I chalked it up to a serious lack of sleep. I’m still pretty sure that’s what it is. I didn’t pay attention to the three-hour time change when I got here Sunday and, as the clock approached midnight west coast time, I realized I had been up for nearly 24 hours.
When you are managing a mental disorder like OCD, staying up for that long is one of the dumbest things you can do.
No big deal, I figured. I’d go to sleep and be fine the next morning.
But my mood has been increasingly foul with each passing hour. As I write this, someone is sitting a couple rows in front of me in the press room playing a loud game of some sort.
My instinct is to walk over, take the device from his hand and smash it over his head. But that’s not my style. I vent it out here instead.
Not helping matters is that I have a compulsive need to produce material at these events. I keep pushing myself when there’s no reason to do so.
I hear it from addicts all the time. They put down the thing that’s caused the most chaos and heartache in their lives, but then they find themselves latching onto smaller addictions to fill the hole. Chain smoking, for example.
That hole inside is what compels us to harm ourselves in the first place. Fail to address the source of the pain you’re medicating and the demons will be back. You end up pushing down on all the different addictions like the keys on a piano.
I’m lucky in many respects, because I started dealing with my pain sourceyears before I even tried to address the addictive byproducts. I also have a powerful ally in God, and got a lot out of praying the Rosary on the hour-long commute to work this morning. I can also indulge in some perfectly harmless and always therapeutic metal music.
But truth be told, I still struggle with other addictions when the big one is under control, just like everyone else. They are the less destructive kind, but troublesome all the same. Especially when you can’t afford them the way you once could.
Anyway, I’m going to work on adjusting my attitude.
Meantime, if you run into me and I’m less than friendly, I apologize in advance. It’s not you.
And if I become downright rude, call me on it.
And, if you really need to, break something over my head.
My mind has been raw all week for a multitude of reasons. Mostly, it’s a case of winter getting to me. The sun is setting later each day, which is good for me, but the cold and snow have done their damage and plunged me into a depression.
I’ve pushed myself hard with work and at home I’ve been a slug. I forget to do simple things and I just want to collapse on the couch. I sigh a lot and swear even more.
It’s not fair to my family. But I can’t seem to help it.
On a positive note, I’ve kept my recovery intact. That’s real progress, because this kind of mindset used to make me binge my brains out. Those days were so much worse.
That doesn’t make me satisfied about my current state of mind.
On one hand, I’m excited for the coming trip. I love the fast and furious writing and the copious networking that gets done. I love seeing friends I usually only see on Twitter and Facebook.
On the other hand, I feel terrible about abandoning my family for four days.
The depression hit me later this time than it usually does in winter. The happy lamp, proper Prozac dosage and program of recovery have served me well. But I’m starting to realize I’ll probably never be able to go an entire winter without feeling this way.
Tough shit. That’s my cross to carry, and I just have to keep getting better at managing the load without complaint and without becoming useless to those around me.
Editor’s note: An acquaintance on Facebook mentioned how August is always a shitty month for her because of something that happened in that month a few years ago. I get that way about August, too, though time has healed wounds. For me, though, I’ve had to get over judging my life by certain years rather than certain months. This post, written in early 2011, is about that.
I’m thinking of all the shitty things that have happened already in 2011. The 9-year-old girl getting killed along with several others at Congresswoman Gifford’s event. Death, unrest and oppression in Egypt. Nothing ever changes, does it?
Mood music:
[spotify:track:39kHMfF3dBMZMbOtoit1XF]
You always hear people talking about what a bad year they’ve had. Marriages falling apart. Loved ones dying. Jobs lost. Surely the new year will bring better things, we think. Then we find that the new year is pretty much the same as the old one.
It’s that losing game of high expectations. The more we get our hopes up, the more devastated we are when things don’t go according to plan.
My head has been in that place too many times to count.
The most glaring example was 1984. I was 13 and thought 1983 was a rough year. I remember being scared to death over world events like the bombing of Marine barracks in Lebanon and that movie “The Day After.” Three years into my parents’ divorce, there was still a lot of venom in the air. I was in my first year of junior high and hating every second of it. And in October, my brother had a horrific asthma attack that was nearly the end of him.
But 1984 dawned full of promise in my young eyes. A bad year was behind me, and better things were surely ahead.
The first few days were good ones. Then came Jan. 7, when my brother finally succumbed to his disease. The year didn’t get better from there. I remember getting sick a lot and missing a ton of school. I hated school so I should have been happy. But I knew I’d have to make up all that school work or end up repeating 7th grade. I had already been kept back in 1st grade, so I didn’t welcome that prospect.
