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Mister Rogers’ Mother Was Right

Say what you will about Mister Rogers. His speech and mannerisms may stop being cool after you hit puberty, but the lessons he taught are timeless and ageless.

My friend Olivia Gatti shared this quote from Mr. Rogers on Facebook awhile back:

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers–so many caring people in this world.

The man was so right.

I suspect Olivia had the earthquake and tsunamis in Japan on her mind when she decided to share, and it certainly fits. There’s been so much tragedy in the last decade, from 9-11 to the tsunamis of late 2004 to this latest event, and for many children — especially those with emotional disorders — it can be enough to terrorize to the core, no matter how far away they are from the given disaster.

I used to have an acute fear of current events that started early in childhood and lasted almost into my mid-30s.

As I’ve written before, fear and anxiety were byproducts of my particular brand of OCD, just like my addictions were a byproduct.

The fear meant a lot of things. Working myself into a stupor over the safety of my wife and children. An obsession with cleanliness, which was interesting since depression always meant my personal hygiene took a dive. It also meant a fear of world events. When that Nostradamus movie “The Man Who Saw Tomorrow” came out on HBO in the early 1980s, I was terrified by the “future” scenes.

Later, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, I thought the scene from above was playing out and it left me in a huge depression, one where I stayed in my basement with the lights off.

Similar emotions took hold on Sept. 11, 2001. Of course, those emotions took hold on everyone that day.

It fed a lot of my addictive behavior in adulthood and blackened parts of my childhood that might have otherwise been happy — even with the bad things that happened. Bad things happen to everyone. That’s life. But some people can maintain a certain level of happiness despite it.

Mr. Rogers learned a powerful lesson from his mother. I wish I had it in my head to focus on the helpers growing up. In hindsight, they were always there:

–The doctors and nurses who saved me from brutal bouts of Crohn’s Disease.

–The therapists who guided me through a diagnosis of OCD and showed me how to manage it.

–My family, especially my wife, and also my father and my mother, who tried to do their best for me. The help Erin has been to me is way too big to be measured here.

–My friends, who have always helped me make sense of things, made me laugh and done all the other things a person needs to get through the day.

–Many of the people in my faith community, who showed me how to accept God’s Grace, even if I still suck at returning the favor.

With the bigger events like what happened in Japan, it’s so easy to see only the calamity, death and sadness. It’s easy to get fixated on whether such a thing could happen where we live.

But when you look at it the way Mr. Roger’s mother suggested, it becomes a different picture altogether. The bad stuff is still there, but you also see that no matter what happens, there will always be enough kind souls to help the rest of us through to the other side.

When you can see the good in people even during the darkest of hours, it restores your faith in humanity.

I’m grateful for the reminder.

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Sympathy for the Unsympathetic

I tend to get a lot of mail from people who read this blog, particularly the stuff about the rougher parts of my life. God Bless ’em, because they’re good people who want to buck me up. But I think they misunderstand where I’m coming from sometimes.

Mood music:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvJGQ_piwI0&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]

There are days when my posts cross over to darker territory, especially when a wave of depression or OCD moment hits. I also do a lot of soul searching here, which is part of what I started this for. Some see those posts and tell me I’m way too hard on myself.

When too much of this happens, I need to come on here and tell you why you don’t need to worry about me or express sympathy. This time, I got a nice, shiny five-point manifesto to make my point:

1.) If I write about something bad that happened to me or something I’m feeling bad about, it’s never, ever a cry for pity. I approach my experiences from the point of view that EVERYONE has bad stuff happen to them and that EVERYONE screws up. I’m nobody special. But many times I need to expose my raw feelings to make a point. That’s what writers do.

2.) This blog is all about me making an example of myself. The way I see it, I’ve learned a lot of lessons and developed a lot of coping skills every time I’ve failed. If I don’t admit to my own failings to show where I used to be and where I’m going, the reader won’t walk away with anything useful.

