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Guilt: The Blessing and the Curse

Everyone struggles with guilt from time to time. Guilt is good in that feeling it means you have the desire to right a wrong. But when you mix it with OCD, the results are catastrophic.

MOOD MUSIC: “Step Outside” by 360s

I’ve always had a powerful guilty conscience. For the most part it has served me well. In my moments of anger, hatred, depression and despair, it has kept me from going too far in my quest to seek revenge on people for whatever I felt they did to me at the time.

Without it, I probably would have done things that would have made people abandon me. Or, I might have done something that would have landed me in jail. The guilty conscience kept me from going too far. That’s probably why God put it in me.

At the same time, guilt would super-charge all of my OCD ticks: The worry out of control, the binge eating, the self loathing and the repetitive actions.

People like to joke about having Catholic or Jewish guilt thrust on them. Since I grew up Jewish and became a Catholic, I’ve found there’s some truth to that. My mother was and is the perfect stereotype of the so-called Jewish mother, using guilt whenever I made choices that weren’t to her liking. In the Catholic community, some people will push the guilt button if you let your kids talk too loud during Mass or if you vote for a Democrat.

But I can’t blame them. The fact that I’ve always had a guilty conscience stems from having done bad things: Lying, being cruel to someone, neglecting my soul.

In a lot of ways, I’ve caused it all on my own.

I still have a guilty conscience, but it’s not as destructive a force as it used to be.

I used to use guilty feelings as an excuse to beat myself to death. I’d typically do this by giving in freely to my addictions, binging until my gut hurt so much that I wanted to be dead. It would also cause me to avoid people I may have hurt along the way, when making things right with them would have been the better course.

In my biggest moments of guilt, I’d isolate myself in my room, not showering for days.

The smell would hit the few visitors I had like a punch in the face.

Somewhere along the way, though, I’ve been able to turn it around. The guilt is still there. I’ve just learned how to react to it in a healthier way.

If I hurt someone, instead of hiding I try to make amends with the person. In doing so, I’ve found that most people are kind, forgiving souls.

If I make bad decisions, I’m more likely to pray and turn it over to God.

Or I write about it here. That way, it’s at least out in the open, where I can get a better look at it and have a fair fight.

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Vince Neil Makes Me Sick

Updated Dec. 20, 2011: Vince Neil suggested in an interview that he might leave Motley Crue next year. Maybe they’ll let John Corabi back in. I always liked the album he did with them…

I’m a big Motley Crue fan. Their music helped me process all the anger of my teens and in adulthood Nikki Sixx’s story of sobriety inspired me to take a long, hard look in the mirror.

But as I watch a new interview with Vince Neil, I find myself wanting to shove my fist through the screen.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:1LS36NmkndFTjsLwrTPVGB]

Neil just finished  a 10-day stint in jail for driving drunk in June 2010 after a party at the Las Vegas Hilton, and he sat down for an interview about the experience.

Two things rub me wrong right off the bat — The reporter interviewing him is his girlfriend, entertainment reporter Alicia Jacobs. Straightaway you know he’s going to be handled with kid gloves instead of having his feet put to the fire as it should be. The other thing is the music they play in the background, which sounds creepily like the stuff you hear in those late-night bullshit Lucinda Bassett infomercials.

Blabbermouth.net, a metal news site I’m quite fond of, has the interview clips on its site.

The interview excerpts Blabbermouth highlighted shows Neil hasn’t learned a thing:

On people’s criticism that he got away with a slap on the wrist and that his punishment should have been harsher because of past experiences: (Neil “past” includes a felony DUI in a 1984 accident that killed HANOI ROCKS drummer Nicholas “Razzle” Dingley and injured two others, leaving at least one of them with permanent brain damage. Neil was unharmed, did 30 days in prison, 200 hours of community service, and paid millions in restitution.)

