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Just a Little Patience

I recently stumbled upon this live version of GnR’s “Patience” and wanted to post it here because it’s always been an inspirational song to me.

Being an OCD-wired control freak with a knack for impatience and  endless attempts at recovery before I finally pulled it off, patience was a virtue I simply did not possess. It would be a stretch to say I’ve mastered it at this point in my life, but I at least appreciate it more than I used to.

I used to drop F-bombs to myself while driving every time I saw those bumper stickers that say things like “Easy Does It,” “One Day at a Time” and “Let Go and Let God.” Already seething in whatever traffic jam I happened to be sitting in at the time, those sayings would raise my anger level into orbit.

Years later, I understand those sayings and appreciate them in a way I never thought possible. My favorite is “Let Go and Let God,” just as the Serenity Prayer is one of my favorite prayers.

Anyway, I hope you get as much out of this song as I do:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjto02iDNZA&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

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It’s a Disease, Not a Choice

An open letter to those who are angry with a loved one whose addictions are off the rails.

Mood music:

This is one of those posts where I’m leaving names out to protect privacy. Still, the person this is meant for will know it’s for them, and he/she will be pissed at me. But that’s OK, because I’m saying something that needs to be said.

Right now, someone close to you has relapsed into alcoholism. This time it’s bad. You’re hurt and mad as hell because you remember a childhood where this sort of thing was a constant.

You might feel like hating this person right now because his relapse feels like a betrayal against you and you alone.

You’re wondering how the hell he could do this when he has so much to live for: grandchildren as far as the eye can see, a lot of the gifts he found a few years back when he got sober. It doesn’t make sense.

Here’s an attempt to explain it from someone who has been there. My problem was binge eating and a growing dependence on wine, further complicated by the variety of pain pills I was prescribed for the aches and pains caused, ultimately, by my bad habits. I was a less-than-ideal husband and dad. I couldn’t be relied upon.

I’d sneak around feeding my addiction and then cover my tracks. Sometimes I would blatantly lie about it. [See “The Liar’s Disease“] I didn’t lie to be evil. I did it because the shame was too much for me to handle.

You might also say I didn’t know any better.

One thing’s for certain: I didn’t wake up one morning and decide it would be a laugh riot to slowly destroy myself and hurt everyone around me in the process.

To you, looking at this loved one who is in relapse, you might feel that way. How the fuck could HE/SHE do this to YOU?

But here’s the ugly truth: Alcoholism — addictive behavior, period — is a disease. Nobody chooses it. They are chosen instead. It controls you like a puppet. You know as you’re doing that addictive action that it’s wrong and you hate every second of it. But your motor skills have taken over and you CAN’T stop.

Sure, we can shake it in time and find recovery, but relapse is a natural part of the disease. In fact, relapse is something I probably worry about the most, because I’ve been relatively lucky up to this point in my 12-Step program.

I know it can creep up on me and regain control at any moment, before I know what hit me.

In one of my favorite TV shows, “The West Wing,” Leo McGarry describes where the mind goes:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma3d-YdLjCs&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

“My brain works differently,” he says, followed by,” I don’t get drunk in front of people. I get drunk alone.”

It’s the same way for a food addict. You can’t have just one slice of pizza. It has to be the whole box. I once joked to a friends that I can’t eat just five. And when I really wanted to numb my frustrations in a bag of junk, I always went peddle to the metal out of sight from others; typically when I was alone in my car.

Yeah, the addicted brain works differently.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is this: Don’t hate the person who has fallen into relapse and disappointed you so badly. The person didn’t choose to be this way. He developed a disease a long, long time ago. And diseases have a habit of reasserting themselves from time to time. Sometimes the victim is not able to shake the relapse this time and it becomes the person’s demise.

It sucks. But it’s how it is.

Be mad. Be frustrated and hurt. But try and remember this person didn’t set out to hurt anyone.

Go easy on him/her, and yourself.

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Hitting Bottom: Songs and Backstory

Hitting bottom is the moment of truth for an addict, whether the shackles are made of heroin, booze or food. I’ve been there. You have a choice: Clean up your act or die a painful death that can be either quick or slow.

People ask me all the time about my big moment. The answer is that there wasn’t that one dramatic moment of hitting bottom.

It was more a series of bottoms. It was a multi-staged crash.

One crash was a couple months after my best friend took his life. I was binge eating with more zeal than ever, and I don’t think I cared at that point if my heart gave out. I was too crushed to care much about anything.

I had just been handed the job of editor for the Lynn Sunday Post, a paper that was already dying. I would be its pallbearer. The job included double duty as a writer for North Shore Sunday. I worked 16-hour days, six days a week.