3.) When sharing a bad mood or experience, the goal is to tell others they’re not alone. A lot of people with depression and addiction suffer in silence, thinking they’re different from everyone else in a bad way. The more people come clean about their own struggles, the more those sufferers can see that they’re not so hopeless and strange after all. In other words, some of the stuff readers try to buck me up over are based on my attempts to buck other people up.

4.) Never think for a moment that I don’t love who I am and what I have. It’s easy to read the darker posts and see a guy who loathes himself and curses his lot in life. But these posts aren’t meant to be that way. I still have my struggles and always need to be better than I am, but I also appreciate who I am, where I’ve been and what I’ve learned. And I know when I look at my wife and children that I’m THE luckiest guy on the planet.

5.) Writing all this stuff down is excellent therapy for me, too. Some people may be taken aback by some of the stuff I come clean about here. But in doing so I clear my own mind of the obsessive thinking that can hold me back. Then I can move on to the next thing. That doesn’t mean I don’t get locked into OCD moments, but spilling it here makes things better. 

So you see, my friends, there’s no need for sympathy. I’m doing just fine.

But I am grateful for your kindness and good intentions.

Now, as MC5 once sang, “Kick out the jams!”

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Learning to Adapt and Liking It. Maybe

Of all the things I’ve always been considered pretty good at — writing, drawing, etc. — one of the things I’ve never appreciated enough is my ability to adapt.

Mood music:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Bh7eE3zW2c&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]

When OCD is out of control, adapting to change is pure hell. You want everything just so, in just the right amount and the right amount of order. Change anything and the person who loses control goes into a tailspin.

But in recovery, adapting to change is a gift I’ve only recently come to appreciate. When you finally realize you don’t have control and you surrender, it becomes easier to pull off.

I used to be terrified of job changes. I remember the day before starting at The Eagle-Tribune and the day before starting at TechTarget. I was strung out on anxiety and walked around full of depression and dread. By the time I got to changing jobs again in 2008, I had already evolved in my recovery enough that the dread didn’t come. The day before I started at CSO Magazine, I was giddy as a kid on Christmas Eve. I was learning to adapt.

Now I’m learning to adapt some more. I’m learning that my current process of distributing this blog needs to be tweaked. And I’m ready to adapt.

This form of adaptation should be easy because it requires me to do less, not more.

When my old colleague sent me a note calling me an “obsessive poster” it gave me real pause. As I mentioned yesterday, I can be obsessive in that task. There’s some publishing science behind what I do and I explained it, but I admit I am obsessive-compulsive about being part of a discussion and worrying about my words being missed along the way. It’s purely selfish, and I’m not proud of it. But I can adapt.

And so starting today, I disabled the automated tool that has made it far too easy for me to tweet and Facebook posts multiple times a day.

I’m pulling it back to three times a day: Once in the morning, once in the afternoon and once in the evening, so the blog will still be exposed to those online traffic cycles. But no more posting things every two hours, for example. That’s just me being ridiculous.

Also — eventually — I’m going to build a separate Facebook page for this blog. That way, the folks who really want it have a place to go and connections that don’t want it won’t have to suffer the barrage.

I’m not sure if the Twitter approach needs changes, but I’m open to suggestions. My security writing already goes out on a separate Twitter feed, though I still push the security content from my personal Twitter page. Do I want to make a separate feed for the diaries? I don’t know yet. But I realize it might be necessary.

LinkedIn is a much more complicated beast, because that is a purely professional social networking platform. I’m not sure how a separate OCD Diaries presence on LinkedIn, separate from my security presence, would work. Complicating matters is that A LOT of my audience on the security side reads this blog as well. I don’t want to make it harder to find.

So you see, I need to adapt this stuff to be more in tune to people’s sensitivities. I can’t change the flavor of the blog. It’s mine and I don’t write it to please people, though it is pleasing when someone gets something from it.

I can change how I deliver my posts, however. 

Ideas are welcome. The change in posting frequency starts now.

The other things will be worked out in March.

I also want to include more local music on here, but sound quality is important. So to all my musician friends, let’s talk.

Seize the day (or evening, in this case).