Neil: “I paid my debt to the society 27 years ago; I did what was required of me then. I was sentenced to jail, I did my time, and I paid an enormous amount of money — two and a half million. But I would have gone to prison if I didn’t. So that’s what I did. And so a lot of people say, yeah, I bought my way out. Well, that’s not really true. Most people would have gotten two days time served and pay a $500 fine — so [they would] never do any jail time. I got 30 days. I think a lot of it was kind of based on what happened to me 25 years ago, with the accident. And I didn’t do a lot of time then.”

On what lesson he’s learned this time that he didn’t learn back in 1984:

Neil: “I was 23 years old. I just turned 50. So, really, it was almost half of my life ago. I was a kid and all of a sudden I had a lot of money, all of a sudden I had fame and I let it go to [my] head. This time I just made a mistake.”

Part of me feels like I should be sympathetic. My own addictive behavior certainly impaired my ability to drive safely back in the day. I never drove under the influence of alcohol, but if you read my “Anatomy of a Binge” post, you can see how shoving junk down your throat while driving makes you a bit dangerous to others on the highway. It’s hard to stay in the lanes when one hand is on the wheel and the other is rummaging through four bags of McDonald’s.

I did this sort of thing many times before I found the 12 Steps and a program of recovery. So, admittedly, what I’m about to say is hypocritical.

Vince Neil makes me sick. His lack of contrition over what happened in 1984 fills me with rage. He could have tried a lot harder to turn a brutally tragic situation into some good. Nikki Sixx has spent much of the past decade trying to help people understand and confront addiction. He never had to, but some higher power has pushed him in that direction.

Sixx was also probably luckier than he deserved. He did his share of drunk driving back then. In fact, some believe his heroin addiction started as an attempt to self-medicate shoulder pain he was in after smashing his Porsche to bits in a drunken haze. By luck he never killed anyone — unless you count the two times he overdosed himself into several minutes of clinical death.

Since Neil’s youthful mistake left one person dead and at least one of the people in the other car brain-damaged, one would hope he’d have spent the following years making amends and becoming a symbol of self-improvement.

Instead, he bragged in one interview that he was the OJ Simpson of the 1980s and now, he says last year’s transgression was a simple mistake. He also shows little remorse for the 1984 accident. He talks about doing what the justice system required of him. Had he not served his time back then, he would have been locked away for much longer in prison, he says.

I know I should probably hold back the judgmental feelings. I know as well as any recovering addict that the itch you get makes you repeatedly do things you know are wrong. I never killed anyone, but my depressions and binges hurt everyone around me in other ways.

I guess I can’t get past this and be more humble because I’ve learned something else: In that moment of clarity when you realize you have a big problem that’s going to ruin you and others without corrective measures — you see what you’ve done in the rear-view mirror and, in time, you develop an overwhelming desire to make amends.

In fact, the 12 Steps requires you to make amends.

Maybe Neil has done these things out of the public eye. I hope he has.

But the public face he has put on this whole affair just tells people they can keep making bad choices without consequence.

One more thing: Something like addiction is a disease, not a choice. But that doesn’t mean you get a sympathy pass for making putrid decisions under the weight of that disease. Even if we don’t have a choice on the sicknesses that afflict us, we still have plenty of choices in how we choose to conduct ourselves.

In my own quest to learn right from wrong and make better choices, I’ve been inspired by people like Nikki Sixx, even if he is a narcissist. Hell, I can be a narcissist when I’m not being careful.

But I can’t help but feel like that’s still a lot better than being a 50-year-old prick who keeps making bad choices, flaunting them and then pretending he’s earned a right to be stupid because he spent a few days in jail.

What a joke.

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More on Kids and Divorce

Yesterday’s post on children and divorce hit a tender nerve for a lot of you, so I feel a few clarifications are in order.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/kJHFaU0lpZ8

Here’s what yesterday’s post WAS NOT:

–A rebuke of single parents. I know a lot of single parents who bust their ass and give their children a lot more love than some of the married couples I’ve met in my day.

–A plea for people in troubled marriages to stay together for the sake of the kids. Actually, as one reader correctly pointed out, it can be more damaging to a child if his/her parents hate each other but stay together anyway. If that’s not a recipe for addiction, abuse and a passing of demons to the next generation, I don’t know what is.

