I recently watched Diane Sawyer’s interview with Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly. To say I was moved would be an understatement. Hers is the story of a spirited fight back from near death.
If you ever get the feeling you can’t do something or overcome big challenges, you should watch this. It will show you that nothing is too big to overcome.
http://youtu.be/VOZgta88L5A
People on Facebook and Twitter are honoring U.S. veterans with words of gratitude and awe. All well and good, but not nearly enough for the countless vets who suffer in silence.
Mood music:
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In so many ways, we continue to treat our veterans like shit. We let so many of them live on the streets, without proper shelter or medication for the mental illnesses they caught from watching comrades get ripped apart by shrapnel on the battlefield.
We look down at veterans every day as lazy, crazy, smelly vermin who prowl the streets scaring our children. We have no idea of what they’ve been through to get so scarred, and a lot of us don’t really care — even if we say we do.
Flashback: September, 2010:
I’m walking the streets of Brooklyn on a beautiful night, and a guy comes up to me. He has a hole in his head where his left eye used to be and burn scars up and down one arm.
I’m smoking a cigar, so he approaches me for a light. He tells me he was maimed in Afghanistan during military service and asks for some change so he can get a train to somewhere. He tells me he’s in New York looking for work and was stranded without money.
I give him the change from my pocket and then he’s gone.
Is he telling the truth? I have no idea, and I don’t really care. He just looked like a guy in pain who needed a few quarters to survive the next few hours, and that’s all that mattered at the time.
Flashback: Late April, 2011:
I’m on Facebook one afternoon and I see a friend commenting that he’s disappointed that some of his friends have decided to “like” a page that makes fun of a fellow known in Haverhill, Mass., as Crazy Mike.
In any city there’s a guy like “Crazy Mike.” The stereotype is usually a long beard, ratty clothes and the fellow is usually living on the street. He talks aloud to no one in particular and falls asleep on playground equipment. People like to laugh at him.
A lot of these so-called crazy guys are homeless vets whose luck ran out somewhere between the battlefield and the hard re-entry into society.
After a few seconds of thinking this through (admittedly, a few seconds is never enough time to really think things through), my temper reaches full boil and I pound out a blog post called “Liking The Crazy Mike of Haverhill Page is Sad and Stupid.”
Discussion follows online, with a big question being if Crazy Mike was in Vietnam and, as a result, sick on the streets with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. One reader insists he is indeed a veteran, and that other homeless people keep stealing his medication. Someone else says she knew the family fairly well, and that Mike is not a veteran. He’s simply a guy who has a serious mental illness.
To me, it doesn’t matter if he was in Vietnam or not. Instead, two realities have my mind spinning like a top on fire.
One is that a lot of people assume he is a veteran, but treat him like shit anyway.
Another thing is that there are a lot of homeless who ARE military veterans, and most days we don’t give them more than a few seconds of thought before we walk on by.
It’s almost as if we honor them on holidays to make ourselves feel better about being the assholes we often are.
I say this as a guy who is admittedly one of those assholes. I’ve made my share of fun of people like this, and in the rear-view mirror, looking back at my own struggle with mental illness, it makes me feel ashamed. Back when fear, anxiety and addiction had me by the balls, I used to walk or drive the other way when these guys approached. It makes me the last guy on Earth who would be fit to judge others for poking fun at someone less fortunate.
It’s not just the homeless vets who get shafted every day. It’s also the ones who have managed to stay off the streets but need special medical attention. Every day, the system set up to help them fails them instead. Sometimes the intent is good, but the message doesn’t get out to those who need to know.
Here’s an example, courtesy of my friend Magen Hughes, who once volunteered for the Compensated Work Therapy (CWT) group:
What they do is they provide vocational therapy, training, etc. to veterans who are not only homeless, but also those who suffer from addictions of various kinds as well as mental disorders.
The group isn’t really well known (or at least, that was my impression while I was at the VA Hospital), so a lot of the veterans who could benefit from the vocational therapy are left continuing down the path that they’ve always known, no matter how destructive it may be. Or they are shoved in one of the psychiatric wards or the nursing home.
That was probably the most heart-breaking part about volunteering, was seeing that there was a service that could help them out, but no one either knew or cared enough to really do them any good. I vaguely recall even being chastised once when bringing up CWT to a nurse as an idea for one of the patients.
They didn’t think that there was a group like that at the VA and I shouldn’t be worrying about “adult stuff like that.”
Veterans need our undivided attention, every day. A holiday here and there is not enough.
Maybe we can start doing better by not ridiculing the guys that have to sleep in our playgrounds and town commons.
I count myself among those who need to do better.
