I’m irritable and sick, going through all the aches and pains that surface when toxins start to drip from the pores.
I’m coming up the stairs from work, anxious to get all the chores that await me over with.
I open the door to find Duncan sitting in his chair at the kitchen table.
He’s wearing a bib and a bowl of soup is in front of him. It’s button soup, he tells me. He made it in school (Pre-K) after being read the book of the same name, in which “Daisy tricks her stingy Uncle Scrooge into making enough soup for the whole town–using just one button.”
“Daddy, have some button soup. It’s on your diet!” Duncan says as I come into the room.
He’s got that big, gaping smile of his, excited as hell because in the magic of the classroom, he discovered something his Daddy could eat. He knows his father needs encouragement, and he’s eager to deliver.
When you really become serious about kicking addictions, God puts the right people in front of you to make the cold turkey period a little more bearable. I truly believe that.
It’s the Grace that helps you move those one, two or three steps at a time.
The memories are still stained with sorrow. But, truth be told, the location of my upbringing is one of the things that saved me.
Mood music:
The sea could be terrifying, especially in the winter. The Blizzard of 1978 is my clearest memory of that. But when calm, it brought be back from the brink every time.
This quote from JFK captures my own feelings about the sea as healer and helper:
I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it’s because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, it’s because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea — whether it is to sail or to watch it — we are going back from whence we came.
I’m thinking about this after reading some Facebook status updates from an old friend I grew up with in the Point of Pines. She was messaging from Cape Cod, where her family has gone for some rest. It’s a painful time for them, because a friend has been found dead, allegedly murdered at the hands of her ex-boyfriend.
“On the cape awaiting the rest of my children and my honey. We need to regroup, relax and help my girls start to heal. Hug your loved ones, tell them you love them everyday. Life is hard.”
Losing close friends and family is hard. I’ve been there three times. They are doing the right thing, though, going to the ocean for solace.
During the worst moments of my younger years, the ocean was an escape route within feet of my front steps. I would sit on the rocks and think things through. I would walk from the Pines all the way to the other end and back.
The process would usually take about 90 minutes — enough time to process what I was feeling. It didn’t necessarily make me happier, and much of the time thoughts just swirled around uselessly in my head.
But I always came back from the beach a little calmer, a little stronger and ready to deal with whatever I had to face.
You could say the ocean would speak to me, talking me off the ledge.
I live away from the coast now, in a city sliced in half by the Merrimack River.
The river has an equally calming effect on me, and I walk along it every chance I get.
But every once in awhile I go back to Revere or a closer place like Newburyport or Salisbury to get my pep talk from the sea.
I hope my old friend and her family get what they need from the sea this time. I suspect they won’t walk away with any less pain than what they feel right now. But I have no doubt they’ll leave there with the added strength to get through the sadness.
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.
Something about the Fourth of July really gives me a craving for heavy metal music. Of course, not a day goes by where I don’t need to listen to some of it. It’s one of the major tools of my recovery from OCD and addiction.
Allow me to explain…
1984
This is the year my older brother died. But even without that, life was pretty miserable. I wasn’t exactly popular in school. I was overweight and the subject of ridicule. Home was no sanctuary. My parents were understandably all over the emotional map, especially my mother. Bitter feelings from their divorce four years earlier still sucked the air from the room. The Chron’s Disease continued to smolder.
But that was also the year I began listening to heavy metal music.
It allowed me to escape the pain around me. The aggressiveness of the music gave me an outlet to process all the rage I was feeling. Without it, drugs and violence toward others might have been next.
My closest friend at the time, who lived two doors down, got me into the music — introducing me to the likes of Motley Crue and Thin Lizzy. When that friend died 12 years later, the music would again help me process my rage and keep me steady.
I’d be angry, hurt or scared, and I needed something to absorb my aggression. Heavy metal was the punching bag.
One of my favorite songs in 1984 was “Knock ‘Em Dead Kid” from Motley Crue’s “Shout At The Devil” album. The lyrics go something like this:
Heard a star-spangled fight/A steel-belted scream
Now I’m black/I’m black/I’m black
Another sidewalk’s bloody dream
I heard the sirens wine/My blood turned to freeze
You’ll see the red in my eyes/as you take my disease
I wanted to be surrounded by this stuff so badly that I got a job in a record store.
1993
Though I was still many years away from a diagnosis, the year I worked in that cramped little dive was one of the best therapy sessions ever. It was a particularly perfect place to get exposed to some of the best Boston bands at the time.