–A suggestion that you’re a lousy parent if you can’t keep your marriage together. It takes two people to make a marriage succeed or fail. And sometimes things beyond your control can damage a marriage. That doesn’t make you a less loving parent. And sometimes, you find someone else to marry who turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to the family. Bottom line: A bad marriage can’t go on. My parents were smart to divorce in 1980. A lot of bad things followed, but things surely would have been worse had they stayed together.

It WAS:

–A reminder that kids pick up on a troubled house immediately and they need constant love and reassurance.

–A big “fuck you” to parents who use their kids as pawns to hurt each other. Doing so just makes you mean, and your child is probably better off without you around.

I mentioned two troubled marriages yesterday, but I have to be honest and tell you that I was particularly fixated on the second case I mentioned.

I also need to admit — again — that I’m only seeing one side of the drama.

But since I’m keeping the names of the players anonymous, I’m just going to roll with the one-sided version of events and say a few things:

1.) It is NEVER, ever OK to tell the other parent you took the child one place for the weekend when you were actually someplace else. It’s one thing if you’re shielding the kid from someone abusive. It’s quite another thing if that parent is not abusive and you’re just doing it to be spiteful. Parents need to know where their kids are at all times because we live in a dangerous world. You lied about a child’s whereabouts, and that makes you a punk. And, contrary to what you may think, it does matter.

2.) When it comes to deciding who gets the child and when, it’s about what’s best for the kid, not you.

3.) Not living at home doesn’t free you of certain responsibilities, like helping to pay the bills. You may not live there anymore, but the kid still does. And like I said, it’s about the child, not you.

If this sounds like a rant that veers too close to a temper tantrum, I make no apologies. The scars from my childhood fueled an adulthood ripped apart by mental illness and addiction.

In the final analysis I made a lot of bad decisions and most of what I’ve been through can’t be blamed on everyone else.

And the difference is that in my case, everyone else did their best, even if some things took a sour turn.

When I see a parent who isn’t trying, I get angry. If a child is dragged through the mud when the parents are trying to do it right, just think of the damage done when the parents aren’t trying.

You’re not trying, my friend. And for now, I wish I had more middle fingers for you than the two God gave me.

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Screwing Your Kids in the Divorce

When people you know go through a divorce, much is made over who gets what and who loses what. The ex-wife gets the house. The ex-husband gets full custody of the kids. But here’s a constant that’s most upsetting: The kids almost always get the shaft.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/gvkvJo2VRJc

Parents don’t usually mean for this to happen. They start out determined to shower the children with love and shield them from the ugly stuff as much as possible.

Then, as the proceedings drag on, the parents look for ways to hurt each other. What better way to do that than by using the children as pawns?

When my parents divorced 30 years ago, they did their best to shield us. They sent us to summer camp, though I really hated that. I just wanted to go play on Revere Beach.

They got joint custody. We stayed with Dad during the week and Mom on weekends. In the summers that arrangement was reversed. Dad got the house.

As the years went on, my mother grew increasingly bitter toward my father. This is understandable to a point. Her oldest son died. How can a parent be expected to think clearly when that happens? But she blamed my father. Actually, she blamed my stepmother: some baseless bullshit about my step-mother not inserting the adrenaline needle properly during my brother’s final and fatal asthma attack.

After that, if my father stared at her the wrong way, she threatened to get full custody from him. She did this on a weekly basis. I don’t think it hurt my father as intended. He held all the legal cards. But it sure as hell hurt me. I would constantly worry about never seeing my father again.

Looking in the rear-view mirror as an adult, I hold no bitterness about it. Not anymore, anyway. I realized I would never move on until I forgave them. We all fail. I have too many times to count. I also realize she was just venting most of the time.

But when I see kids caught in the middle of a marriage in trouble today, I always return to the scars of childhood, real and imagined (when you’re a kid you imagine things, and if you grow up to be a head case like me, you REALLY imagine things).

I bring all this up because I know of a couple troubled marriages right now where children are involved.