I’ve driven past these guys many times. I don’t go to memorial services on Veteran’s Day like I should. I certainly didn’t adequately appreciate my grandfather’s valor when he was alive.
We all have work to do.
In all my efforts to get sane a few years ago, I did a lot of stupid things. I’m sharing it with you here so you don’t make the same mistakes:
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/l4Xx_vjGnlo
–Don’t try to control your compulsive binge eating problem by fasting. You won’t make it through the morning, and then you’ll binge like you’ve never binged before.
–Don’t mix alcohol with pills that have the strength of four Advil tablets in an effort to kill your emotional pain as well as your physical pain. That sort of thing might kill you.
–Don’t hate the people in your life for the bad things they’ve done. Remember that they’re fucked up like you and that hating them will never make the pain go away. In fact, it’ll just make it worse.
–Avoid the late-night infomercials. Those things were designed for suckers, especially suckers who can’t sleep because they’re so overcome with fear and anxiety that they see knife-wielding ghosts around every corner. You might find yourself falling for it and spending stupid sums of money on fraudulent bullshit like this.
–Don’t spend every waking hour worrying about and rushing toward the future. You will miss all the beauty in the present that way, and that’s a damn shame.
–Don’t try to control everything. Doing so just makes you look like an asshole.
–Don’t put down others just so you’ll feel better about yourself. You’ll just ruin another life, and you will not feel better. You’ll feel worse.
–Don’t try to eradicate your mental disorder. Learn to work with it instead, because once your brain reaches adulthood, there’s no turning back.
–Don’t spend your life trying to please everyone. You never will, and they usually won’t deserve the effort.
—Don’t over-think things. Thinking doesn’t make you smarter.
—Don’t bitch about your job. You’ll just annoy people. Change yourself and your attitude first. Then, if you still don’t like the job, work on finding a new one and keep doing your best at the current job in the meantime.
—Don’t whine about how tough everything is. Life is supposed to be tough at times, and wallowing in it keeps you from moving on to the good stuff. To put it another way, stop seeing yourself as a victim.
Class dismissed.
We often come undone when we start comparing our quirk-infested selves to so-called normal people. Instead, we should celebrate our insanity and put it to work for us.
Mood music:
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I used to despise myself for the things I thought were weird and out of place. The windmill hands. The inability to sit up straight in a chair. My big nose and ears. My laughter toward things others would consider serious and even tragic. My tendency to tell stories that are way out of context with the conversation around me. My inability to feel at ease in a room full of people.
In hindsight, I wasted a lot of nights worrying about all these things. I was certain nobody else had the strange behaviors I had and still have.
As I get older, I realize two things:
1. A lot of people have the same strange behaviors as me, including the constant pacing and talking to myself.
2.) People who fail to act out of the ordinary at least once in awhile bore me. Our quirks make us interesting. Our funny dress and way of talking can brighten up someone else’s otherwise ho-hum day.
I didn’t fully appreciate these things until I started working with my current boss, Derek Slater. One of the first things I noticed about him three years ago is that he was different from many of the editors I’ve worked with in the past. Journalism is a career inhabited by a lot of misfits who don’t always know how to walk in step with the rest of the crowd.
I’ve heard editors complain bitterly about how difficult these people were to work with because they were always off step with the newsroom machinery. They tended to ignore deadlines. Their writing wouldn’t conform with standard journalism 101. The people you report on can be infuriating to deal with, pulling tantrums over quotes they give you once they see the absurdity of their words in print.
I used to be one of those editors who couldn’t deal with these people, even though I was every bit the infuriating misfit myself.
The thing I immediately noticed about Derek is that he enjoys all of the above. To him, the folks who don’t behave and wait their turn to speak are simply interesting and entertaining. They help keep the world spinning.
Which is probably why I’ve lasted in this job. Not that I haven’t pissed him off more than a few times. And I don’t think he particularly enjoys it when people ignore deadlines.
I knew a reporter once who was always maligned for his aloofness. He would come in at strange hours, file stories and leave without telling anyone. His stories would just appear in the queue out of nowhere. He wore the same stained pants all the time. One day, he went into a gun shop to take lessons in how to handle the weapon. He pointed the gun at his temple and shot his brains onto the people and things around him. I was not kind to him back when I had the chance.
I sometimes wonder if more compassion for this kid — acceptance of his weirdness — would have made a difference.
My speculation is that not fitting in was too much for him in the end. He wouldn’t be the first person to end it for that reason. He won’t be the last.
I was lucky. I learned to see my misfit ways as a saving grace, the thing that gave me the strength to accept the strange and out-of-place things that have littered my life.