Work was all I had at that point. Erin and I were engaged (realizing life is too short, I proposed a month after Sean died), but I was still trying to please my masters, so work came first. On Sundays, my only day off, I was sleeping through the entire day.

By the summer of 1997, I realized I had to push back or end up in an institution somewhere. Fortunately, my boss at the time saw that I was physically deteriorating and stepped in.

In December 1998, I was 285 pounds and collapsing under the weight. My father was too, and wound up getting quadruple bypass surgery. That was another slap in the face to warn me that I had to clean up. I lost 100 pounds, though I did it through unhealthy means that would explode in my face several years later.

In late 2001 I realized that I was never going to please the managing editor I worked for at The Eagle-Tribune. He was forcing me to be the type of manager I didn’t want to be — an asshole. So I told him I was going higher up the food chain to get reassigned. And that’s what I did. They put me back in the night editor’s chair, which helped for a short time.

By late 2004 I was out of The Eagle-Tribune and in a job I loved. But I was putting enormous pressure on myself and the physical toll was showing. All my personality ticks were in overdrive: the obsession with cleanliness. The paranoia over my kids’ safety. A growing sense of fear that kept me indoors a lot.

That was probably the deepest bottom to date, the one that made me realize I needed to get help from a therapist; help that led to my OCD diagnosis.

The next bottom was in late 2006, when I had developed many of the mental health tools I use today. But my brain chemistry was such a mess I couldn’t get past the fear and anxiety attacks. That’s when I decided to try medication, which has worked far better than I ever thought possible.

The last bottom was in the summer of 2008. I was finally finding some mental stability, but I surrendered to the binge eating during therapy and was back up to 260 pounds. And it was hurting my health in a big way. I kept waking up in the middle of the night, choking on stomach acid. I couldn’t find clothes that would fit me. I was getting depressed again.

And so I started checking out OA and by October was headlong into my 12-Step Program of Recovery.

I immediately dropped 65 pounds, and have maintained the same healthier weight of 198 pounds for more than a year.

All these events were bottoms.

I hit bottom for different things.

Hopefully, I’m done.

The whole back story is here.

One thing I do to remind myself of why I never want to go back there is listen to songs about hitting bottom, coming clean and getting punched in the face by the truth. Here are four favorites:

“Cold Turkey” by Cheap Trick (covering John Lennon):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e04OBJzbvc&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

“Girl With Golden Eyes” by Sixx A.M.:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKPbi-K6nNQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

“Under The Bridge” By Red Hot Chili Peppers:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsaubMAVHV8&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

“Coma” by Guns N Roses:

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

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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.

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The Mental Illness Stigma That Won’t Die

The author came clean about his own battles with mental illness and addiction exactly because of stupidity like this…

Mood music for this post: “Push Comes to Shove” by Van Halen, from the “Fair Warning” album:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3aW7oofNgs&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Kay Lazar from The Boston Globe wrote a story this week that sent my blood boiling. My problem wasn’t with the reporting or writing. She does a fine job. It’s the topic that burns.

The story, available here, is about firms putting limits on coverage for mental health care. It’s the same sorry song that ratchets up the fear level for those suffering from depression, OCD, bipolar disorder and the like.

It proves to the sufferer that mental illness is still viewed as a less-than-legitimate illness, something that’s more a figment of the sufferer’s imagination.

In the eyes of many health insurers, it appears this sort of thing doesn’t justify the same kind of coverage it offers for those with heart problems or asthma.

The industry can be just as daft when it comes to fair coverage of those things, too, but I look at mental health issues differently than most, given my own experiences. [Summed up in OCD Christmas, The Bad Pill Kept Me From The Good Pill and The Most Uncool Addiction]

Here’s the intro to Kay’s report:

Spiraling medical costs have driven many employers to place new limits on coverage for mental health care, raising concerns that the rules may violate federal regulations intended to make it as easy for patients to see therapists as other doctors.

At issue is the growing practice of requiring therapists to undergo lengthy and repeated phone interviews about their patients’ progress before the insurance company will approve further treatment. According to patients and therapists interviewed by the Globe, the reviews have established tougher criteria for additional visits and have been burdensome and intimidating. That has sometimes led to curtailed treatment and protracted appeals.

Among those feeling the squeeze are state and municipal employees who get their insurance through the Group Insurance Commission, a quasi-state agency that provides mental health coverage for more than 100,000 workers and their families.

The commission, facing double-digit increases in its mental health insurance costs, changed its rules last year and now requires therapists who are not in the commission’s roster of approved specialists to justify, usually through lengthy telephone reviews, a patient’s need for continued treatment after every 10 sessions. Previously, the commission simply required the therapists to regularly fax the insurer a progress report.

