacted in ways that are more amusing in hindsight.

I blame the Blizzard of 1978 for my overreaction. When you’re eight years old and you watch the Atlantic Ocean rip apart a beach wall and head straight for your house, bad things go through your mind and they tend to stay there. Those things are helped along when the media compares every new storm to come along with that blizzard.

In August 1991, the news was full of reports about a military coup in Russia, which was scary because that meant the overthrow of Mikhail Gorbachev. He would be back in power before the week was out, but take the early hours of that crisis and mix it with reports that a hurricane called Bob was coming straight at us, and here’s what you get:

Me running around the house with duct tape, slathering reams of it on every window I could find.

I ran into my sister’s basement bedroom and proceeded to tape her window. One of her friends was sleeping over and got to see me in all my crazy glory.

“Get up, a hurricane is coming!” I bellowed. Stacey and her friend remained in the bed, not a care in the world.

“Come on, you idiots!” I yelled. “This ain’t no fucking Hurricane Gloria.”

Hurricane Gloria hit Massachusetts in 1985. It was supposed to be a devastating event, but it passed over us with more of a whimper than a bang. Hurricane Bob was going to be much worse, the weather people were telling us. And, of course, they started comparing the expected storm surge with that of the Blizzard of 1978.

Panic engulfed me.

Hurricane Bob turned out to be almost as anti-climactic as Gloria, but that Halloween a much more devastating storm hit and flooded out the neighborhood almost as badly as in 1978. Ironically, ours was one of the only houses not to get flooded.

Man's face covered in duct tape

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My Problem with “One Day at a Time”

“One day at a time? You wouldn’t believe the crap that swirls around my head one day at a time.”–Anonymous

Recovering addicts have a saying burned into their brains: “one day at a time.” It’s important wisdom to live by. But when the recovering addict has OCD, there’s a big problem.

Mood music:

In the world of 12-step recovery programs, the idea of “one day at a time” is not to be overwhelmed. Instead of trying to get your arms around everything necessary for recovery inside of a week or a month or a year, we subscribe to the idea of just focusing on what we have to do today. Doing this a day at a time makes the clean-up tasks seem a lot less overwhelming.

It’s a good way to be in all aspects of life. Plan for the future, but stay focused in the present.

The problem with an OCD case is that the disorder forces you to do nothing but stew over the future. You look at the next week or the next month and relentlessly play out the potential outcomes.

The first time someone told me to take it a day at a time, my instinct was to punch him in the face. I had a business trip three weeks away to worry about. I had a medical test scheduled for the following month and had all kinds of potentially grim outcomes to worry about.

That’s how guys like me roll.

Still, I decided to give “one day at a time” a chance. I even took a class of mindfulness-based stress reduction to that end.

I learned that it absolutely is the best way to go about life. When I’m able to focus on the present, I’m happy and successful.

But I’ve also learned that it’s hard as hell to pull off. My OCD often reasserts itself and I dive back into long-term worries, which lead to present-day failures.

The whole concept fell to ashes this past autumn as I slipped into one of the deeper depressions I’ve had in a long time. The depression has lifted significantly, but I remain scattered.

This past weekend I was so all over the place that my lapse from mindfulness became too big to overlook, and I find myself looking for ways to get it back. I feel like Bill the Cat from the “Bloom County” comic strip: flopping about and yelling “Ack!”

I played guitar both weekend days, which helped. More daily walks would help, too. It might also do me a world of good to go to confession sometime this month. Emptying the trash that builds up in the soul is a good way to move on.

In a perfect world, I would probably do well to take a refresher course in mindfulness. But this isn’t a perfect world, and there’s no time or money for such an endeavor.

Somewhere in my house is the packet of papers I collected during the mindfulness course. I plan to tear the place apart until I find it.

Stay tuned.

Bill the Cat

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The Day the Devil Beat Me

I haven’t posted in a while for two reasons: One, I’ve been burned out. Two, I needed time to describe what it’s like to slide back into old habits.

Mood music:

It seems I’ve spent so much time writing about my recovery from binge eating and other addictive behaviors that I forgot what it was like to be back on the other side — where recovery gives way to failure and the fallen is left feeling like he’s been dragged back to square one.

It started in August, amid a series of pressures. First, I injured my back and was sidelined for two weeks. I was on the couch for a week soaking up the Vicodin my doctor prescribed me. He also prescribed Prednisone, a drug that always stirs my dark side.

The Prednisone made me want to eat a lot. I largely resisted, but while I didn’t binge, I got sloppy.

Then things got stressful at work. We had to deal with a huge security vulnerability called Shellshock, and I found myself working 16-hour days and forgetting to eat. Forgetting to eat is bad, because it ensures sloppy eating at the end of the day. And one day, that’s what happened.

