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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, and whose progress over the years has inspired 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.

Wendi’s 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 was caught in the middle of all that.

 

Sometime around 1991, things started coming to a head. 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. It’s been heartening to see.

This post is my long overdue hat tip to you, Wendi. I love you.

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Discriminating Against Head Cases

I’ve seen plenty of examples of failed justice in my day: A judge letting an abusive dirt-bag dad get unsupervised weekend visits just because he reappeared after a few years. A thrice convicted pedophile being let back out on the streets. I never expected to hear about the court discriminating against someone for having OCD.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI3RneGO_ks&fs=1&hl=en_US]

I usually try not to write posts in response to comments that flow into this blog. I like to let readers’ statements stand on their own. But when someone flags something particularly insidious, I have to share.

The two examples that follow came my way by way of a couple mental health forums on LinkedIn where I post blog entries.

I’ll keep their names to myself to protect privacy.

But to help you appreciate the first person’s perspective, I’ll tell you she’s a certified mediator who provides psychotherapy for adults, children, couples and families. She also does group sessions for anger management, domestic violence and parenting.

I have a special respect for someone in this line of work. As a kid suffering from a particularly vicious form of Crohn’s Disease and, by extension, behavioral issues, I firmly believe I was saved by the children’s therapist assigned to me. That same person kept me on the sane side of the line when my parents’ marriage dissolved in hatred, abuse and mistrust.

In adulthood, my recovery from OCD would be nowhere without the three therapists who have helped me in the last six years.

I’ve had a couple really bad therapists along the way, too, so I never take someone’s word as Gospel just because of what they do for a living. But the person who contacted me yesterday seems solid and worth listening to. Here’s what she wrote to me in response to Monday’s post, “More Bullshit About Mental Illness“:

My clients just lost their kids in family court because the mom had OCD. She “counts” and so this was considered “traumatizing to the two older kids.” They are in their teens, however; the bureau allowed them to keep their two younger children. The Child and Family Services organizations are off their rocker. I see kids returned to abusers and drug addicts, I don’t get it.

There are elements about this that I have questions about. For starters, why take the teenagers but let the younger kids stay? I suspect it’s because the teenagers are at an age where seemingly abnormal behavior is going to freak them out more. Teens are almost always confused. But the larger suggestion that someone got a raw deal in the courts because of her OCD quirks is totally believable to me.

I’ve seen more than one fellow OCD sufferer scorned in the workplace for being a little different. Not in my workplace, but in other companies.

True or not, I think that when someone has OCD, they always need to be prepared to defend themselves against someone else’s stupidity. Of course, it’s not enough to say someone discriminated against you for having a mental illness. You need to be able to prove it. That shouldn’t be hard for obsessive people who are known to be painfully diligent at documenting things.

Breaking a stigma is hard. There’s no play book. There’s always the danger of coming across as delusional or whiney. Come to think of it, some of us ARE delusional and whiney.

Despite all I say about breaking stigmas and fighting back, I have to be honest and say that I’ve never experienced the kinds of things people write to me about. I’m very lucky. I’ve gotten nothing but support from every office I’ve ever worked in. If I was going through depression and needed time off, I got it. When I decided to write this blog, the folks at work were very supportive.

You might say that for an OCD patient, I’ve led a charmed life.

I do know this, though: When you take a skeleton like mental illness out of the closet and toss it to the middle of the street for all to see, the control it has over you lessens and the bones of the disorder turn to ash.

I’ve lived it. I know it. I used to live in mortal terror of speaking up for myself. Once I got over that initial hump, there was no turning back.