I would be simple to point the finger at one party and say they’re evil. Truth is, this is a mess that’s splattered all over the place. I think most employers want to do the right thing and offer the best coverage possible, but when costs spiral out of control they sometimes make decisions that prevent the mentally ill from getting the right treatment.

It’s especially easy to say the health insurance industry is the devil in this tale. After all, it’s the one making this outrageous demand for lengthy phone interviews before approving further treatment.

But I’m biased. My view of the health insurance industry is that decisions are based exclusively on the bottom line than on what’s right. I see it all the time. I also take the simple and probably naive view that if a sizable chunk of one’s salary is being used to pay for healthcare and all the extra expenses that come with medication, the insurer has no business putting the squeeze on patients.

I’m not an expert. I can only base my opinion on personal experience. But I’ve heard enough horror stories from other people to know this crap is for real.

That’s exactly why I started this blog.

I chose to out myself and share my experiences so other sufferers might realize they are not freaks and that they have a legitimate, very easily explained medical problem that’s very treatable. It takes that kind of understanding for someone to get up and get help.

I try not to engage in political debate because this is such a personal issue, though sometimes I have to make a point on current events like I did when Health care Reform passed in March.

I do know this, though: Many good people have died because of mental illness. They were ashamed and afraid to get help because of the stupid notion that they are somehow crazy and either need their ass kicked or be institutionalized. So they try to go it alone and either end up committing suicide because their brains are knocked so far off their axis or they die from other diseases that develop when the depression forces the sufferer into excessive eating, drinking, starvation, drug taking or a combination of these things.

There’s also the ridiculous idea that a person’s workmanship becomes valueless when they’re in a depression. If someone misses work because they have cancer, they are off fighting a brave battle. They are fighting a brave battle, of course. No doubt about it.

But depression? That person is slacking off and no longer performing.

I’ve been able to debunk that idea in my own work circle. It helps that I’ve been blessed to work with exceptional, amazing and enlightened people.

Luckily for me, I got rid of my fear and anxiety long ago, so I’m going to keep sharing my experiences. It probably won’t force change  or tear down the stigma single-handedly.

But if a few more people get just a little more fight in them after reading these diaries, it will have been well worth the risks.

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The Brenners Invade The White House

The author on returning from a journey that would have been impossible a few years ago.

It’s 5:30 a.m. and I’m running on less than four hours of sleep, so excuse any typos that follow…

I’m back in my “sunrise chair” the morning after returning from one hell of a road trip that included a private tour of the White House West Wing, a stay at buddy Alex Howard’s place and a stay with our wonderful Maryland relatives, Charron, Steve, Stevie and Maggie.

There’s a lot about the trip I’m still stunned about. I’m still in awe of the fact that I got to poke my head in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room and that I got a quick peek inside the Situation Room when a staffer was leaving the main room (the Situation Room is actually made up of several rooms).

I’m very thankful for Howard Schmidt for giving us the tour and for Alex for letting the whole family stay in his cramped but very cool townhouse on Capitol Hill.

I’m also thankful for the level of recovery I’ve achieved, because without it I never could have done the trip, especially with the whole family on an 8-hour drive down and a longer, 12-hour drive home Sunday (lots of traffic).
I’ll be honest and tell you I wasn’t perfect this trip. Friday morning we got a late start to the day and I found myself in an OCD-enhanced mood dive. It was a classic control freak out: I wanted to show Erin and the boys EVERYTHING. But with two small kids with shorter legs than their Dad, you can’t do that. And for a few hours Friday afternoon, as we walked from the Lincoln monument to the Museum of Natural History, I was in that brain-clouding mood I used to live with 24 hours a day.
But it was still a good day, and an even better night. Being in the West Wing of The White House, where every president of the last century has toiled away (some for the good, others for the not-so-good), was just magical for a history nerd like me. And I’m grateful my wife and children got to see it all.
It was a joy the next day to spend time with our Corthell cousins on the Maryland coast: Charron, Maggie, Steve and Stevie. Such a wonderful family. Charron took us to a maritime habitat that included time out on the water and inside a really cool lighthouse.
I especially enjoyed watching Maggie and Duncan bond during the boat ride.
So why wouldn’t this trip have been possible a few years ago? For starters, driving ANYWHERE outside the comfortable confines of the north-of-Boston area used to send me into panic. My fear and anxiety extended to a terror over getting lost. Even getting lost in Boston was cause for fear.
This trip, I did the whole drive down and back with none of that. I even enjoyed the journey.
I also wouldn’t have had the guts a few years ago to inquire about a White House tour. Too much work and I’d have to actually talk to someone with a big title. That would have been too intimidating.
I also would have been afraid to take the time off from work, since being a people pleaser was more important than living back then.
My 12-Step recovery program helped a lot. It kept me from wasting time and energy on binge eating and so I got to experience more from the journey. My Faith also helped, because I know now that the key to everything is to Let Go and Let God. I worked my tools, and everything was fine.
Not perfect. I feel like an idiot for taking that mood swing Friday afternoon. I also realize now more than ever that I’m addicted to computer screens. Erin decreed that we leave the laptops behind and I’m glad we did. But man was it hard to not run to a computer and upload those White House pics right after taking them. That’s something I still have to work on.
But then I knew I was still a work in progress. I always will be.
But I’m a grateful, lucky work in progress.
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Digging Through Trash, Finding Treasure