When I was an angst-filled teenager bent on self-absorbed periods of depression — and before I became an angst-filled grownup bent on self-absorbed periods of depression — it was a place where I could escape.
Located off of Route 1 northbound, Rockit Records was literally a hole in the wall, not much bigger than a walk-in closet. It later expanded in size, but even then it seemed small. But the sounds booming from speakers above were always big.
It was the perfect safe house.
To this day, I’m grateful as hell for Al Quint for helping me get in there.
The store was crammed with cassettes, vinyl and eventually CDs. You could sell and buy used music. You could buy all the hard-to-get metal fanzines.
True story: On Aug. 3, 1987, I was the first kid in the store to buy Def Leppard’s just-released and long-awaited “Hysteria” album. The band was already spinning in a downward spiral toward candy-coated pop. I just didn’t realize it at the time. And in those days, I was a BIG Def Leppard fan.
A year later, I believe I was the second or third kid to buy Metallica’s “And Justice for All” album.
The owner eventually sold the place and that essentially meant I was out of the job. I wasn’t exactly in the new owner’s good graces. But by then, it was time for me to move on.
There’s now a Subway sandwich shop where Rockit Records once stood. A pity, really. But a lot of music stores suffered the same fate as the iTunes age dawned.
For me, it served its purpose. A jewel of an escape closet from a world of hurt.
2003
I was going through a rough patch at work (my own shortcomings at the time more than anything else), that therapy took the form of Metallica’s “St. Anger” album. The album itself is far from their best, but the opening song tore a path straight into my soul.
2011
Today, I listen to the music more for simple enjoyment than as an anger-management device. The anger went away some time ago.
The nostalgia is a big attraction for me, too. It takes me back to a time when I was in pieces; to a time when the music literally saved me. It has become something of a security blanket.
At any number of events, you can see me darting around all over the place, taking pictures with my Android phone. The obvious reason is that I want to capture the special events in life. But it has also become a good weapon against what I call OCD Fidget Syndrome.
Mood music:
I’ve mentioned the fidgeting before. A byproduct of my OCD is a serious discomfort with sitting properly for any length of time. One way I manage it is by putting my feet up on the desk when I work, which for some reason helps me minimize the bobbing and weaving. There’s also the windmill hands. Those who know me well have seen it at one time or another, usually when I’m sitting at a desk engaged in a project. My face gets slightly contorted and I start shaking my hands around like they’re on fire.
Taking pictures gives me a positive outlet for all that nervous energy. But I’m no professional. For that you have to talk to my sister-in-law Amanda or my friend Kevin Littlefield. I just mess around with the phone camera. But lately I’ve gotten more brazen about it.
Now I’m experimenting with all the nifty free camera apps available in the Android Marketplace.
My favorite is Retro Camera, which gives every image a rustic glaze. It was a life-saver earlier this month when Sean and I were camping in the driving rain. Sitting under a tent can be bad for my fidgeting ways, but the camera helped:
I also used the app to take one of my profile pictures.
In this one, I took Retro Camera into the bathroom and put the phone behind my head as I stared in the mirror:
Here’s one of Sean reading in a tree out back, also taken with Retro Camera:
I recently discovered some other apps that allow all kinds of craziness for the less-than-average photographer. There’s the Camera Illusion and Photo Illusion apps that let you take pictures that look like pencil drawings and infrared images. I’ve gone nuts with that one, as the following snaps show:
My niece, Madison, in the supermarketErin giving our nephew Owen a smoochMy massive re-usable Starbucks traveling cupSomeone left this Curious George stuffed doll lying aroundSelf portrait using the pencil feature and a red overlay
For this one I used the emboss effect, which didn’t make me any less ugly. But it was still a fun experiment.
Last night was my annual pilgrimage to Beverly, Mass. for an appointment with the nurse who manages my Prozac intake. She has done better for me than my primary care doctor did. Here’s why.
Mood music:
Drugs used to treat mental disorders must be tightly controlled. Too little and it won’t help you. Too much can make your disorder worse.
When I first started taking Prozac in 2007, my primary care doctor was prescribing it. My depression and anxiety were melting a hole in my heart and I was at my wit’s end. I had resisted medication for a long time because I didn’t believe in them. I saw it as quitting.
That’s the thing about OCD. The craving for control blinds you.
But years of therapy, though helpful, hadn’t helped me break the spell of fear and anxiety, and that was limiting me. So at my doctor’s suggestion, I gave it a try.
The anxiety and depression evaporated within two weeks and I felt like a new man. But I would still be in and out with mood swings. I eventually figured out that my doctor wasn’t the best person to manage this drug. He’s a fine doctor, but these capsules have a complexity I think was beyond his expertise.