Another reader recently wrote to me about the injustices she has suffered for having a mental illness:

I have two very bad instances of discrimination based on mental illness. I worked for medical doctors for ten years, had all outstanding performance reviews, and received bonuses periodically. I began to have trouble functioning because of undiagnosed and untreated bipolar disorder. I had doctors working with me who told me I needed a leave of absence to get medical care. I went to my boss, the executive director and an MD, and told him what my therapist and neurologist recommended. His words were “I’m a doctor, I can’t have someone with a mental illness in a position of authority in a company I run!” Second case, my supervisor docked my pay for going to the doctor even though I was exempt. Also, she told me that I had to have therapy sessions via phone or email because she couldn’t afford to let me leave the office. She also told others about my illness without my permission. It was at that point I decided I have to try and find a way to work for myself even if I had to leave in a homeless shelter.  I will never be treated that way again.

Me neither, my friend.

I can’t tell someone how to fight back when a judge or employer screws them over their illness.

I only know what I do: Minimize the impact of my OCD by exposing it for all to see through my writing.

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Dreading the Darkness

It’s 5:12 a.m. on Aug. 31, and it’s still dark outside. I already miss the 4:30 a.m. daylight of a couple months ago. Looks like my anti-depression experiment is underway.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PntIAwAe20M&fs=1&hl=en_US]

I’ve mentioned before that the fall and winter are usually periods of depression for me. There are two reasons. The first is that some ugly things have happened to me in previous winters.

But the bigger reason is that the hours of daylight get progressively shorter, which always screws with my brain chemistry.

And so, on Aug. 1, my doctor and I started an experiment: Up the Prozac dosage early and get ahead of the winter, thus cutting the annual depression off at the knees.

There’s still been enough daylight to keep me from thinking about it too much. But now that September is upon us, I’m starting to feel a slight sense of dread.

What if this experiment down’t work?

What if it does and something bad happens because, well, bad things have happened in winter before? That’s the fear of loss thing I experience.

Having OCD means I can spin these concerns in my brain for hours. But while all these things go through my mind, I’m still feeling a sense of peace. I have a feeling things are going to turn out fine this time.

That’s not to say I won’t experience depression. But I at least have the happy feeling that I’m doing something about it instead of sitting on my ass feeling sorry for myself.

That’s the key difference between now and the past. I’ve learned to take action. When you’re on the move, it’s a little harder for the bad stuff to catch you.

I’m on team for a Men’s Cursillo weekend in October, so I’ll be giving God a lot of my time this fall. Since prayer always heals me, this will certainly help.

I’ll continue to sponsor people in Overeater’s Anonymous, which is good because when you’re trying to help others help themselves, there’s not nearly as much time to sit around and spin the what-ifs in your mind.

My children will be in school, which means there will be a lot of school activities to keep the mind busy. There will be field trips to chaperone, homework assignments to help with and lunches to make.

There will be plenty going on with work to keep me busy, including trips to New York and Toronto.

And there will be plenty of good books to read and music to hear.

Life can be a lot of work. But it doesn’t suck.

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Summer of 1990

I’m not sure why, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the summer of 1990. That was a rough summer with a serious streak of depression. And yet thinking about it takes me to a happy place.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0z6ATxLk8Q&fs=1&hl=en_US]

I’ve had to do a lot of digging into my past as part of my therapy and recovery from OCD. Sometimes I see it as a waste of time, since you can’t change the past. But it is important to get closure on the things that haunt you so you can move on. I can’t explain why. I only know from experience that it’s true.

That said, let’s dive back to this summer 20 years ago.

I was getting ready for my second year at North Shore Community College. I was hell-bent on becoming a writer by this point, but it hadn’t yet taken the form of journalism. Instead, I wrote a lot of song lyrics and poems. If you saw them, you would laugh. My favorite was something I penned as my friend Aaron was throwing up all over my basement hideaway because I insisted he get drunk with me. We split a bottle of vodka and he had eaten McDonald’s beforehand. The puke looked like brown confetti.

I sat on the floor as he passed out on my bed, and I wrote about the fear that I had just killed my friend. Twenty years later, we’re both still alive and kicking.

Back then I was binge eating and drinking with plenty of pot mixed in. To control my weight in the face of such behavior, I would run circles in the living room of the basement apartment for one to two hours at a time.

I remember being pretty down on myself because I couldn’t find a girlfriend. For some stupid reason, I thought I needed one.