In one case the parents are working hard to be honest with the kids and make sure they know they are loved. I don’t know what will happen to that marriage in the end, but I give the parents  credit for trying to keep the emotional scars off their kids. If the marriage fails scarring will be inevitable. But the parents can do a lot to soften the blow.

Then there’s the other case. One parents tries to hurt the other by deciding not to babysit when scheduled. Of course, in this case it’s not babysitting. It’s parenting.

Then one parent has the child for the weekend and lies to the other about where they’ve been.

It’s not for me to get into who is right or wrong. I’m biased because I’m only getting one side of the story.

All I know is that it makes me sad. I can only pray that this child escapes with as little damage as possible.

Nobody likes it when someone’s marriage hits the wall. And when lawyers are brought in, you can expect ugliness to ensue because the lawyer’s job is to make sure his or her client wins.

Of course, in these situations, nobody wins. Some marriages need to end because it happened for the wrong reasons to start with or there was abuse. And sometimes people just change and what happens happens.

I just hope the kids make out OK at the other end of these dramas.

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Fear and Loathing in the TSA Line

It’s rare that I connect the things I write on CSOonline.com with this blog. The two are separate entities dealing with different subjects. But once in a great while, the two intersect. The uproar over the TSA’s more “invasive” security tactics is a good example.

Last time the two intersected was over the summer when I got hassled by the U.S. Secret Service (the cops on bikes, specifically).

I look at this TSA controversy and I’m immediately reminded of my past battles with fear and anxiety and how something like airport security would freak me out.

So please indulge me and click on the column below. And if you agree or disagree, please do weigh in.

Thanks.

TSA and the freedom thing: We’re the problem

The nation is in an uproar over full body scanning and pat downs in the airport TSA security lines. Is it a necessary security measure or a violation of our freedom and privacy? Bill Brenner weighs in.


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The Amityville Obsession

Part of my obsessive-compulsive behavior includes a study of the more morbid pieces of history. The Manson murders is one example. The Amityville murders is another. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with the latter.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72rWAe0pUdQ&fs=1&hl=en_US]

The match for the fire is a book I just read called “The Night The DeFeos Died” by Ric Osuna. The book goes a long way in crushing the bullshit hoax about the house being haunted. I watched “The Amityville Horror” as a kid and it scared the hell out of me. I’ve had an interest ever since. This book gets into the train wreck that was the DeFeo family. They were outwardly religious and close-knit. But the father was a rage-a-holic who apparently yelled a lot and beat his wife and kids, especially his oldest son Butch, who is now rotting in jail for the murders.

The book also reveals that the DeFeo family had mob connections. The toxic mix of dysfunction reached its climax Nov. 13, 1974. After a night of chaos in the house, Butch and his sister Dawn plotted to kill the abusive father and a mother they felt was an enabler.

Somewhere in the chaos, the story goes, Dawn killed their younger siblings. This apparently outraged Butch, who then blew her head off in anger. Investigators later found powder burns on Dawn’s nightgown, suggesting that she had indeed fired a rifle.

The only one who knows the real truth is Butch. But he has proven himself to be a serial liar, so the truth will remain in his head. My impression is that he got an unfair trial and that investigators covered up a lot of things in order to have a slam-dunk case. That’s certainly an argument Osuna makes in the book.

So why the obsession with this story? There are a few things worth noting:

–I don’t romanticize this stuff. The interest isn’t because of the brutal nature of the murders. I’ve seen the crime scene forensic photos for the DeFeo and Manson murders, and they made me sick to my stomach.

–It’s really part of my fascination with history.

Like it or not, this stuff is part of American history. The Manson story is a snapshot of everything that went wrong in the 1960s, where a counterculture born of good intentions — a craving for peace in Vietnam and at home — lost it’s way because there were no rules, no discipline and there was no sobriety. I agree with those who believe the promise of the 1960s died abruptly in the summer of 1969. I’m also fascinated because it shows how easily seemingly stable people can be brainwashed and controlled to the point where they would willingly heed orders to commit the worst of sins.

–The Amityville story is a case study of what happens when the head of a household abuses the rest of the family. Slap a kid around often enough and you just might turn him into the type of man who shoots heroin and plots the murder of some or all of his family.