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When Honesty Is A Lie

I’ve figured out another reason for my sour mood in recent days, and now is as good a time as any to get it off my chest.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/6YzKLRM-pr4

A lot of people have been coming up to me here in San Francisco praising me for being “so honest, open and courageous” in this blog. It was a similar thing when I was in Washington D.C. for ShmooCon a couple weeks ago.

I appreciate those feelings. I really do. But when I look in the mirror lately, those words don’t ring true.

Maybe I’m being too self-critical, maybe not.

But the feeling is there. And it stings.

Here’s the thing: I do open up about a lot of things on here. That’s why I do this thing. If one person can open up about himself, I figure, others will be less afraid to be honest with themselves and they’ll be happier for it.

But don’t think for a second that I tell you everything.

I still have trouble sometimes being honest with myself and other people. It’s not that I hide anything particularly insidious. It’s the more typical things:

If I run into a PR person who wants to pitch me something I’m not interested in, I often lack the honesty to tell them I’m not interested. That strings them along and gives them false hope, and it’s not fair to them.

When I talk to people about how I’ve cleaned up from an addiction, I’m not so revealing about the other addictions I still let control me (computer gadgetry, for example). Sure, I wrote about that and just linked to it. But I think I’m far more hooked on technology in ways that make life less manageable than I initially let on.

I’m also not honest enough about just how hard it is sometimes to be social and sober-abstinent at the same time. Last night I stayed in the hotel because I wanted nothing to do with people.

I’m not saying what I’ve written before was a lie. It wasn’t. But it wasn’t the full, naked and ugly truth, either. I hold little details back. Some things just feel too private to share.

I guess that’s just part of being human.

Whatever the case may be, I don’t want people thinking I’m better than I am and inflating my head with high praise.

Instead, just help keep me honest.

(Image originally appeared on the SodaHead site )

 

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Message for a Young Friend

Two old friends have a son who’s been through the meat grinder too many times in his 12 short years. Some think he should settle in for a lesser life than he’s capable of. I say bullshit.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6a9WmfFKs8&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]

My young friend’s name is Mark. He lives in a city on the North Shore of Massachusetts. That’s all I’ll reveal about his identity. But his parents will know this is for him and will hopefully share this with him:

Dear Mark,

Because of the mental and physical challenges you face, some grownups think you should set your sites low. They think you’re not cut out for college or a career as, say, a scientist.

They mean well. They know what you’ve been through and they don’t want you to get hurt. But if I’ve learned anything in my own journey through hell, it’s that you can’t always hide from hurt and disappointment. Life is hard. But it’s supposed to be.

It’s how we find out what we’re truly made of.

Item: Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a pampered child whose world view changed when he was crippled by polio in 1921. A lot of people would have given up right there, but he rebuilt his life, became a mentor to other polio victims and was the longest-serving president in history, dealing with war and economic calamity that could have broken the spirit of healthier leaders. Through it all, he carried on an outward cheeriness that put people at ease.

When I was a kid there were plenty of roadblocks. I missed a lot of school because of Crohn’s Disease and lost a brother when I was only a year older than you are now. My studies suffered, and I was put in a lot of the classes where they put the problem children.

Things worked out, though. I got married and had two kids that are much smarter than I was at that age. I have a job that’s allowed me to do a lot of excellent things (excellent to me, anyway).

You shouldn’t settle for anything less than the life you want.

Item: Abraham Lincoln suffered crippling depression his whole life and lost two of his four children, all in a time before anti-depressants were around. He led the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery.

There will be setbacks and those can be discouraging, but you CAN survive them with the right perspective.

Item: The drummer from Def Leppard had an arm ripped off in a car wreck. A lot of people thought his career was over. Twenty-six years later, he’s still drumming.

So just keep trying, and never give up on yourself. Nobody can hold you back. Only YOU can hold yourself back.

One more thing: Having a good life doesn’t mean you get to live without the bad stuff from time to time.

It’s easy for people who fight mental illness and addictive behavior to go on an endless, futile search for the happily ever after, where you somehow find the magic bullet to murder your demons, thus beginning years of bliss and carefree existence.