I was sent to stay with my maternal grandparents in Florida for two weeks because my parents thought it would do me good. I was a miserable prick the entire time, and looking back on it I feel bad for my grandparents.
I was also deep in the grip of puberty and I was getting fatter by the day. Prednisone had swollen my face to the point where my head looked like the bottom half of Jabba the Hutt. Since I was just starting to care about girls, that didn’t bode well for me.
I would have other bad years: 1996, when my best friend killed himself and my fear and anxiety had the better of me; 1997, where the pain of what happened the year before was almost too much to take and I started eating and smoking heavily, and much of the time between 2001 and 2007, when I finally started coming unglued and realized I could do something about it or let everything go down in flames.
But a lot of wonderful things happened in those years.
So when I look back on it, maybe all those years weren’t so terrible. Bad things happened, but I’ve learned that a good life is in how you deal with the bad as well as the good.
I’ve also learned to lower my expectations.
When your expectations are low, you can’t help but be pleasantly surprised by the direction life takes you in.
Sure, sometimes I still get my hopes up about things. But I’d like to think I’m more rooted in reality now.
There’s something about living through one or two big snowstorms a week that puts your anti-depressant medication to the test. Let’s see how I’m doing on this one…
Like many of my fellow New Englanders, I’m getting pretty tired of all this winter weather. There’s nowhere to put the stuff anymore, and there’s the constant worry of one of these storms fucking up my travel plans.
I got a wave of depression rolling through me right now. Not the sad, everything sucks kind of depression, but the grumpy variety that makes me more of a curmudgeon than usual. On days like this I drop a lot of F-bombs with smug self-righteous satisfaction.
That’s OK. No one gets hurt, and I wait until the kids are in another room to let the profanity loose.
I’m working from home today because we’re supposed to get 8 inches. I’m working from home tomorrow because we’re expecting another 6-12 inches. Some folks would be excited about working from home all the time, but the truth is that I go bat-shit crazy if I’m separated from my Framingham office for too long. I need face-to-face interaction with my colleagues to help fuel my creativity. I get restless, and that’s not good.
So here I am, back in my favorite living room chair, the kids playing with Legos in front of me. I missed these guys and I missed Erin. It’s good to be home. Too bad I’m feeling down.
It’s not my family’s fault. I get this way after traveling sometimes. The ShmooCon conference was terrific and it was good to see a lot of security friends. But I also pushed myself to the edge by writing nine posts in my security blog (six alone on the ShmooBus ride from Boston to D.C.) and three articles on top of that. I write a lot because I enjoy it and the content at these events inspires me. But I pay a price.
So I have this coming down the mountain feeling. A blue feeling.
But it’s not a sad depression. It’s more of the tired variety. Which gets me thinking:
The other day I wrote a post about making peace with the frequent bouts of depression. I was trying to address a question a friend at the conference asked me because of her own struggles, but I wasn’t sure that I adequately got the right words out of my head.
Then I got a comment from Katherine Allen, a reader of this blog who is also a a family therapist. She put what I was trying to say into words that absolutely nail it. I’m glad she keeps up with this blog, because I always learn from what she has to say. Her latest comment is one I need to share beyond the comments section, because it addresses my friend’s question and puts the brand of blues I have now into the proper perspective:
I hear struggles like this a lot. I sit with clients and wonder about what their definition of happiness is, true lasting happiness not the giddy “sunshine and lollipops” moments that are sometimes confused with happiness. Definitely, changing expectations is a mandatory, but I like to add to that changing the definition of emotions and their validity. All emotions are valid and they all exist for a reason, we are all exposed to every one of them, from the highest joys to the deepest pains (unless of course someone is self medicating) and instead of wondering “why me/poor me” I challenge people to move to the next place of “this hurts, but what do I want to do about it?”
Small bouts of depression are normal for all of us. It is the brain’s way of demanding time, to slow down, reconsider, regroup. Yes, chronic depression is something entirely different but I don’t think that’s what the majority of people are suffering from when they express frustration like your intro does.
I’d like to also offer up the idea of redefining pain, too. I believe we should embrace pain, again not as a why me but rather as an opportunity to learn and to grow into the next higher level of development. Did you ever see Mother Theresa say “well, that’s enough for me, I think I’m good”. No. Or the Dalai Lama, or Ghandi. There is no end to the potential of growth and we are only limiting ourselves by fearing the pain associated with that growth.