It’s the whole cause-and-effect thing that keeps my obsession going.

My own experiences have given me an obsession with the key moments in a person’s life that determine if that person will turn to evil or come out of the adversity stronger and better.

I’m lucky because I’m a case study in the latter category. But I can’t help but feel bad for those who go the wrong way.

Some of the twists and turns are so random.

In the case of the Amityville murders, I don’t believe for a second that the house is haunted. Several families have lived there happily over the last 30 years. Sure, a couple of the future residents had bad things happen to them. But bad things happen to everyone.

You don’t need a haunted house to give your life ups and downs.

Sometimes, all it takes are the ghosts in your head.

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The Pedophile, Part 2

A childhood-friend-turned-convicted-pedophile was kicked off Facebook a few days ago, much to my relief. But his case makes it uncomfortably clear just how dangerous social networking can be in the hands of an addict — including me.

Mood music: 

Before I go further, here’s the original blog post I wrote about this guy about a week ago. That’ll give you all the background you need for what follows.

After talking to him on the phone, I had a decision to make: Unfriend him on Facebook or stay connected to keep an eye on him? I chose the latter.

Sure enough, despite what he told me about cleaning up his act, he was “friending” scores of teenage girls from such far-flung places as Indonesia and Thailand. I was able to follow the conversation threads he was having with these girls:

“You’re pretty.”

“Can you IM (instant message) me?”

And so on.

My friend, Kevin Littlefield, started to quietly notify our Facebook friends. I alerted the authorities that they should keep an eye on him and reported the activity to Facebook. Since then, I’ve learned that several other friends were on to him and alerted Facebook as well. One of us got through, because by the start of this week, he was gone from Facebook.

It’s been sobering to watch this guy. I consider myself very lucky that my addiction was binge eating and, to a lesser extent, alcohol.

At least with those addictions, you have a fighting chance to redeem yourself and fit into society. For someone addicted to sex — especially pedophilia — you’re all done once you’ve been caught and convicted. You have to register as a sex offender and tell all your neighbors.

That’s as it should be.

It’s one thing to have an addiction in which you slowly destroy yourself. It’s quite another to prey on another human being and damage them for life because your addiction makes you do something to them instead of yourself.

He doesn’t belong in society. Pure and simple. We all have a chance to redeem ourselves to God, but justice means the punishment for some crimes has to be permanent for as long as you remain on this Earth.

That old friend of mine is getting exactly what he deserves.

That doesn’t mean I feel good about it all. As an addict, I know how powerful things like Facebook can be. I’m not on there trying to pick up women. But I do find myself on there for long periods of time, simply curious about how other people’s lives are going. You can find a page for everything — favorite bands, favorite topics like history and politics, in my case. It’s very easy for me to put the blinders on and just stare at it for an unhealthy amount of time. I’m working on that one.

I’m not a special case here.

But in the spirit of this blog it is noteworthy.

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The Pedophile

Some people deserve to spend life in a box. But even they have a shot at redemption.

As a dad, I have zero tolerance for anyone who hurts a child. So when I discovered someone I’ve known for many years spent a decade behind bars for pedophilia, It was like a knife in the gut. Further complicating matters is that as a recovering addict, I can’t help but feel bad for this guy. But only a little bit.

He’s addicted to sex and that addiction drew him to kids. He certainly got what he deserved: Hard jail time in the midst of hardened criminals who draw the line at crimes against children. People like that wouldn’t think twice about killing a pedophile in their midsts.

So this guy has been back on the streets for a year. He’s homeless, has found it nearly impossible to find a job and is constantly watching his back. He’s required by law to register as a sex offender, and to inform people living around him that he’s a convicted sex offender.

My first instinct was to tell him to fuck off when he contacted me. But after he described his evil instincts as an addiction, I paused. As I’ve said before, when someone is in the grip of addiction, sanity and logic no longer apply.

I had to hear the guy out.

He understands why people shun him. He doesn’t blame them. He’s been working hard at putting his life back together and curses the day he was born because he hates the side of himself that led to three convictions for assaulting a minor.