There’s no such thing as happily ever after.

That’s OK.

I believe in you. Your parents certainly believe in you.

The rest is up to you.

–Your friend,

Bill

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Am I Too Hard on Myself?

A friend asked that question yesterday. I’ve certainly been accused of being too hard on myself before. My step-mother reads this blog and told me I should give myself a break. Steve Lambert, former editor of The Eagle-Tribune, said I was too hard on myself when I wrote the “One of My Biggest Regrets” post.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:0OXjHxbrmrkpvqudvzWlDR]

The short answer is that sometimes I am, most of the time I’m not.

When I was at my absolute worst, I knew my soul was in deep trouble and I hated myself for not having the will to do something about it. I call it my long road through self-hatred. Back then I would be hard on myself by wallowing in the corner or, more accurately, in my car, where I would go on many, many binges.

If I had the ability to cry it out back then, I would have probably binged less. But I’ve never been good at crying, so I’d let the rage fill me and I’d do my best to destroy myself. It’s not that I wanted to die. It’s that I hated and wanted to punish myself. Giving in to my addictions was a lot like taking a thick leather belt and lashing myself a few hundred times.

That’s what happens when mental illness and addiction burn wild with no management. You end up being hard on yourself, and nothing good comes of it. In fact, it just makes things worse.

Today I’m hard on myself in a different way. I come on here and write about what a shithead I was the day before, and in the process I fix my course and work on doing better. That’s much more healthy.

I was feeling stupid yesterday because I purchased a new pair of boots and a pair of pants on Amazon.com. I needed the boots, but not the pants. It was a splurge with money we don’t necessarily have. Call it no big deal, but I know better. Sometimes, when I’m not letting the food addiction or wine guzzling control me, I let the spending addiction control me. Or the Internet addiction.

That’s when I have to remind myself that I’m being a jerk. And then I try to do better.

When I put up my wall and fail to let family in, I need to come on here and remind myself that I’m doing something wrong so I can fix it. Same thing when I’m thinking about things in absolutes.

In the final analysis, I see nothing wrong with being hard on myself as long as it leads to self improvement.

It’s the brand that leads to self pity and self destruction that’s the problem.

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Out of the Closet, Into the Light

My kid sister-in-law told me a friend of hers has admitted to some hefty demons. I won’t mention the person’s name (I don’t know her, actually), but I know where she’s been.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:5F6rwEF15hN1jnhNk2YQHn]

This is a little message for her friend, in the event she someday stumbles upon this blog:

Outing yourself is a hard thing to do. When I did it, I was terrified at first because I thought my mental struggles would be used to define who I was. It gave me an appreciation for what it must be like when a gay person comes out of the closet.

I felt weird around my family at first. Ill at ease might be the best way to describe the feeling. I’m sure they felt the same. That I had OCD and related addictive behavior didn’t surprise them much. As my sister-in-law will tell you, I’ve always had an abundance of strange behaviors.

The people I work with were most surprised. I guess I did a good job of fooling them back in the day. But they have never defined me or treated me differently over what I’ve opened up about. I get the same fair shake as everyone else.

Since people keep their demons hidden for fear of bad treatment at work, it was an eye opener for me when I got nothing but support for coming out with it.

After awhile, it’ll be like that with your friends. They’ll appreciate you more, and they’ll be grateful that you came clean. Some of them will learn from your example, even though they may not know they need it yet.

I understand one of your problems is compulsive lying. There’s no need to feel like a freak over this, because everyone with mental health struggles and addictions lies. I certainly have. Hell, I’ve never met a so-called normal person that hasn’t lied. It’s not something to be proud of or accept. Lies imprison us and make our troubles deeper. But when we can stop living the lie, there’s a new peace and freedom that’s very powerful and hard to describe.

When I decided to stop living lies, I felt 100 pounds lighter. Physical pains went away.

I understand you are looking at taking medication. I take Prozac and it works. But I’m convinced it works as well as it does because I went through years of hard therapy as well. That’s the most important thing you can do: Find the right therapist to talk to. Therapy will provide you with mental coping tools that will make you stronger. By that point, medication becomes the mop that wipes away the remaining baggage.