I spent that summer working in my father’s warehouse and hated every minute of it. I’d put the headphones on and listen to my metal to pass the time, and the summer became all about getting through the days until the college semester started back up.

I tried to escape in movies a lot. Aaron, his then-girlfriend Sharon (a good friend to this day) and I went to the Showcase Cinemas in Revere a lot. One Sunday, we saw a movie called “Flatliners,” about some medical students who engage in an experiment of near-death to get a peek at the afterlife (or something like that). It was a dark movie, and for whatever reason, it sent me into a deep, deep depression.

That same week, Iraq invaded Kuwait and my depression deepened. I had a real fear of current events back then, and everyone was talking about Saddam as the next Hitler and people were mentioning the WW III segment in the Nostradamus book of predictions. This was it, the start of World War III, I thought.

Ironically, it was Sean Marley — a friend who would take his own life six years later — who snapped me out of it. He was on a real anti-government kick by that point, and he convinced me — rightly or wrongly — that the way to cope was to rebel against everything the government stood for. So that’s what I did. One day, in Sean’s car, I torched a dollar bill with my cigarette lighter after someone mentioned it’s illegal to destroy money. I was a real rebel at that point, in my own stupid mind.

I began to read a lot about the 1960s counter-culture movement in the face of the Vietnam War and that gave me inspiration. I started listening to The Doors a lot.

One movie that made me feel better that summer was “Pump Up The Volume” with Christian Slater. To this day, I think that movie has one of the best soundtracks of all time. Hence my choice of today’s mood music. That Soundgarden song was part of the soundtrack. The movie added fuel to the rebellious fire I was stoking.

A lot of life has happened since that summer. Some of it has been good and some of it bad.

But that summer of my 20th birthday was a turning point for me. I can’t describe it perfectly, but that summer was the first time I really, truly started to examine who I was, what I believed and what I wanted to be. It took nearly another 20 years to figure it out, and I guess I’m still figuring it out.

But that uneven summer was a start.

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One of My Biggest Regrets

Yesterday I saw many old friends from my Eagle-Tribune days at the retirement send-off for legendary editor Cheryl Rock. It was a great afternoon. But one of the people I saw there brought back the powerful memory of one of the worst things I ever did.

I didn’t talk to Sally Gilman. I guess I felt too awkward and nervous. She didn’t say anything to me, either. She probably doesn’t remember me. But what I did to her was awful.

It was sometime in late 2000 or early 2001. I was the assistant editor of the paper’s New Hampshire edition and I reported to a manging editor who made my brand of control-freakism look like a minor, passing cold. I’ll keep his name out because I’m about to say some not-so-nice things about him.

I was warned about him when I was about to take the N.H. job. One editor said I would have to play good cop to this guy’s bad-cop style. That was very good advice that I didn’t take.

Instead, I gave in to my instinct to please my masters — this particular master, anyway. His attitude was that all the reporters were children who needed their ears slapped back on a regular basis, and he expected me to carry out his will. It was against my instincts, because I wanted to be known as a nice guy. But I pushed on. When he told me to take a reporter to the woodshed because that person wasn’t performing as he felt they should be, I did.

Sally was one of those reporters who was always in his sights. It was ridiculous, because she was older and wiser than we were. She had been covering New Hampshire for many years. She lived there. We should have just let her do her thing, because it was good enough.

But he wanted more. If an idea wasn’t something you could turn into a multi-story enterprise package with seven sources per story, then it was crap. Community journalism was a mark of laziness, apparently.

He was always on Sally to come into the North Andover, Mass. office to work more often. She resisted, because New Hampshire was where the action was. She lived there. She once noted that the New Hampshire plates on her car increased her credibility with sources, and she was right.

Still, it became my job to push her to come to the office. It seems absurd in this day and age, where you can easily work from anyplace that has a wi-fi connection. But even back then, e-mailing in a story was simple enough.