Actually, I’m not going through a wave of depression right now. But it does come and go and I’ve had to learn how to be OK with it. A new friend who found this blog told me she’s struggling with the concept.
This post is directed toward her. It’s my attempt to answer some questions she asked me about it.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:3p7XSsT6AFs9lCkv6FtLbj]
You mentioned that you have frequent bouts of depression medication and therapy don’t seem to touch, and that you’re at a point where you’re learning — trying to learn, anyway — how to live with it and be happy, even though you’re kind of resigned to the notion that true happiness is beyond your reach.
The answer is complicated, but it goes something like this:
First, I should mention that I still have my ups and downs and always will. Bad things will still happen, but I know beautiful things will happen, too.
Too much OCD out of control will almost always send me back to the depressed place.
A couple years ago I started to wonder if I’d ever understand true happiness in the face of these chronic conditions. The answer, I’ve found, is yes. Sort of.
I don’t think I’m happy in the conventional sense. But I don’t think anyone really enjoys that kind of happiness.
And that’s the problem.
We have an overdeveloped sense of what happiness is supposed to be. I call it the Happily Ever After Syndrome. We have this stupid idea that if we can just get the right job, find the right mate, accumulate the right amount of material things and have as little conflict with people as possible that we’re going to be on cloud nine for the rest of our lives.
Deep down we know that’s bullshit. But we reach for it anyway.
It’s a battle of false expectations. And when we can’t reach those expectations, it’s a huge let-down. It creates a hole in our souls that we try to fill with more material things and with alcohol, food, drugs or a combination of the three. For others, porn works, too.
That stuff makes us feel better for a few minutes, but before long we feel worse than ever.
I think that hole is still in me. But through the Grace of God it’s gotten a lot smaller.
My faith is part of it. Some people shut right down when you mention faith, but I can’t avoid the subject, because believing in a higher power and fighting tooth and nail to devote myself to Him is something that filled me with a peace I didn’t have previously.
Some people have told me it’s a waste to live that way because after death there’s nothing but darkness. OK, let’s supposed their right. I still have no regrets, because living this way is better than living with the shame I always felt when I was all about me. I’ve also noticed something about people who think I’m crazy for that: They never seem to be happy, either. But I try not to judge them. I’ve done enough wrong in my life to know that I’m in no position to do so.
That doesn’t stop me from being an ass at times, thinking I’m better than the next person. But it helps.
The biggest thing, though, is that at some point I changed my expectations. Some might say I lowered them. More accurately, I think I just discarded expectations altogether. Sometimes the expectations still swell beyond reality, but they’re much more in check than they used to be.
And through that process, I’ve discovered there is happiness. In being more accepting about the low points, I can deal with them more quickly and move on.
I like to think of these setbacks as growing pains. We’re supposed to have bad days to test the better angels of our nature. We’re supposed to learn how to move forward despite the obstacles that used to make us hide and get junked up. When you can stay sober and keep your mental disorders in check despite a bad day, that’s REAL recovery.
This is where I consider myself lucky for having had Crohn’s Disease. That’s a chronic condition. It comes and goes. But you can reach a point where the flare ups are minimal.
It’s the same with mental illness and addiction. You can’t rid yourself of it completely. But you can reach a point — through a lot of hard work and leaps of Faith — where the episodes are minimal.
Accepting all this for what it is lets me be happy.
Prozac, therapy and the 12 Steps have helped me immensely. But they don’t take the deeper pain at your core away. These things just help you deal with the rough days without getting sucked back into the abyss.
The depression I experience now is more like a flare up of arthritis or a passing headache than that desperate, mournful feeling I used to get. It’s a nag, but it doesn’t break me. It used to break me all the time.
That’s progress.
Maybe I’m not happy forever after, but that’s OK. My ability to separate the blessings from the bullshit has improved considerably in the last five years.
Seeing The Neighborhoods perform at the Joe “Zippo” Kelley benefit last night reminded me of my old friend Danny Waters. He shared in many of the adventures — good and bad — of my youth.
Mood music:
It was Sean Marley who introduced me to Dan. It was 1986 and I dropped in on the Marley residence (2 doors down from me) on a Sunday morning. Sean and Dan had been up late the night before, drinking. Dan had a mop of blond hair and I couldn’t see his eyes.
The two were delighting in the sounds of a Randy Rhoads solo on a live bootleg one of them had acquired. That would be the first of many times the three of us would hang out like brothers. I was the little brother, and sometimes they treated me like it, laughing over and mocking something stupid I said. I gave them plenty of fodder.