Things may get worse before they get better. When you start dealing with this stuff, you find yourself learning how to behave all over again. You will still go through periods of depression.

This is when any addictions you may have will tempt you. Fight it at all costs. I didn’t at first. I completely gave in to my addictive behavior and I paid dearly for it. Even if you don’t think you have an addiction, it might be worth considering a 12-Step Program. The tools you learn from that will help you cope with the mental struggles at the heart of your troubles.

Coming clean doesn’t mean you get to live happily ever after. But happily ever after has always been a bullshit myth. But you will have an easier time dealing with the tough times. That may not make sense right now. But it will.

Here’s the thing about one’s demons: When they hide in the dark, out of view, they own you. They’re too powerful to beat.

Opening the door and forcing the sunlight on them is hard as hell. But once you take that step — as you just did — the demons start to shrink. The light always kills demons. They turn to ash and you become a lot bigger than they ever were.

That’s what I’ve learned from my experiences, anyway.

Congratulations on taking that first step. I wish you the very best.

–Bill

 

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43 Years Through The Minefield

Today is my sister Wendi’s 43rd birthday. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the day than to explain what she’s been through and how far she has come.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MceneYWgPc4&fs=1&hl=en_US]

A Sister’s Battle with Depression

This blog is chock full of my own experiences with depression and addiction. I even hint here and there about how the addictive behavior runs in the family. But I’ve avoided the story of depression among siblings until now. This post is about my older sister, who had it much harder than me.

I haven’t mentioned it up to this point because it’s her story and her business. I didn’t want to violate her privacy. But recently I’ve realized her story is an important part of my own. So I sought and received her permission to tackle it head on. Hopefully, this post validates the trust she’s putting in me.

Since this blog focuses on my own experiences, I’m not always effective at pointing out other people’s success stories. But Wendi is a success story, whether she realizes it or not.

Growing up, me, Wendi and Michael had our individual problems. I had the Crohn’s Disease, Michael had the asthma that eventually killed him, and Wendi had the misfortune of catching abuse from a mother flustered by all the chaos.

I remember the routine at 22 Lynnway well. Early in the morning, before school, Wendi was required to do a lot of chores. I particularly remember the sound of the vacuum. To this day, I get rattled by the sound of a vacuum because of the memories it brings up. If she missed a spot on the rug, she caught my mother’s physical and verbal wrath. Because me and my brother were sick so much, we also got a lot of the love and attention while Wendi was off on the side trying not to piss my mother off.

When my parents divorced in 1980, things seemed to get worse. When my brother died, things got worse still. In my mother’s defense, there was a lot of hell and heartbreak she had to live through, and to be honest I’m not sure I would have handled it much better if I were in her shoes. Mental anguish makes you do stupid things.

When my stepmother came along, my mother’s jealousy grew worse, and so did the abuse. Wendi caught the brunt of it.

Like me, Wendi had a lot of ups and downs with weight. Like me, she tried to control it through reckless means.

Sometime around 1991, things started coming to a head for my sister. She started plunging into deep depressions. Between 1991 and 1998, I can remember three occasions where this led to her hospitalization. She talked openly about wanting to kill herself. One such occasion, in 1998, was a couple months before my wedding. Since it was only two years after Sean Marley’s suicide, this made me more angry than anything. My anger was a selfish one. How dare she get suicidal and hospitalized and put me through this all over again. And how dare she do this while I was getting ready for my wedding.

I realize something now that I didn’t realize back then: Depression and the collateral damage it causes to others is never really in the sufferer’s control to stop. And it can care less about timetables. Mental illness doesn’t take breaks for holidays and weddings, for the convenience of others. Given my own battle with depression in subsequent years, I get it now.

I’m sorry for getting angry with her back then.

There’s something else I feel sorry about: Because of my own mental turmoil, I chose to avoid situations that made me uncomfortable. Wendi’s depression made me very uncomfortable. The result is that I wasn’t the helpful younger brother I should have been.