On the day Shellshock was blowing up and I was diving into meetings on our communication strategy, I was also in the midst of getting four videos made. The video shoot was already a pressure point because I had to reschedule it once already due to the back injury.

It was as intense a day as I can remember having in many years, and on the way home I found myself in the Burger King drive-through. I picked foods that I can eat under my no-flour, no-sugar regimen. A lot of it.

I carried around the shame for a week, until I finally told Erin what happened. After she saw a $21 charge for Burger King on our bank statement, of course.

This is my fault. Nobody else is to blame. The work pressures were the same things we all endure in the normal course of our professions. In recent years I’ve had a pretty good set of tools to manage those pressures well. But for whatever reason, in the last month I forgot to use them.

This was a long time coming.

I had been disenchanted with the OA recovery program I was following, and I had been struggled to strike the right food balance for months.

Now I have to clean up and find my way again. The upside is that I don’t feel beaten. Human beings make mistakes frequently. The important thing is what one does with the mistake to learn and grow.

I haven’t slipped since that day in the Burger King drive-through, though the eating is still sloppy. I’m working my way out of it, but I’m still in that unsettled, raw place. Getting back on one’s feet is hard, but I’m going to get there.

I have no alternative.

Next: Feelings of lingering vulnerability catch up with the author during two hikes in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Back in my hell by Eddie the Yeti

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Making Sense of a 9/11 Obsession

It happens every time the calendar rolls into September. I start watching documentaries about 9/11 and can’t stop.

It’s as if an unseen force is controlling my actions. I go from one YouTube clip to the next.

Many people do this in the days leading up to the anniversary, but for me there’s the OCD element, where after I watch something I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ll forget the rest of the world exists and just replay the scenes in my head over and over again.

Maybe it’s supposed to be this way. We need to remember what happened that day — the people we lost and those who distinguished themselves as heroes.

Or maybe I’m just making excuses for the part of me that can’t seem to look away.

Whatever the case may be, there’s at least one documentary I want to share with you: the Discovery Channel’s Inside the Twin Towers.

You can watch it all on YouTube in ten 10-minute clips. Here’s part one:

I think this documentary is important because you can learn a lot about the goodness man is capable of.

There’s a morbid aspect of the program where they show what it was probably like to be inside the towers as they collapsed. But this is mostly about people helping other people despite the risks to their own lives. You see a lot of strangers helping each other.

Once the haunting aspect of the documentary wears off, you’ll walk away feeling inspired.

And maybe, just maybe, you’ll realize that you are capable of great things, of touching a lot of people, regardless of your own personal demons.

Events like 9/11 are full of evil and sorrow. But, as Mister Rogers said in a show he did right after the attacks, the helpers always come. Some are firefighters running up endless flights of stairs with 60 pounds of gear on their backs. And some are stock traders who, when put in a certain place at a certain time, did something they were always meant to do.

God has a plan, all right. Sometimes it involves awful events. But it’s a plan that sorts the boys from the men, the girls from the women, and the good souls from the selfish and indifferent souls.

If that’s the lesson I take from this annual obsession, so be it.

9/11 World Trade Center Memorial

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A Hacker Walks Into a Vape Shop…

A while back, I wrote about my use of electronic cigarettes as a way to avoid tobacco products.

Since then, the phenomenon known as “vaping” has taken off. It’s especially popular in the security industry I work in. There’s some symbolism in that, as I’ll explain shortly. But first, a self-assessment.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/53iekfJg4IY

E-cigs have gotten me over smoking. True, vaping looks like smoking, and even feels like it to an extent. But I’m using nicotine-free water vapor and have absolutely no interest in returning to the old-fashioned cigarettes. I now detest the smell of real cigarette smoke and how it hangs in the air like a bad dream. I don’t miss getting ashes all over my clothes, either.

I like how the vapor vanishes almost immediately after the exhale and how it makes no mess. My breathing is also ten times better since nixing the cigarettes. (OK, that last one isn’t a scientific measure, but you get the idea.)

I admit that I’m also using vapor to satisfy the need to have something in my hand and in my mouth. I’ve done far worse, though. I can live with this.

There is something else I enjoy about vaping: the creativity it brings out in my security peers.

Which brings me to the symbolism I mentioned earlier.

Hackers are thought of as people who break things, and that’s partly true. The good guys break things to uncover weaknesses in technology that can then be fixed. That work is potentially lifesaving, if you look at the late Barnaby Jack’s focus on finding and fixing security holes in medical devices.

But the thing that gets lost is that hackers are also master builders. In the process of breaking things, they help build stronger technology. And, in the case of some friends, they love to build devices that dispense vapor. Hell, there’s even a Facebook group dedicated to the craft.

There, folks show off the different liquid flavors they’re trying the same way foodies take pictures of all their meals. They also show off the myriad vaping devices they’ve concocted, many of which look like lightsabers. The pieces that are assembled into a pipe are like the paints an artist puts on canvas.