I see it as a gift, really. Like many gifts, it comes with a lot of baggage and can make my life and that of those around me unmanageable at times.
But when properly nurtured and controlled, it can help you make the big differences that make life worth living.
Today is Teddy Roosevelt’s birthday, which I bring up because his is the ultimate story about staring adversity in the face, grinning and spitting in its eye.
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TR was a sickly boy whose asthma often left him struggling for breath. He could have used that as an excuse early on to avoid life’s big challenges. Instead, he lifted weights obsessively and built himself into a bull of a man who would live what he called “the strenuous life” until it drove him to the grave.
TR went through a lot of bad stuff in his life. Let me demonstrate with a little help from Wikipedia:
–Sickly and asthmatic as a child, Roosevelt had to sleep propped up in bed or slouching in a chair during much of his early years, and had frequent ailments.
–His first wife Alice died young of an undiagnosed case of kidney failure two days after their infant Alice was born. His mother Mittie died of typhoid fever on the same day, eleven hours earlier, in the same house.
–His youngest son was shot down behind German lines during the first world war.
Despite all that hell, he lived every day like it was his last.
–He was a prolific author, writing with passion on subjects ranging from foreign policy to the importance of the national park system. wrote about 18 books (each in several editions), including his Autobiography,[90] The Rough Riders[91] History of the Naval War of 1812,[92] and others on subjects such as ranching, explorations, and wildlife. His most ambitious book was the four volume narrative The Winning of the West, which connected the origin of a new “race” of Americans (i.e. what he considered the present population of the United States to be) to the frontier conditions their ancestors endured throughout the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries.
–He was a political warrior. We all know he was president, but before that he was governor of New York, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, vice president, NY police commissioner and a state assemblyman.
–While running to win back the presidency in 1912 (he didn’t succeed), he was shot in the chest. He delivered his speech anyway, speaking for 90 minutes.
–After the presidency, he lived hard right to the end, going on expeditions of Africa and South America (the latter journey nearly killing him) and staying active in politics.
I think of him whenever I have a tough day, get sick or experience tragedy. He never took it lying down, and neither will I.
So, what’s your excuse?
A report in USA Today says 1 in 100 adults have planned their suicide in the past year, a statistic that doesn’t surprise me, knowing what I do about depression.
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I’ve suffered a lot of depression in my day. I’m experiencing a touch of it right now. I’ve never seriously considered ending it. But I can easily see how someone in that state of mind could head in that direction.
From the report:
“There’s a suicide every 15 minutes in the United States, and for every person who takes his or her own life there are many more who think about, plan or attempt suicide, according to a federal report released Thursday.
“The analysis of 2008-09 data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that rates of serious thoughts of suicide range from about 1 in 50 adults in Georgia (2.1 percent) to 1 in 15 in Utah (6.8 percent). Rates of suicide attempts range from 1 in 1,000 adults in Delaware and Georgia (0.1 percent) to 1 in 67 in Rhode Island (1.5 percent).
“Overall, more than 2.2 million adults (1.0 percent) reported making suicide plans in the past year, and more than 1 million (0.5 percent) said they attempted suicide in the past year, according to the researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.”
I think I was just lucky. Or, more likely, my religious beliefs made suicide a line I wouldn’t cross. Instead, I dove head-first into a self destructive existence where I lived for my addictions.
Perhaps subconsciously, as I binged my way to 280 pounds and ate painkillers for breakfast (I was prescribed them for chronic back pain) I was slowly trying to kill myself. A troubled mind can easily rationalize that it’s not suicide if you’re not jumping off a building, pointing a gun at your head or wrapping a noose around your throat. Fortunately, I came to my senses before I could finish the job.
But I’ve seen relatives get hospitalized for suicidal talk and my best friend became one of the tragic statistics on Nov. 15, 1996. When depression takes hold on the vulnerable mind, you stop thinking clearly and, at some point, you lose full control of sane actions and thought. Some people think suicides were simply cowards who couldn’t cope with life’s everyday challenges. But they have no idea what they’re talking about.
Depression is an insidious beast that lurks like a vulture, waiting for you to get just tired enough to submit to the torture.
I’ve learned to see my own depression as just another chronic illness that comes and goes. I treat it with Prozac, regular visits to a therapist and a strict diet. I’ve learned, in a strange way, to still be happy when I’m depressed.
That sounds fucked up. But it’s the best way I can describe it.
Being lucky enough to have reached that point, I’ve made it my mission to help break the stigma.
Sadness and suicidal thoughts need not be the end. For a lot of people I know, it turned out to be just the beginning of a life full of wisdom and beauty.