I’ve slowly been digging through a bunch of old boxes I put in storage in my father’s Saugus warehouse, and while I have yet to find my old journals, I did strike some gold in today’s rummage fest.

The biggest find of all: my late brother’s high school yearbook, which he never lived to see. Near the end of the book they put a page in tribute to him.

Also in the pile: A very faded photo of my brother fishing on the Marley Family boat. At the wheel is Sean Marley. This is around 1980, half a decade before the friendship between me and Sean truly began taking root.

I also found pictures of my great-grandmother, Jessie Wiener. To me, she was always “Granny.”

Expect upcoming entries that focus on these finds.

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Shakin’ the (Empty) Money Maker

The author on keeping sane when you gotta make do with less.

Mood music for this post:”What’s It Gonna Take” by Motley Crue:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wredTXeMS64&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

It’s easy to come undone when the money supply tightens up.

Just about everyone I know is feeling the financial hurt these days. In our case, we chose to take on the world of financial hurt. Erin has a cool editing business that deserves a chance to flourish and we had to take a chance for that to be possible. I don’t regret it for a second.

Success isn’t for those who play it safe.

But it can be a bitch when you have an addictive personality like I do. I put down the addictions that were going to be the death of me, but the trouble is that to keep the most destructive addictions at bay, people like me latch onto other vices. One is spending money. Not the crazy spending on fancy cars and clothes, mind you.

It’s the little things. The spending you do when it’s the path of least resistance and maximum comfort.

Buying dinner instead of cooking what’s in the fridge. Getting one of the high-octane coffee drinks at Starbucks when I should just stick to the coffee supply I have at home. Spending money on desk trinkets and books when I’m on vacation.

I do much better at keeping these habits in check now than I used to. I don’t really have a choice right now. But sometimes I do something stupid, like download new music from iTunes. When the Slash solo album came out, for example, I pressed the download button. Instant gratification. It didn’t even register in my head that the action mean Apple would be taking its money from one of the credit card numbers stored in the system.

Or when fueling up the car, I might grab a Red Bull without thinking. Red Bull is expensive, by the way.

Next week I’m taking the family to Washington DC, and we’re doing a lot of things to save money. Driving down instead of flying. Staying with a friend instead of paying for a hotel. Packing a lot of meals to have on the road instead of eating every meal in a restaurant. Given my most destructive addition, that would be a bad idea even if we were flush with cash.

But with two kids in tow, it’s going to make things a lot harder than it would be otherwise.

Though our financial burden is something I worry about, I’m not coming undone like I would have a few years ago. I would have stayed in bed or on the couch, binge eating on everything in site and drinking wine from the bottle. My brain would spin the problem around over and over and over again, with no solution at the end. I would punch walls and drive with all the road rage I could muster.

Those things aren’t happening, and for that I am grateful.

We have a roof over our heads and we’re in no danger of losing it. We still get the food on the table. Our clothing and medical needs are met. Most importantly, we have each other and God.

We’re very creative at finding things to do on the cheap or for free. We have a ton of wonderful friends and I’ve reconnected with some people who have been very important forces in my life. A friend who works at the White House is giving us a West Wing tour. That will be a huge experience for my kids, and it’s not costing a dime.

There are a lot of people out there who aren’t so lucky, and I really feel for them.

So I’m going to keep taking it a day at a time, and while it sucks being broke sometimes, I know things will work out.

They always do.

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Birthdays of the Dead

The author observes another birthday for someone who isn’t around to celebrate.

Mood music for this post: “On With The Show” by Motley Crue:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyapJ9iCWxA&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

I’m a lot better at remembering the day someone died than the day they were born. I guess that’s understandable. Birthdays come and go. Death dates for those who are close burn a scar into your brain that makes the moment feel like it only happened seconds ago. Even if its 14 years later or 26.