He also told me it was stupid to take my prescriptions from a primary care physician. Essentially, he said, that was like putting a 12-year-old in charge of a dynamite stockpile.
So he sent me to my current Prozac nurse.
Last year, she knocked my 60-milligram dosage back to 40 for the summer. With the longer days and extra sunlight, the logic was that I wouldn’t need as much. It worked until late summer, when a couple weeks of cloudy weather and earlier sunsets sent my brain chemistry out of whack.
I went back up to 60 and had some steep mood swings in the process. It evened out fairly quickly, but as far as I was concerned, those mood swings weren’t worth the experiment.
So last night, she decided to keep me at 60. If it isn’t broken, why try to fix it?
She asked how I was doing with my therapist.
“Excellent,” I said. “I walk in there with a large cup of Starbucks and he glares at me like a father who can’t get his kid to tie his shoes just right.”
She smiled. “Next time,” she said, “You should walk in with two large cups.”
To that, we laughed like schoolkids who had just shared a dirty joke.
My therapist has buttons I like to push. One button is that he thinks everyone should quit caffeine and do yoga. I’m apparently not the only one who likes to have fun with that. The beauty of it is that I can do that, he can take it, and I still get something valuable from my appointments.
As I’ve said before, drugs without therapy won’t work in the long run. Mental wellness requires a lot of things: Careful diet, therapy is a must if you have a disorder and sometimes you need medication, though that isn’t always the case.
When I have an appointment with the Prozac nurse I usually cuss about it. It takes me an hour to get to her office for something we could do over the phone.
Yesterday, I badly wanted to cancel.
Erin wouldn’t have let me, anyway.
“You need these appointments,” she said yesterday, as she frequently does when I balk at going.
If a recent story in The New York Times is to be believed, psychiatrists are ditching talk therapy in favor of quick-to-the-draw prescription solutions because insurance companies won’t pay them enough for the broader treatment.
Like many of the nation’s 48,000psychiatrists, Dr. Levin, in large part because of changes in how much insurance will pay, no longer provides talk therapy, the form of psychiatry popularized by Sigmund Freud that dominated the profession for decades. Instead, he prescribes medication, usually after a brief consultation with each patient. So Dr. Levin sent the man away with a referral to a less costly therapist and a personal crisis unexplored and unresolved.
Medicine is rapidly changing in the United States from a cottage industry to one dominated by large hospital groups and corporations, but the new efficiencies can be accompanied by a telling loss of intimacy between doctors and patients. And no specialty has suffered this loss more profoundly than psychiatry.
Trained as a traditional psychiatrist at Michael Reese Hospital, a sprawling Chicago medical center that has since closed, Dr. Levin, 68, first established a private practice in 1972, when talk therapy was in its heyday.
Then, like many psychiatrists, he treated 50 to 60 patients in once- or twice-weekly talk-therapy sessions of 45 minutes each. Now, like many of his peers, he treats 1,200 people in mostly 15-minute visits for prescription adjustments that are sometimes months apart. Then, he knew his patients’ inner lives better than he knew his wife’s; now, he often cannot remember their names. Then, his goal was to help his patients become happy and fulfilled; now, it is just to keep them functional.
Dr. Levin has found the transition difficult. He now resists helping patients to manage their lives better. “I had to train myself not to get too interested in their problems,” he said, “and not to get sidetracked trying to be a semi-therapist.”
This is tragic on so many levels.
I’ve said it before: Medication (Prozac) has been a critical part of my OCD management. It put my defective brain chemistry into balance and greatly reduced the moments where my brain would pulsate out of control with worry and obsessions until it incapacitated me.
But had I gone on the drug without doing the brutally hard therapy first, I would not be doing anywhere near as well as I am today. I can promise you that.
Mental health is like physical health. There is no magic bullet — or magic pill — fix. You need a combination of diet, rest and exercise to maintain health as well as any medicine that you may need.
Talk therapy helps you build your coping tools from scratch. They become your lifeline to sanity, especially if the drugs stop working, which can happen in a variety of circumstances.
This is just one more example of the health insurance industry putting the bottom line before wellness. I don’t want to beat on the insurance providers just for the hell of it. The industry does face the genuine problem where treatments are becoming more expensive, especially in a population where many refuse to take care of themselves.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way…
There are things one can do to cut costs. But when you cut into the muscle of the treatment — in this case talk therapy — the treatment will bleed to the point of near-death.
Now I know what they’re thinking: People can go to a therapist for talking and the other guy for medication, but now we have another problem. Not everyone can afford both.