But we wanted the stories inputed directly into the newsroom’s Lotus Notes-based system. We felt we shouldn’t have to reformat copy on deadline. Perhaps we were the lazy ones.

One morning, Sally filed an incomplete story. I can’t remember exactly what the problem was. But the boss was pissed off about it, and he told me to give her a kick in the ass. Her husband was having some serious surgery that day and we both knew it. But he ordered and I got on the phone and gave her a talking to.

An hour or so later, Steve Lambert, the top editor, called me to his office. I went in there to find him, my direct boss, and editor Al White. Considering what I had done, they went pretty easy on me. There was no yelling. Steve just asked me what happened and I told him. The N.H. managing editor sat there with a very red face. It was always red, mind you. But it was particularly glaring in Steve’s windowless office.

It turns out that Sally had called to complain. She was really upset. How dare an editor call her early in the morning to give her a hard time about something trivial on a day when her husband’s life was hanging in the balance.

Steve agreed with her, as well he should have. But he was still calm about it. He told me I needed to ease up. He didn’t want reporters to see me as the newsroom ass-clown. I said I’d keep that in mind and left his office, feeling like I had just been simultaneously stabbed in the side of the head and slammed in the gut with a brick.

Ten-plus years later, the way I treated her is one of my biggest regrets.

Some could try to absolve me of fault because I was carrying out orders. But the truth is that I could have stood up to this managing editor and told him that was not the day to push this poor woman.

I could have been the good cop, smoothing out the rough feelings reporters were having over his management style. It would have been insubordination on my part, but it would have been the right thing to do. Instead, I was just another bad cop, no better than he was.

I badly wanted to tell Sally I was sorry yesterday. But I couldn’t get up the courage to approach her.

I’m going to find her phone number and let her know how sorry I am.

One more note about that managing editor: I eventually reached my breaking point with him and asked for a transfer. Al sent me back to the night editor’s chair. Al was always a hard guy to read, but I think he knew I was a pile of rubble at that point, so I thank him for giving me that second chance.

One night after I returned to that position, I was asked to help the New Hampshire desk process election results from the various towns we covered. Around 4 a.m., the managing editor started to go into a diabetic shock. Another reporter called his wife and I hit the streets in search of a store that was open so I could get him some orange juice.

He later recovered enough to drive home. I stuck around and finished his work. It wasn’t hard, because I’d been left to finish his work many times.

I’m not proud of this, but there were moments after that where I would think about that orange juice I got him and regretted doing so. Maybe, I thought in my delusional mind, I could have saved reporters a lot of future suffering. Fortunately, I’m not the kind of guy who would do such a thing. If someone’s life is in danger, you help them. Pure and simple. That I had those thoughts still fills me with shame.

He’s still in the business, but I have no interest in connecting with him. The feeling is mutual, I’m sure.

In hindsight, that incident with Sally was a classic case of OCD run wild. Back then the condition hadn’t yet been diagnosed, but it was there, eating away at my brain, making me do bad things.

I don’t think I can ever apologize enough for some of the things I did in that job.

I was really coming undone at that point, but I hadn’t yet hit the series of bottoms I had to reach before I realized I needed help.

Today, the lessons are clear to me:

–Treat everyone as you wish to be treated yourself because that’s what God wants and it’s right.

–People who report to you will always do more for you if you skip the hard-ass bit and be more caring and nurturing.

–Finally, being a people-pleaser is just plain stupid, whether it’s a family member, a friend or a boss. People-Pleasing never works. You can never make everyone happy.

When you try, you do really stupid things.

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Bully’s Remorse

There was a kid in high school everyone used to pick on. He had a monotone voice and was frail. Kids were terrible to him, including me.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:5Qy0zLjQy3czoj0yZ7DFkk]

For you to understand what I’m about to get into, a review of the 12 Steps of Recovery are in order, with special emphasis on 8 and 9:

1. We admitted we were powerless over [insert addiction. Here’s mine]—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. [Here’s what I’ve come to believe]

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

So I’ve been thinking about my former classmate a lot these days. I haven’t seen or heard from him since the day we graduated 23 years ago. I often wonder where he is, what he’s doing and if he’s ok.