In 2003, Wendi caught a bizarre infection the doctors couldn’t make sense of. She spent a couple weeks in ICU and pumping her full of antibiotics didn’t seem to help her much. A couple times we were certain she wouldn’t make it. But since then, things have gotten better for Wendi. Not easier. Maybe not even happier. But better.

A couple years earlier, she had announced to the family that she was gay. It took some family members by shock, but not me. When I thought about a couple of the more “normal” relationships she had tried to nurture in past years and the depression she went into when things didn’t work out, it all made perfect sense to me. She was trying to live a life that didn’t gibe with her true nature.

When she came clean about that, her life didn’t get easier. But I suspect, because she found a way to be truthful with herself, that some things got easier to deal with. She’s been through her ups and downs since then. A marriage didn’t work out. She suffered some nasty complications from gastric bypass surgery. But she has moved on from those difficulties much more quickly than in past difficulties.

Like I said, dealing with one’s issues doesn’t mean you live happily ever after. Putting up with difficult people doesn’t get any easier. Peace is never an absence of conflict.

But when we get better at facing those challenges, life in general becomes a little sweeter.

That’s what I’ve learned from my own struggles. And I think that’s what Wendi has learned as well.

I know a lot of people who have fought the demons and gotten bloodied and grown a hell of a lot stronger in the process.

Wendi is one of them.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

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A Pastor Moves On

Dennis Nason, pastor of All Saints Parish, steps down Oct. 1. He’s struggling with cancer and decided to step aside so the parish can move on. He’s earned a tribute here. He made a believer out of me by coming clean about his own sins.

We have it in our heads that priests are supposed to be perfect and sinless. That’s why the sex scandal hit people so hard. We were taught to trust priests at all costs, and some of them betrayed that trust in evil ways.

When you’re a screw up like I once was — and still am in some ways — and you find someone you hope will help you out of the abyss, it’s a crushing blow when the mentor fails.

But as I’ve settled deeper into my Faith, I’ve realized those mistakes are part of the long journey out of Hell.

But for that theory to work, all parties involved have to have the capacity for honesty. That’s a big theme in the 12 Steps, too. Honesty is a bitch when you wrestle with addictions. I’ve said it before, addicts are the best liars on Earth. The depth of my own deceit was like a bottomless pit by the time I hit bottom.

That’s where Father Nason took me to school. He was an alcoholic who could have covered his tracks and carried on. Instead, he revealed everything to everyone. What follows is an older post I wrote about that very incident and what it has meant to me:

The Priest Who Came Clean

Originally posted on April 11, 2010:

I’ve met many priests, some good and some not-so-good. People criticize priests because they’re athiests or they’re angry about the sex abuse scandal. Father Dennis Nason made a believer out of me by coming clean about his own sins.

You would have to be sick in the head NOT to be outraged by the sex abuse, and especially of the cover-up. In the end, though, people forget that priests are human, with all the sin-making embedded into their genetic code just like the rest of us.

When a priest is able to lay his own flaws bare for all to see, I think it takes an extra level of courage, since there has to be a lot of pressure around the lofty standards they are held to.

Father Nason rose to the occasion.

I met Father Nason about 11 years ago. He took over our parish, All Saints, when several other churches were closed down and consolidated into the All Saints Community.

He had a lot of angry people on his hands. One’s church becomes home, and when you close it and force them to go someplace else, trouble is inevitable.

Then the priest sex abuse scandal burst open like an infected sore, shaking the Faith of a lot of people like never before.

I started going to All Saints regularly in 2001, the year my oldest son was born. It would be another five years before I chose to convert, but by then the church had become a source of comfort at a time where my mental health was starting to snap off the rails.

At one point over the summer, Father Nason vanished. Few knew why.

Then at one Mass, the deacon read an open letter from him.

In the letter, Father Nason revealed that he was in rehab for alcoholism. It would be several months before he emerged from rehab, and while he was there the sex abuse scandal really began to explode. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks also happened around that time, and people’s souls were tested like never before.