In my case, I go to a therapist to talk things out, and a nurse on his staff is authorized and in charge of writing my prescription.
Psychiatry and therapy are not exactly the same beast.
But a good psychiatrist includes the talking part and uses it to maximum effect.
Force them to stop doing that and many people will fall through the cracks.
Just got to my hotel in Santa, Clara, Calif., with a few random memories shifting around in my head — memories that illustrate who I was and who I am now.
Mood music:
It was July 1991 and I was with Sean Marley on my first trip to the west coast. I didn’t really want to go because I was afraid of everything and everyone. But Sean was red h0t about the idea, and back then I was always out to impress the man.
So off we went, on a 10-day California trip that would take us as far north as Eureka and as far south as Los Angeles. We lived in the rental car the whole time except for L.A., where we stayed in a friend’s apartment.
I remember the plane going in for a landing. I looked out the window and saw the Bay Bridge below. It was a gorgeous sight from that height, with the bay glistening in the summer sun. I saw the same view this morning and felt warm and energized. Back then was different. I thought of the Bay Area earthquake two years before, with TV coverage that included a live shot of a piece of the bridge collapsing and a car driving off the newly created edge into the abyss.
I knew we’d be driving over that bridge at least twice.
Terror.
I was afraid of talking to strangers. I was afraid to go to clubs at night for fear we might get mugged so far from home.
In L.A., we hooked up with a guy who used to live in the Point of Pines in Revere. I didn’t remember him, but he and Sean were tight as kids. Michael was his name. Michael took us to visit a couple of his friends who were living the stereotypical Hollywood lifestyle. They had a band, but sat in their cramped bungalow all day, surrounded by towers of empty beer cans and cigarette boxes, watching all the bad daytime TV they could feast their eyes on.
One of them asked me where we were from. The Boston area, I told him.
“Dude,” he said through the cloud of cigarette smoke encircling his head. “That’s a pretty long way from here.”
The statement filled me with more terror.
A pretty long way from here. From my safe place in the basement apartment at 22 Lynnway, Revere, Mass.
Terror.
That’s pretty much what the trip was. Sean ate it all up and had the time of his life, despite me.
I didn’t know back then that I suffered from OCD-induced fear and anxiety. I was still many years away from the therapy, medication and spiritual conversion. I had no idea what the 12 steps were when I was 21. Too bad, too, because I SHOULD have had the time of my life on that trip, too.
But that’s what fear does. It robs you blind. Robs you of everything that should make life worthwhile.
Thank God I’m done with that shit.
I’ve made this flight many times since then, always on business. But I’ve gotten the chance to enjoy the surroundings and experience the culture along the way.
In small steps, I’ve tried hard to make up for lost time. That gets me in trouble sometimes, because I forget to pace myself. That happened last time I was here in February, and my family paid the price.
Let’s see if I can do better this time.
And maybe one of these days, instead of coming here for work, I can come here for fun. Maybe Erin will live out of a rental car with me for 10 days.
“One day at a time? You wouldn’t believe the crap that swirls around my head one day at a time.” –Anonymous
Recovering addicts have a saying burned into their brains: “One Day at a Time.” It’s important wisdom to live by. But when the recovering addict has OCD, there’s a big problem.
Mood music:
Let’s look at the meaning of “One Day at a Time.” In the world of 12-step recovery programs, the idea is not to be overwhelmed. Instead of trying to get your arms around everything necessary for recovery a week into the future or a month or year, we subscribe to the idea of just focusing on what we have to do today. Doing this a day at a time makes the clean-up tasks seem a lot less overwhelming.
The problem with an OCD case is that the disorder forces you to do nothing BUT stew over the future. You look at the next week or month and relentlessly play out the potential outcomes of that space of time.
The first time someone told me to take it a day at a time, my first instinct was to punch him in the face.
I had a business trip three weeks away to worry about.
I had a medical test planned for the following month and had all kinds of potentially grim outcomes to worry about.
That’s how guys like me roll.
So how have I managed to keep my addictions largely at bay for well over two years? Simple: I remembered another 12-Step saying (OA saying, more specifically): Fail to plan, plan to fail.”
I imagine that this is the very first slogan that found it’s way into the original Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Can’t you just picture a frantic newcomer talking about how difficult he (and yes, it was only men in the beginning – and the men didn’t think women could be real alcoholics, which is another story…) he was finding sobriety?
I can almost imagine the conversation:
Newcomer: What am I going to do? Next week I have to go to the office Christmas party – how will I ever stay sober there!