One of the byproducts of writing this blog is that old friends and strangers have reached out to me for chats about what they’re going through.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/mso6N_eqg_k
You could say I’m doing an increasing amount of unpaid, uncertified counseling. I’d like to think it’s just me trying to be a good friend and following up on what I do here.
It can be a bit much sometimes. That’s not a complaint. It’s just the everyday challenge of life. But when someone else commits their time to counseling people through their pain, depression and crises, I respect them for what they’re getting into.
Amber Baldet, one of my friends from the business world, is in the process of getting certified to do online crisis and suicide prevention. Here’s her profile.
Donating a couple dollars to the work she’s undertaking will help her considerably.
If you see her around, thank her for doing it. You never know. She might be the one who helps you through a crisis someday.
I went to see “The Way” with Erin and saw a lot of myself in the characters. You’d see a lot of yourself, too.
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The summary of the film is this (stolen from IMDb): Tom is an American doctor who goes to France following the death of his adult son, killed in the Pyrenees during a storm while walking The Camino de Santiago, also known as The Way of St. James. Tom’s purpose is initially to retrieve his son’s body. However, in a combination of grief and homage to his son, Tom decides to journey on this path of pilgrims. While walking The Camino, Tom meets others from around the world, all broken and looking for greater meaning in their lives, and discovers the difference between the life we live and the life we choose.
I don’t identify with Tom as much as I do his walking companions, especially a Dutchman named Joost and an Irish writer named Jack.
Joost tells Tom he’s making the journey because he needs to lose some weight to fit into his suit for an upcoming wedding. Jack is on the journey because he thinks there might be a book in the experience, and he’s trying to break his writer’s block.
If you rolled these two guys into one, that would be something close to me.
Despite the official reason Joost is there, he proceeds to eat his way across Spain. For much of the movie, he’s comforting himself with food. Jack is a blowhard who likes to talk about living like a real pilgrim, living off the land for survival and such. But he uses his company-issued credit cards to enjoy all the comforts of the local culture.
At one point, after a lot of wine, Tom interrupts Jack’s latest verbal tirade, calling him a bore who thinks he’s better than everyone else because he’s writing a book. The truth is that for all his talk, Jack’s carrying a lot of spiritual pain. It reminded me of some of my own bluster and hypocrisy. But it also reminded me of the healing power of writing, and how important it is to me. Not that I needed the reminder.
The scene that really hit me hard, though, is one where Joost is in his hotel room, about to tear into the feast he’s ordered from room service.
He’s wearing an open bathrobe, staring at himself — and his bloated belly — in the mirror with disgust. He stares at the tray of food and goes to take the first bite, and it’s there that you see the shame and pain in his eyes. The truth eventually comes out that his wife won’t sleep with him anymore because he’s too fat. He wants to please her, but he can’t stop himself from eating and popping pills.
All my past binge eating, wine guzzling and obsessive pain pill popping came back to me, as clear and awful as if I had just done it all the day before. I really felt bad for Joost at that moment.
By film’s end, Jack seems to have had a spiritual re-awakening and Joost seems to accept who he is, saying he’s just going to buy a new suit.
The recovered binge eater in me wasn’t particularly satisfied with that outcome, but it’s clear by film’s end that each of the characters came a long way in mending their broken souls.
For most of my life I’ve been an avid walker. As a kid I walked the full length of Revere Beach every day. In my 20s and 30s, I’d go out almost daily and take long walks. For all my recovery from addiction, the walking is something I haven’t gotten back into as much as I should. This movie has me rethinking that one. It reminded me that I walked for a spiritual lift as much as it was for weight control. In fact, a lot of my walking life was done in the midst of binge eating.
I’ve been able to control my weight in recent years without all the walking. But I think I need to get back to the walking anyway.
A good walk can help me set my mind and soul right. It doesn’t have to be a walk across Spain.
In fact, I’d much rather walk Revere Beach or the hilly terrain where I live now.
The news is full of analysis this morning about all the ways Apple’s Steve Jobs changed the world. Rightfully so. But he was also an interesting case study in human nature, and we can learn from what was good and maybe not so good.
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Let’s put aside talk of the iPhone, iPad etc., and talk about the man. I’ll admit that I’ve always been hard in my judgement of Jobs. Sure I have no right to judge, but while none of us do, all of us do.
My view of Jobs has always been colored by the TV movie about him and Bill Gates called “The Pirates of Silicon Valley.” The film focuses intently on Jobs as a crazy, overbearing and even cruel executive. Apple employees wear shirts that say “90 hours a week and loving it!” He torments employees constantly in the film, and you find yourself thinking that it would be good if he got run over by a truck at the end of the movie.