At one point, Dan was living in a house at the very end of Pines Road, a street directly across from my house that ended in a boat ramp leading down to the water. I’d go there and check out his guitars. The man could play.
He was brutally shy, though, and he would be there one minute and gone the next. He also had an almost super-human ability to consume massive amounts of beer without dropping dead, though one time, after downing 20 beers, he practically spent the next 24 hours chanting, “I’m not well.”
The very first time I drank myself into a puking spree was in his apartment next the the Northgate shopping plaza on Squire Road. I sat on his bathroom floor for a long time counting the tiles. That somehow made me feel better.
I would get loaded in his company many times after that. I learned to hold my liquor, and the drinking parties would often alternate between his apartment (he later moved to an apartment off Revere Beach Parkway) and my basement in the Point of Pines.
Dan was good friends with Zane, a kid I wrote about in a previous post. Zane jumped off the top of a building in 1988. It would not be the last time Dan lost a close friend to suicide.
I always felt like Dan was more Sean’s friend than mine, and to an extent that’s true. Those two were joined at the hip between the mid 1980s and 1990s. I never would have met Dan or found common ground with him if not for the friend we had in common.
Dan and Sean also played a lot of guitar together. They eventually let me join in as singer. We wrote a few songs, but I can’t really remember them.
As the years progressed, Dan and I would hang out without Sean quite often. The three of us still hung out all the time, but at one point Sean was in an intense (some would say Sid-and-Nancy-like) relationship with a girl who looked like that singer from The Cure. The two fought as often as they took breaths, and their fights would usually start at one of the parties at my place or Dan’s.
Times where it was just me and Dan included a 1988 show at The Channel headlined by The Neighborhoods, the 1991 Lollapalooza festival with Rollins Band, Body Count, Nine Inch Nails and Jane’s Addiction, and low-key nights in his apartment, drinking and watching late-night TV.
One night I freaked out because I consumed two beers and an entire stick of marijuana by myself in the concrete storage room beneath the front patio of my basement hangout.
The fellow who gave it to me was about 500 pounds and wore a black trenchcoat, even during the summer. He died Valentine’s Day 2009 of a heart attack. I lost touch with him as I became focused on career and learned after his death that he had led an admirable life of aiding the mentally disabled. Anyway, I was freaking out because, in the midst of lying on my bed enjoying the high, I suddenly got the idea that I just might have a heart attack. That’s one of my earlier memories of an anxiety attack.
I called Dan.
He drove over and found me pacing up and down the driveway in a blue-green polka-dotted bathrobe I used to own. It was well after midnight.
He took me to Kelly’s Roast Beef and bought me a box of chicken wings. The binge-eating addiction was well under way, and I downed the whole thing in seconds. That calmed me down. I settled into a state of high where I’d let out a “heh heh” every few seconds.
Kelly’s was always a favorite place for me to binge eat away my troubles. It was as good as any drug or liquor store.
Sean got a kick out of the retelling later.
Later, Dan and Sean got into a scrape and I failed to return the favor and come to their aid. It was the fall of 1991, around the time that photo of the three of us above was taken. We were at Kelly’s and as we started walking back we noticed 10 punks were following us.
I freaked and walked ahead, ducking into what was then a bar-restaurant called The Driftwood. I looked back to see the punks circling Sean and Dan, kicking the shit out of both. I had a bartender call the cops and went back outside. By then it was all over. Dan had a black eye. The two limped their way back to the Pines. I stayed a few paces in front of them.
If I could relive that moment, I would have stayed with them and taken my beating, too. It would have made me a better friend. I’d also enjoy retelling the story today, because I wouldn’t look so pathetic in the rear-view mirror.
In 1996, I was living back in The Point of Pines and me, Dan and Sean would walk to Kelly’s every Sunday morning for coffee.
They would usually walk a few paces ahead and talk about a Skinny Puppy song or whatever else I wasn’t paying attention to because I was starting a deep descent into a dark place marked by fear, anxiety and vicious binge eating. Those days, Sunday was for getting myself into a state of anxiety and depression about the upcoming work week. The job was fine. I wasn’t.
Sean was in much worse shape than I was. I don’t know how aware Dan was of just how bad he was getting, but I was all but oblivious. I was too locked inside my head to see what was happening.
Thank God Sean had Joy. She did everything she could to bring him out of his deepening depression. He took his life anyway, but I love her all the more just for being his wife and shouldering a burden I was too self-absorbed to share at the time.