He was the kid everyone made fun of — brutally. And I was probably one of the biggest offenders for the first two and a half years of high school. On the surface he took our taunts with an expressionless face. How he reacted out of view I can only imagine.

There were a lot of bullies at Northeast Metro Tech (it used to be “Vocational School” and we all called it the Voke) and I was made fun of a lot. I was picked on for being fat, for my lack of skill in sports and other things real or imagined.

So what did I do after being picked on? I turned around, found the kids who were weaker than me and attacked them verbally and physically. Mostly verbal, but I remember throwing punches on occasion. Some of it was the reaction to getting picked on. Most of it was from the growing chip on my shoulder over my brother’s death and other unpleasantness at 22 Lynnway in Revere.

By junior year, I had lost a lot of weight and grown my hair long. I was deeply into metal music by then and I started to make friends among some of the so-called metalheads. He had also latched onto metal as a refuge from his pain (he was also pretty religious), and we started to relate over music.

Junior and senior year I made a big effort to be nicer to him, and in the mornings before classes began I would hang out with him. Or, I should say, I let him follow me around. I was still a jerk but was trying to be nice because I was under the influence of another brother, Sean Marley.

So why have I been thinking about him? Because I don’t feel like I did enough back then to set things right. It’s one of my big regrets.

At our 20-year high school reunion in 2009, someone mentioned seeing him at a bus stop going to work.

Sometime soon I’m going to track him down. I have a couple leads on his current whereabouts.

I simply want to say I’m sorry. Someone once suggested I want to make amends to make myself feel better; that I want everyone to see how cool I am doing things like this and writing about it. Maybe there’s some truth to that — the first part anyway. But it’s about more than that. I want to get to know the dude again, if he’s up for it.

If I get to make my amends, you won’t be reading about it here. Righting a wrong will be good enough for me.

bullies

 

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Riding The Blue Pill

Today an experiment begins. Though it’s still summer, I’m going back up an extra 20 MG on the Prozac. The goal: Avoid the deep slide into depression that usually comes just in time for the Christmas season.

Mood music: “She Rides” by Danzig:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnizbRoqv84&hl=en_US&fs=1]

I was at 60 MG for the winter and most of the spring, but dialed it back to 40 in May. The reason I’m going back up, though I feel fine, is because August is when the days start to get noticeably shorter.The therapist believes upping the dose now will prevent a repeat of the usual blue moods that hit me when the sunlight becomes more scarce.

It’s interesting that this experiment would begin on Aug. 2. Twenty years ago today, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and all the talk about Saddam Hussein being a new Hitler threw me into a deep, fear-induced depression that August. Back then my OCD always manifested itself in a fear of current events. In fact, it was only about four years ago when that brand of fear eased off.

That summer was actually the closest I came to suicidal thoughts. Ironically, it was Sean Marley — a man who would take his own life six years later — who talked me back to a certain level of sanity.

Most recently, in 2005, I had a long panic streak over the bird flu in Asia, which was predicted to be the next great pandemic, as deadly as the one in 1918-19. I would read every magazine and every website tracking all these world events as if my personal safety depended on it. If a hurricane was spinning in the Atlantic, I would watch with deepening worry as it edged closer to the U.S.

Though those fears are gone now, I still have the blue-to-black moods to contend with from time to time, so it’ll be interesting to see how this experiment works.

If it goes well, I may actually have a Christmas season I can enjoy, instead of walking around alternating between haze and craze.

The trick, meantime, is to avoid the short-term mood swings that go with a dosage change.

We’ll see.

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Friends Who Help You Heal, Part 2

For a lot of years, I didn’t have many friends. It’s not that people didn’t like me. It’s just that I chose to isolate from the rest of the world for a long time. People with mental illness and addiction do that sort of thing.