In talking to the guy, I found myself thankful as hell that my addiction took the form of binge eating. I think even a heroin addict is more fortunate than someone addicted to sex, pornography and especially pedophilia.

The latter addictions hit a person like any other addiction. You hate that side of you and want to change. But you find it impossible to stop unless you’re lucky enough to find recovery. And recovery is back-breaking, emotionally-draining work.

To have a sex addiction like that has to be sheer terror and hell for someone who isn’t evil at his core.

My Faith also tells me that no person who is sorry is beyond redemption. So you pray for them and hope for the best.

That’s where my sympathy ends.

I once had a debate with my friend Ken White about the death penalty. He’s for it, I’m against it. I argued that it’s hypocritical for the state to take a life. Ken argued back that some people don’t belong in society and have to go. That includes pedophiles. Maybe they’re not evil people, but their actions are evil and if they can’t function in society they shouldn’t be in society.

It was hard to argue back against that logic. Thing is, I tend to agree with him now.

Should this guy on the streets be back behind bars or dead? I’ll let others debate that. All I know is that I’m never, ever going to meet this guy in person or create a situation that lets him anywhere near my kids or anyone else’s.

Walking around with a big scarlet letter on his back must really suck, but it’s for the best. Even he knows that.

In the years following the Manson murders, the four who carried out Manson’s orders turned against him and turned to God. They completely renounced what they did and Charles “Tex” Watson even became a minister behind bars. They sought and received forgiveness from God. But they will never get out of prison.

They may have a right to forgiveness. Everyone does. But they did the crime and have to take the punishment. They gave up their right to live among the rest of us. That’s justice.

The pedophile now on the streets probably deserves a similar fate. But for whatever reason, they let him back out.

But he doesn’t have his freedom. He’ll always be watching his back. That too is justice, I suppose.

Writing about this was not comfortable. I wrestled with myself over whether to even tackle the subject. I decided I had to because I know the evil things addiction will make you do.

I saw this as a necessary tale of caution.

I’ll tell you what: I’m just extremely grateful that my addictions revolved around food and substances. People around me were hurt along the way, but it’s easier to receive forgiveness for those things.

It’s a bitch having to relate to someone who has done far worse than me.

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What the hell? My Manson Obsession Resurfaces

Over the years, people have viewed my obsession over the Manson Murders as an oddity. How could I blame them?

The murders took the concept of gore and evil to new heights and dealt the hippie counterculture a body blow it never fully recovered from. Some will fight me on that point, but really — the 60s counterculture’s vision was never the same after Aug. 9, 1969.

So why am I bringing this up now and what does it have to do with the mission of this blog?

I made a new friend on Facebook yesterday: Scott Michaels, founder of Findadeath.com and one of the best experts on the Manson case around today.

He gives special “Helter Skelter” tours around L.A. of not just the murder sites themselves, but every location tied to the case, even those tied by a tiny thread, like one of the buildings Sharon Tate lived in years before her murder.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uizmSLifc7M&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

My interest in this case is an extension of my interest in history, because this WAS an important piece of American history. But I also remain fascinated as someone in recovery for OCD and addiction.

Manson fed the addictions of his followers and twisted wiring in their heads that was already mangled. Susan Atkins is a perfect example: She had a troubled past and was already mentally unhinged before Manson got his hands on her. He exploited his followers’ various levels of mental illness and addiction and turned some of them into killers.

Not all the Manson followers were mentally ill or addicted from a technical standpoint, but there were plenty of head cases to play around with.

Looking at my own past, when mental illness began to take hold in my early 20s and I was looking for SOMETHING bigger than me, I was a pretty good target for corrupting influences like this. Fortunately, the Manson-like influence never materialized and, even if he or she had, my moral compass was such that I would only take things so far.

I was lucky on many levels and eventually found God and my program of recovery. But in the back of my mind I know how weak I was in those days. Hell, I thought it was cool to wear a Manson shirt, which of course it wasn’t. Fortunately, I had more positive influences in my life than bad.