Some of us get carried away. Take my friend Boris, who started collecting and concocting devices some time ago and can’t stop. Look at the guy’s bathroom:

Boris's collection of vapor pipes and liquids

While some like to build their own, there are also folks who just like to collect different pipes the way kids collect baseball cards. Martin Bos has an impressive collection:

Martin Bos's vapor pipes

While the creativity that Boris and Martin demonstrate tickles me, I’ve mostly used the e-cigs you can find in most gas stations. I only recently upgraded to an eGo pipe, which so far has great battery life.

I don’t plan to maintain a vaping habit forever. But compared to some of my past habits, which caused plenty of physical and mental destruction, this is good clean fun.

For now.

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Knowing You’re a Punk is the First Step in the Cure

I was an absolute punk this morning. I was incensed over tech problems, dropping F-bombs and punching the desk with my fist.

Mood music:

It’s a typical problem for someone with clinical OCD. You want to control everything, though you know it’s impossible.

In mid-rage, I learned a friend had just lost a sibling.

Rage turned to guilt.

I’m no special case. We all lose our patience from time to time and act like spoiled brats. More often than not, it’s over little things, like missing a favorite TV show or getting stuck in traffic. It’s much easier to blow up than to be stoic when things don’t go our way.

The news I received this morning in the middle of my tantrum just goes to show that someone else always has it worse. I know what it’s like to lose a sibling, and I truly feel for my friend and pray for his family. I needed a hard slap of perspective this morning, but I wish the lesson came from someplace else.

Appreciate what you have. Hug those around you, and don’t sweat the little things. If you fail at any of these, just try again.

I’ll work at following my own advice.

Perspective-is-everything

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To the Asshole Who Wrote “5 Reasons to Date a Girl with an Eating Disorder”

The Internet has made it possible for all sorts of assholes to have a forum. Although this is common knowledge, some people still manage to shock me.

The latest example is an article someone calling himself Tuthmosis wrote called “5 Reasons to Date a Girl with an Eating Disorder.”

Mood music:

I always try to see the best in humanity. For all the bad seeds out there, I do believe we’ve come a long way in how we treat people based on such things as race, sexual orientation and religion.

Then there are people like Tuthmosis. In his article, he claims women with eating disorders make for good dating because, among other things:

  • They are fragile and easily controlled.
  • They are crazy, and crazy women are fantastic in bed.
  • Their obsession with appearance will improve their overall looks.
  • They cost less money because they won’t eat much.

That publications happily run this shit makes me sick to the bones.

If you see this, Tuthmosis, I just want to say one thing, on behalf of everyone — men and women — who has suffered at the savage hands of eating disorders and other mental illnesses:

Fuck you.

The publisher, Roosh, claims there is nothing wrong with this article. Fuck him too.

assholes

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Binging a Path from Hilltop Steakhouse to Augustine’s

Many of my friends and family are sad to hear about the planned closing of Hilltop Steakhouse on Route 1 in Saugus, Mass.

I’m not gonna lie: I never understood the affection people had for the dining experience there. I always found the food mediocre at best, particularly in later years. But I did do my share of binging there because it was close by and affordable. And I can’t argue the place’s significance as a landmark on that stretch of highway.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/cFKeEBFsZek

The massive cactus sign. The cattle statuary all across the front lawn. If you’re from around there, you can’t help but feel nostalgic.

On hearing the news about Hilltop’s plan to close, one friend lamented that all the classic eateries of the area were gone, bulldozed for unremarkable restaurant chains. He ran off some names of places long gone: Hometown Buffet on Route 114 in Peabody. Augustine’s further up Route 1 in Saugus.

Something occurred to me upon hearing the names: All my old binging holes are gone.

As a kid I loved going to Augustine’s. It’s the first buffet experience I can remember. I loved that I could eat at the trough until I was ready to throw up — which I did more than once. As I got older I realized the food was actually pretty mediocre. But that didn’t matter. Binge eaters don’t care if their drug of choice is high-quality dining. What matters is availability. It’s why college freshmen tend to gain wait their first semester. The crappy food in the dining hall is free flowing and you sort of feel cheated if you don’t pile it high.

When I worked at Rockit Records in the early 1990s, Augustine’s was still open, and I binged there daily at one point. I was almost relieved when they finally tore it down.

Some days I’d binge at Hilltop, then do the same right after at Augustine’s. I was like the shark in Jaws, chewing my way from the barrel ropes to the boat.

I don’t miss doing that shit. But I don’t blame places like Hilltop and Augustine’s for what I did. Even without them, there’s plenty of binging ground on that stretch of highway to be done if I were so inclined. I’m not, thank God.

We like to heap all the blame on our enablers. But the problem always begins with the addicted mind.

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