Mood music: “Damn Good” by David Lee Roth:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mIP7ySBXBg&hl=en_US&fs=1]

I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately, because these days I seem to be spreading myself thin making plans with a lot of people. It’s a problem that’s well worth having. A blessing, for sure.

I’ve gotten some good quality time in this week with my friends,  the Littlefields. They’re staying in a beach house on Salisbury Beach and invited me over.

I spent all Wednesday morning there and some of last night. I’ve learned a few things about this family: Kevin’s oldest daughter, Courtney, has a razor-sharp wit. She keeps her old man on his toes, much to my entertainment. I’ve also learned that Matty, the 5-year-old, likes to run around outside in his underwear and that seagulls are terrified of him. He also kicks serious ass on the Xbox.

I’ve gotten the chance to catch up with many more friends this summer. Some of this is the Facebook effect, reconnecting with a lot of people from the past. But for me, there’s a lot more to it.

For a long time I preferred to hole up in my room or in my car. It was easier to go on a binge that way. People always get in the way when you’re obsessed with getting junked up.

It was also too painful to talk to people. I was way too self-conscious to pay attention to anyone else. I was 280 pounds at one point, and didn’t want to be seen that way. I also had little in common with people in general. I was so isolated that all I did was watch science fiction shows on TV. Life can be limiting when all you have to talk about is Star Trek or Star Wars.

I filled up the rest of my time with work, trying hard to please the masters and working 80-hour weeks. That too is a great way to isolate. You don’t have to talk to too many people when you’re holed up in an office all the time.

Why Erin stayed with me through that period is beyond me. But she did.

When did the isolation break? Probably a few years into my recovery. Once I reached a point in therapy where I could start to manage the OCD and shed the fear and anxiety that always hung over me, I suddenly found myself hungry to see new places and meet new people. I’d say that turning point came sometime in 2007. I haven’t looked back.

I travel frequently for work, and when I do I always make time to see friends who live in whatever area I’m visiting — San Francisco, Chicago, Toronto, Washington DC, New York, etc.

As time goes on, the list of people to visit is getting a lot longer.

I didn’t see that coming.

But I’m not complaining.

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Lessons of a Thirty-something

The author is reflecting a lot on things that happened in his 30s.

Mood music: “Lunchbox” by Marylin Manson:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5Fo57AXW3w&hl=en_US&fs=1]

Since my 40th birthday is next month, I’m thinking a lot about the last decade. In many ways, I’m not the same guy I was when I was staring at my 30th birthday. This has been a decade of healing, with a lot of broken scabs along the way.

At the start of my 30s, I started to come undone. The symptoms of what would eventually become an OCD diagnosis suddenly grew in intensity. The binge eating addiction entered a new era of viciousness. Some relationships imploded while others were renewed.

In my early 30s, the OCD manifested itself in some insidious ways. I was obsessed with pleasing people, especially my bosses at The Eagle-Tribune, and my mother. I was also obsessed with keeping my weight down in the face of the binging. So I exercised like a madman. In the process, I was just masking a physical decline.

At 31, I was busy being something I’m not good at — a hard-ass. My bosses demanded it. I would get wound so tight that I became impossible to work with. I was also busy trying to keep my mother and step-father happy, which was almost always impossible, especially when it came to their personalities clashing with that of my wife, who had given birth to Sean a year before.

I celebrated my 31st birthday with my mother, stepfather, in-laws and Erin at the Legal Seafood in the Peabody mall. I didn’t want a cake. My mother went nuts about it, because on someone’s birthday you give them cake. She couldn’t understand why I didn’t want it. She was going to ask the waitress to bring me a cake anyway, but Erin put her foot down, because, as I said, I didn’t want a cake.

The next day, my mother called:

Ma: “I just wanted to apologize for not having a cake for you.”

Me: “But I didn’t want cake.”

Ma: “I tried to get you one, but YOUR WIFE wouldn’t let me.”

It always came back to Erin. She was always the scapegoat for decisions I made that my mother didn’t like. And yet, I pressed on, trying to make everyone happy.