I’ve also been interested because Susan Atkins and Charles “Tex” Watson — the chief killer at the Tate and LaBianca residences — eventually turned on Manson and became Born-Again Christians. As a devout Catholic myself, I’ve always wondered about where the wall is between forgivable sin and the kind you never recover from. Would God truly let these people into His Kingdom after what they did, even if they repented? Everything I learned during my Catholic conversion says yes, and yet it’s still hard to swallow. I’ll find out the real truth someday.

Some of the Manson followers came from backgrounds most would consider normal. The last sort of folk you would ever consider capable of murder.

And yet they did what they did.

So yes, the combination of historical significance and the multitude of mental illness case studies have kept me fascinated over the years.

I’m glad I’m now in touch with Michaels and who knows — maybe someday I’ll get to go on one of his tours.

It may take me time to get down there, but getting a tour of the West Wing of the White House took some doing, yet it happened eventually.

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My Personal Ground Zero

A walk past Ground Zero takes the author from the darkness to the light.

Mood music for this post: “The Engine Driver” by The Decemberists:

If ever there was a day when I could relapse my way into McDonald’s to down $40 bags of junk and wash it down with four glasses of wine, this was it.

My mood took a deep dive this afternoon. And the source was the last thing I would have expected.

In New York City to give a security presentation, I walked past the World Trade Center site on my way to the my destination nearby. Gone are the rows of lit candles and personal notes that used to line the sidewalks around this place. To the naked eye it’s just another construction site people pass by in a hurry on their way to wherever.

I was pissed off at first. It wasn’t the thought of what happened here. My emotion there is one of sadness.

No, this was anger. I was pissed that people seemed to be walking by without any thought of all the people who met their death here at the hands of terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001. It was almost as if the pictures of twisted metal, smoke and crushed bodies never existed.

I wasn’t here on that day. I was in the newsroom at The Eagle-Tribune and remember being scared to death. Not so much at the scene unfolding on the newsroom TV, but at the scene in the newsroom itself. Chaos was not unusual at The Eagle-Tribune, but this was a whole new level of madness. I can’t remember if my fear was that terrorists might fly a plane into the building we were in as their next act or if it was a fear of not being able to function amidst the chaos. It was probably some of each.

This was a huge story everywhere, but The Eagle-Tribune had a bigger stake in the coverage than most local dailies around the country because many of the victims on the planes that hit the towers were from the Merrimack Valley. There was someone from Methuen, Plaistow, N.H., Haverhill, Amesbury, Andover — all over our coverage area.

When the first World Trade Center tower collapsed on the TV screen mounted above Editor Steve Lambert’s office, he came out, stood on a desk and told everyone to collect themselves a minute, because this would be the most important story we ever covered.

Up to that point, it was. But I was so full of fear and anxiety that my ability to function was gone. I spent most of the next few days in the newsroom, but did nothing of importance. I was a shell. I stayed that way until I  left the paper in early 2004. In fact, I stayed that way for some time after that. I should note that the rest of the newsroom staff at the time did a hell of a job under very tough pressure that day. My friend Gretchen Putnam was still editor of features back then, but she and her staff helped gather the news with the same grit she would display later as metro editor.

The bigger point though is that I was in that newsroom, not in lower Manhattan. Many of the people walking by today were, and their scars are deeper.

As I started to process that fact, my mood shifted again.

I realized these people were doing something special. No matter where they were going or what they were thinking, they were moving — living — horrific memories be damned.

They were doing what we all should be doing, living each day to the full instead of cowering in fear in the corner.

Doing so honors the dead and says F-U to those who destroyed those towers and wish we would stay scared.

It reminded me of who I am and what I’ve been through. I didn’t run from the falling towers or get shot at in the mountains of Afghanistan or the streets of Baghdad. But the struggles with OCD and addiction burned scars into my insides all the same.

I was terrified when I was living my lowest lows. But somewhere along the way, I got better, healed and walked away. I exchanged my self hatred and fear for love of life I never thought possible.

It’s similar to what the survivors of Sept. 11 have gone through.

They reminded me of something important today, and while some sadness lingers, I am grateful.