Once he did emerge from rehab to rejoin his parish, there was a new sparkle in his eyes. It was like a weight had been lifted. Then another weight dropped on him. It turns out one of the priests in our parish was one of those sexual predators we had read about in the papers.

Something like that would test the sobriety of anyone forced to come in and deal with the mess. Father Nason met it head on.

He was angry with his archdiocese over the fact that pedophile priests had been enabled for all those years; cases swept under the rug like dust. You could hear the anger in his voice and see it in his eyes. He would rage about it in more than one Homily.

His reaction is a big reason I stuck with the church instead of bolting.

Around that time we also had trouble hanging onto the other priests. One left after less than two months, apparently freaked out by the amount of work this parish demanded of him.

Through it all, Father Nason kept it together and brought his parish through the storm.

I don’t always see eye to eye with him. Sometimes I think his administration is disorganized and that his Homilies are all over the place; though when he nails it, he really nails it.

But those are trivial things. When he came clean about his addiction, it hit me deep in the core. At the time, my own addictions were bubbling in my skull and preparing to wipe out what was left of my soul. I just didn’t know it at the time.

His honesty kept me going. And now that I’ve spent the last few years getting control of my own addictive behavior, I have a much better appreciation for what he went through.

This post isn’t meant to put him on a pedestal. He is only human, after all, and he sometimes misses the mark like the rest of us.

It IS meant to thank him for the time he came clean, inspiring me to do the same.

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Welcome to the Outcast Club

An old friend is reminding me of the outcast I used to be and how like-minded people tend to stick together — even when they shouldn’t.

I was actually quite a prick to Stevie Hemeon. I used to punch him in the Theodore Roosevelt School yard because he was one of the few kids I was strong enough to hit. He never deserved it. Yet he still hung with me, kind of how high school chum Aaron Lewis did later on.

In fifth grade, we were on the side of my house messing around with an air purification vent my parents had installed because of my brother’s severe asthma. Somewhere in there, one of us — probably me — stuck a garden hose in the vent and turned it on. We left the hose in there, assuming one of us had shut it off. It flooded the finished basement bedrooms and that’s probably the most pissed off my father ever was at me.

I told him Stevie stuck the hose in the vent. That was an early lesson that lies never help. They just land you in deeper trouble. My father is no dummy, after all.

Stevie moved to the Beachmont section of Revere and I didn’t see him again until high school. Before transferring to the Voke I spent the first two months of freshman year at Revere High, and Stevie was there. I was an asshole to him the entire time. And still he hung around with me.

Why? I think because we were both outcasts, and outcasts tend to stick together.

After 25-plus years, Stevie and I reconnected on Facebook. I immediately apologized for being a jerk back then and, it turns out, he never carried bitterness about it. From his perspective, it was just young, stupid kids doing the stupid things kids do. He never held a grudge.

Stevie has been through the medical wringer in his adult life, almost the reverse of my situation, where my biggest medical difficulty happened in childhood. His Facebook page describes his adult life pretty well: “A hemodialysis patient, who is getting a fourth shot at life. With my past, medical demons, hodgekins and guillian barret’ syndrome. A walking medical mystery.”

He talks a lot about his ailments on Facebook, but never in a bitter way. There’s always a positive spin to it, which is nothing short of amazing to me. He’s the only dialysis patient I know of who describes going for a treatment as “having a blast” with the staff and fellow patients he befriended along the way.

I remember a similar situation when I spent all those weeks in the hospital in the 1970s and early 1980s. A special bond forms among the patients on a given floor. You laugh together, watch the same TV shows and play pranks on each other. It makes me wish I could reconnect with some of my fellow patients from those days. Unfortunately that’s not going to happen, because at least two of them didn’t make it to adulthood.

In any event, that bond creates something of an outcast club. Because of our illnesses we couldn’t really play sports or do other things that made you “normal.” So we bonded over being misfits.

I’m glad I reconnected with Stevie. I admire his positive attitude in the face of illness. I’m pretty sure a lot of other former classmates feel the same way.

It’s just another example of the people God puts in your path to teach you the lessons of life.