By 2006 I was long gone from The Eagle-Tribune, but was still obsessed with pleasing the masters at TechTarget. And I was still trying to please my mother. It was getting a lot harder to do, since I was two years into therapy, newly diagnosed with OCD and spending a lot of time digging back into an abusive past for clues on how I got the way I did. A lot of it came back to her. And so in the summer of 2006 that relationship broke apart.

Why go on about these things? Because some important lessons emerged from the experiences that were instrumental in my healing.

First, I realized that no matter how hard you try, keeping people pleased is impossible.

Second, I realized that the only way to achieve mental health is to be true to oneself. For me, that meant surrendering to a higher power and dealing head-on with the addictions. It also meant being honest about my limited ability to control OCD without medication.

And while some relationships fell apart, others that were damaged in my 20s started to heal in my 30s, especially in the last year.

To that end, I think of Joy, Sean Marley‘s widow. She’s remarried with kids and has done a remarkable job of pushing on with her life. She dropped out of my world for nearly 14 years — right after Sean’s death — until recently. The contents of our exchange are private, but this much I can tell you: I was wrong all these years when I assumed  she hated my guts and wanted nothing more to do with me.

I have to be careful with this last reconnection. I still have a lot of questions about Sean’s final years and the OCD in me wants to know everything now. If I’m lucky, some answers will come in time. But I’m not going to push. I have no right to.

Besides, simply being reconnected is, as Joe Biden might say, “A big fucking deal.”

I used the Marilyn Manson song above as my mood music today because I think of “Lunchbox” whenever I get angry about my limitations. By the time the song is over, I usually feel a lot better.

But while the kid in the song has his metal lunchbox and is “armed real well,” I got my tools of recovery. So you could say I’m armed much better than that kid.

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Where My Head Is At Today

The author turns a corner after a messy couple of weeks.

Mood music for this post: “Can’t Get It Out of My Head” by Velvet Revolver:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L374AQko1sY&hl=en_US&fs=1]

As the reader knows, I’ve had a choppy couple weeks. Money troubles. Back troubles. Multiple mood swings. Depression. The addiction demon calling to me. But I’m turning the corner. I knew I would.

I’ve done what I had to do to set things right. I tightened up my food plan considerably. I swallowed my pride and did what I had to do on the financial front. I’ve kept the urge to binge and break my sobriety and abstinence at bay.

The lesson I have to learn every few months is that there is no such thing as “happily ever after” once you clean up from addiction and find the proper treatment for mental illness. You ALWAYS have to manage it. And there are always downward shifts.

Actually, a correction: There is “Happily Ever After.” It’s just not the sugary pile of shit the folks at Disney would have us believe.

To me, happiness is to have constant challenges, whether it’s with the addiction and mental illness or the career stuff. To not be bored is to be happy. All in all, I couldn’t be happier with the direction my life is taking.

I love that I’ve been able to do a ton of writing and reporting at work despite the back pain, which once upon a time would have left me completely useless.

I love that I’ve gotten in so much family time in recent days.

The word “love” doesn’t fit into the financial situation, except that I am happy I can deal with that without the panic I used to experience with money. And that was when the cash flow was thicker.

I love that I even when my head isn’t perfectly clear, I can still enjoy precious moments like Monday night, when I babysat my niece and let her boss me around. That little 2-year-old is a boss for sure. And she never stops talking. She’s a Corthell girl, for sure.

So it’s Friday morning and I’m drinking coffee and listening to Velvet Revolver. The kids are fighting over computer games, so I’ve cranked up the music to drown them out.

I’m taking the family budget-bill-paying chore from Erin today (we trade off every three months, though she’s been handling it much longer than three months for this latest stretch).

I got some writing and reporting in the works for the day job. And I’m looking forward to all of it.

I’m sure there will be some more mood swings along the way. I’m sure my demon will call to me.

But I can deal with those fuckers and still be happy, because my perception of happiness is more in sync with reality.

Seize the day.