But Jobs was a brilliant visionary, and brilliant visionaries always seem to fight harder against their demons than most people. Or maybe it just seems that way because they’re on the public stage.
Considering my own battles with personal demons, I’m actually awed by what it must have been like for him. I’m just a regular Joe. I’ve never invented things that will change how we live and I never will. But I’ve had to struggle plenty to be a better man. I’ve been cruel to people in my past. I’ve let obsessive-compulsive thinking drag me to the depths. Clawing back has been beyond hard.
It must have been a million times harder for a guy like Jobs, who possessed a talent and drive few on this Earth will ever know. When you’re so damn good at changing the world with technology, how can you not carry on like a deranged narcissist when you’re still young? Some manage to avoid that, but they are freakishly exceptional people.
While there are plenty of indications that Jobs remained a difficult boss to work for in his later years, there’s also a lot of evidence that he grew as a human being. Mark Milian at CNN wrote a good piece about Jobs’ spiritual growth. In it, he says:
“As with anyone, Jobs’ values were shaped by his upbringing and life experiences. He was born in 1955 in San Francisco and grew up amid the rise of hippie counterculture. Bob Dylan and the Beatles were his two favorite musical acts, and he shared their political leanings, antiestablishment views and, reportedly, youthful experimentation with psychedelic drug usage.
“The name of Jobs’ company is said to be inspired by the Beatles’ Apple Corps, which repeatedly sued the electronics maker for trademark infringement until signing an exclusive digital distribution deal with iTunes. Like the Beatles, Jobs took a spiritual retreat to India and regularly walked around his neighborhood and the office barefoot.
“Traversing India sparked Jobs’ conversion to Buddhism. Kobun Chino, a monk, presided over his wedding to Laurene Powell, a Stanford University MBA.
“Rebirth is a precept of Buddhism, and Apple experienced rebirth of sorts when Jobs returned, after he was fired, to remake a company that had fallen the verge of bankruptcy.”
He still fought personal demons, to be sure. But you could say he died a better man than he once was.
It doesn’t matter who you are and how big you become. It doesn’t matter how much talent you have or if you create things that change how everyone else lives.
If your soul doesn’t evolve and you fail to be good to the people in your life, the rest doesn’t matter much, does it? That’s my belief, anyway. Feel free to disagree.
I think Jobs did grow inside, and good for him.
The more I talk to fellow recovering addicts and emotional defects, the more I realize we have one big thing in common: We want to please everyone and be loved for it. Unfortunately, it’s an impossible goal that can lead to crushing disappointment.
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It’s an especially stinging problem in the age of social networking, where some people have learned to measure their worth by how many “friends” and “followers” they have. Facebook in particular is full of peevers who get picky about what you post even as they post things that annoy others. It’s an atmosphere tailor made for resentments.
Whenever I go to an OA, AA or 12-Step Big Book study meeting, someone always brings up their need to have everyone like them. The reason they became an addict was because that hunger could never be satisfied.
I wrote about my own experience with this in a post called “Why Being a People Pleaser Is Dumb.”
I wanted desperately to make every boss happy, and I did succeed for awhile. But in doing so I damaged myself to the core and came within inches of an emotional breakdown. It caused me to work 80 hours a week, waking up each morning scared to death that I would fall short or fail altogether. I wanted to make every family member happy. It didn’t work, because you can never keep everyone happy when strong personalities clash.
In the face of constant let-downs, I binged on everything I could get my hands on and spent most waking moments resenting the fuck out of people who didn’t embrace me for who I am.
I’d like to tell you I’ve learned to shrug it off and let people go when they didn’t want to subscribe to my personality. But the truth is that I still struggle with it.
When a family member gives me the cold shoulder, it affects me. Never mind that I’ve cold-shouldered many a family member in my day. When I discover someone on Facebook has unfriended me, I go on a hunt to find out who it was and why. Never mind all the people I’ve disconnected from for annoying me.
With this disease, hypocrisy is a constant companion.
As conflicted as I remain, I am coming around to the idea that I have to be myself, even if some people hate me for it. It’s a slow and messy process, but you could also say there’s a survival instinct kicking in.
I’m a devout Catholic who wants to be accepted by everyone in my church community. But my gallows humor and metal-head ways are going to bubble to the surface and I can’t expect everyone to like it.
On the other side of the blade, I can’t expect all my friends in the music and writing worlds to share my views on faith.
I also can’t expect everyone to approve of everything I write here. By extension, I can’t expect everyone to want all the content I insist on pushing through my social networking feeds.
All I can do is be myself and hope that the better parts of me surface more often than the unsavory parts.
Being someone else is simply too hard. Besides, in the end we get judged on who we were, not on who we pretended to be.