The day Sean died, I spent much of the afternoon frantically trying to reach Dan. When I finally got him on the phone, he collapsed into a pile of rubble on the other end. It’s not a stretch to say that was one of the worst moments of my life. I knew how tight they were, and Dan was more of a loner than I was, which meant he wouldn’t have as much of a support system as I had. I alienated my support system, of course. But that’s a story for another post.
Dan and I continued the Sunday walks into the spring of 1997. We always bought three cups of coffee. We always left the third cup on the beach wall for Sean.
That spring, Dan dropped out of my world. I wouldn’t reconnect with him until 2009 on Facebook. I spent all the time in between thinking he hated me for not doing enough on my end to help Sean. I eventually learned I was just being stupid.
Today Dan is doing just fine. He got married, had two beautiful daughters and lives in Texas.
He plays in a band called Three Kinds of People.
I miss him, and know we’ll never hang out like we used to. But when I think of how we both managed to survive a lot of ugly shit, it makes me happy.
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.
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.
A few days ago, rumors wafted around the Internet about Facebook shutting down in mid-March. Panic ensued, illustrating just how addictive this thing has become.
Call me nuts (well, I am a little nuts). But as a guy who’s recovering from a runaway addiction, I know it when I see it.
And since an addict is forever playing a frustrating game of whack-a-mole, I admit the thought of Facebook going away panicked me a little, too.
There are times when I’m embarrassed by my own Facebook behavior. Sometimes I’ll stare at it for hours even if there’s really nothing new happening. It’s easy to use it to be a busybody and nose around in other people’s worlds, though some folks are only too happy to supply the fodder.
Last summer my friend Linda noted that I changed the settings on my Facebook page to allow wall comments. It amused her because it was my birthday. She knows me well. Truth is, I wanted to see the birthday messages. I have an ego to stroke.
I suffer from an inflated ego. It’s a side-effect of where I’ve been. I have this odd fear of being forgotten. And I didn’t want to be forgotten on my birthday. It sounds ridiculous. But there it is.
OCD types have big egos. Achieving big things is one of the ways we try to fill in that hole in our souls. In my profession, getting access to the major power players of information security is a rush. I feel like I am somebody as a result. When I don’t make it to a big security conference, the wheels in my head start spinning. I start to worry that by not being there, I become irrelevant.
With this blog, when I write something that really connects with people, the ego grows a few sizes larger.
I’m somewhat ashamed about this. But I also think it’s a common thing among us. When people say they want their birthday to pass quietly without hearing from people, I don’t buy it.
Everyone wants some attention. That is exactly why Facebook took off.
People suddenly found they had a way to project themselves in ways never before possible. Wannabe writers suddenly got to become “published” writers because they had a platform to do it with. For the most part, this has been a good thing, because a lot of those writers are very good.
But it’s also become an outlet for a never-ending supply of mind junk. And I’m only too happy to consume it.
There’s small comfort in the fact that I’m not alone.
For me it’s complicated further by my profession. In the media world I exist in, proliferating your content is vital to survival. If nobody sees the content, why would anyone want to advertise with us?
So I can’t completely put Facebook down and walk away.
I also use it to push out the contents of this blog. I won’t lie: Some of it is driven by my OCD impulses, some of it is because I badly want to break some stigmas.
Facebook, Twitter and the like are like a rushing river. Throw a toy boat on the water and it’ll be gone from view in milliseconds.
So we throw duplicate copies of the toy boat into the current every few hours.
I’m no better than the other people who worried about Facebook going down.
I also know people who can stay off Facebook for days and weeks at a time. I envy them.
The best I can do, since I can’t extract myself from Facebook, is be a positive voice and give people something they might be able to use while I’m here.
There’s a lot of good in my life today. I’ll never take it for granted like I did back then.
Have I led a tragic life? No fucking way.
I’ve lost a lot of people I cared for and my body has been through the meat grinder. But that can never take away the blessings.
And it’s not over yet.
To understand this, just think about your own life. You’ve no doubt experienced sickness and death, family dysfunction and career ups and downs.
If you haven’t, you will.
In between the rough patches, I fell in love with and married the best gal on Earth, had two precious children who keep me laughing and loving, I’ve enjoyed a lot of success in my career, traveled to a lot of cool places and found God.
That stuff doesn’t suck.
Then there’s the joy I feel every day in recovery. All the great friends I have, doing a job I love and having the OCD under control.
Would I want to go through the bad stuff again? Of course not. But the weird truth is that I’m not sure I’d change the past, either. It’s easy for someone to wish they had a lost loved one back in their life and that they were less touched by illness.
But without having gone through these things, would I be where I’m at today?