Oldtimer (early on, he might have been sober only a week): Slow down, it’s not next week yet. Take it One Day at a Time!
And a slogan is born – because it’s got some real wisdom in it. For in truth, each one of us has only one day at a time – or one hour or one moment.
Abstaining a moment at a time
In the first few rocky days of recovery, just abstaining for that moment, hour, etc. is truly all we can do. If we can’t do that, there’s no point in worrying about tomorrow, or next week, or whenever.
The One Day at a Time philosophy has benefits far beyond the early days in recovery. It can keep us grounded in the present – that Holy Instant that is so easy to miss in a busy and productive life.
Planning is okay
Unfortunately, some in 12 Step Groups have taken the philosophy to mean we shouldn’t plan. This is patently false. A major promise of the Program is torestore us to sanity, and that includes the very human blessing and curse – planning. We need to set goals, to make appointments, to design our lives.
But planning doesn’t mean we have to leave One Day at a Time behind – the trick is to watch for expectations.
It’s one thing to plan and quite another to demand that the plan work out the way we require it too – in that we have no control at all. When our plans bring unintended results – and the often do – all we need do is reevaluate, accept where we are in this moment, and start anew.
There are a lot of contradictions when you put the sayings “One day at a time” and “Fail to plan, plan to fail” together. It’s like a warm front running into a cold front. You get thunder, lightening and worse. Cars are picked up and wrapped around trees.
So even when the OCD in me is planning, planning, planning, I do remember to take my recovery — especially the food plan that helped me break the binging spell — one day at a time.
I can digest life much more fully when the pieces are broken up.
But the push and pull still makes for plenty of confusion.
Saturday, things did not go as planned. It was the day of Sean’s Scout camp out, and the forecast was for fair skies a few days before. Naturally, it poured the whole time. But it was a lesson in making the best of a bad situation.
Mood music:
We had a great day despite the torrents of water falling down on us. Kids love getting wet and muddy — for a little while, at least. The scout leader cooked up a storm under the big tent using nothing but cast-iron pots and charcoal heated in the camp fire. That I considered it a good day shows just how much I’ve changed in recent years.
When all your awesome plans get washed out, it can be frustrating when your brain works the way it’s supposed to. But when the traffic in your skull doesn’t flow properly — which is usually the case when you have OCD — a day that suddenly changes shape will spark a serious case of crazy.
In my case, that means high anxiety, followed by multiple temper tantrums, followed by addictive behavior — binge eating in my case — and then a migraine with the urge to throw up. Not necessarily in that order, but usually in that order.
A flight gets delayed or canceled? Bad reaction. Car breaks down? Bad reaction. A carefully constructed schedule ripped apart by shifting winds? Catasrophic reaction.
But I’ve put a lot of effort into controlling the OCD behavior and changing my overall outlook on life.
Saturday I benefited from that. Instead of focusing on the bad things (the rain and mud, the cold) I was able to focus on the good stuff (watching the kids have a good time, sitting in my over-sized lounge chair under the big tent, drinking coffee and writing down a ton of ideas for future blog posts.
Despite the deluge we were able to keep the fire burning all day, and that fire was much appreciated for those of us who don’t like to be cold.
The gray and wet also couldn’t take away the spectacular view where we were, atop Seven Sisters Road in Haverhill, one of the highest elevations in the city. You could see the Merrimack River for miles around.
A few years ago, this kind of day would have sent my OCD into overdrive. I would have felt like a caged animal. The laughter from the kids would have sounded like gunshots, and I would have cowered from the rain as if it were falling lava laced with every deadly disease on Earth.
I would have panicked at the sight of any mosquitoes and, in the bigger picture, I would have sat there feeling every bit like a victim. In this case, a victim of nature.
Like I said, the fact that I could instead enjoy a day like that — even taking inspiration from it — was almost freaky.
Because of the ongoing rain, the Scout leaders decided to send Sean’s group home at 8 p.m. They know how kids get when they wake up drenched the next morning, and didn’t want their first big camp out to be a souring experience. I was a bit bummed out by this, and found myself surprised by that for all the reasons I mentioned above.
So we went home to our warm beds.
The next day, we paid for our day of fun. I opened my eyes Sunday morning to a headache that stuck with me for much of the day, and I was full of crankiness and snark.
I just wanted to stay under the covers, but life doesn’t work that way when you’re a responsible grown up.
It took me a long time to peel myself off the living room chair, and I was rude to pretty much everyone in church.
But as the day progressed, my mood improved. It always does.
It was good to be able to have a better attitude when things didn’t break my way. But next time, I’ll want my sunshine back.