Today would have been my brother Michael’s 44th birthday. He died at 17. Sean Marley’s birthday is around Oct. 7 and I almost always forget until a week later. He died at 30.

It creeps me out to think that I’m almost 40, much older than two people who were always the older brothers I looked up to.

But for whatever reason, I woke up remembering that it’s Michael’s birthday.

The night he died — Jan. 7, 1984 — I remember clearly. He had had another bad asthma attack and we were used to them. When someone is having a major asthma attack in your presence, it’s a scary fucking thing. One of his attacks happened a year before his death while we were in a movie theater watching the James Bond “Octopussy” film. We never saw the end of it because we had to rush him to the hospital.

To this day, I have no interest in rewatching that film.

But on this night I wasn’t there. An ambulance was called in and I’m told he walked onto the back of the ambulance on his own. A couple hours later he was dead in Lynn Hospital, currently the site of a Super Stop & Shop. It shouldn’t piss me off to think he died in what is now the cereal aisle or the deli counter. But I guess it does a little bit.

Strangely enough, the memory of the day Sean Marley died is much more painful to think about, probably because I was grown up by then.

On Friday, Nov. 15, 1996 I was having a good day in the newsroom where I was writing for the Stoneham Sun. Sean had been spiraling downhill and I had last spoken with him around the previous Tuesday. He was pretty depressed during that call, and still I was too stupid and self absorbed to realize I should be taking the short walk down the street to his house to just be there for him. But I had a busy work day the following morning, and I just hung up the phone and shook my head.

So that Friday I get back to the office after attending a co-worker’s birthday lunch. The day was brilliantly sunny. Then my mother called. She was driving past Sean’s house and saw police, firefighters and an ambulance, all kinds of commotion and someone lying on the ground with EMTs standing over him. I knew at that moment it was the end. I called the Marley’s number and Sean’s wife, Joy, got on and told me he was dead.

Blog rewind: Lost Brothers

It’s been so long since Michael was with us that it’s sometimes hard to remember the exact features of his face. But here’s what I do remember:

We fought a lot. One New Year’s Eve about 30 years ago, when the family was out at a restaurant, he said something to piss me off and I picked up the fork beside me and chucked it at him. Various family members have insisted over the years that it was a steak knife, but I’m pretty sure it was a fork. Another time we were in the back of my father’s van and he said something to raise my hackles. I flipped him the middle finger. He reached for the finger and promptly snapped the bone.

We were also both sick much of the time. He had his asthma attacks, which frequently got so bad he would be hospitalized. I had my Chron’s Disease and was often hospitalized myself. It must have been terrible for our parents. I know it was, but had to become a parent myself before I could truly appreciate what they went through.

He lifted weights at a gym down the street from our house that was torn down years ago to make way for new developments. If not for the asthma, he would have been in perfect shape. He certainly had the muscles.

He was going to be a plumber. That’s what he went to school for, anyway. During one of his hospital stays, he got pissed at one of the nurses. He somehow got a hold of some of his plumbing tools and switched the pipes in the bathroom sink so hot water would come out when you selected the cold.

He was always there for a family member in trouble. If I was being bullied, he often came to the rescue.

I miss him, and find it strange that he was just a kid himself when he died. He seemed so much older to me at the time. To a 13-year-old, he was older and wiser.

He was close to a kid who lived two doors down from us named Sean Marley. After he died, I quickly latched on to Sean. We became best friends. In a way, he became a new older brother. Sean died in 1996 and the depression he suffered has been one of the cattle prods — next to my own fight with mental illness — for this blog.

A year after Sean died, I found another, much older brother named Peter Sugarman. He died in 2004 after choking on food.  His death sent me over the cliff with the OCD firing in every direction. That was the year I realized I needed help and started to get it.

Blog rewind: Marley and Me

Sean Marley, who introduced me to metal music, taught me to love life, and whose death has been one of the cattle prods for my writing this blog.

I had known Sean for as long as I could remember. He lived two doors down from me on the Lynnway in Revere, Mass. He was always hanging around with my older brother, which is one of the reasons we didn’t hit it off at first.

Friends of older siblings often pick on the younger siblings. I’ve done it. It happens.

Sean always seemed quiet and scholarly to me. By the early 1980s he was starting to grow his hair long and he wore those skinny black leather ties when he had to suit up.

On Jan. 7, 1984 — the day my older brother died — my relationship with Sean began to change. Quickly. I’d like to believe we were both leaning on each other to get through the grief. But the truth of it is that it was just me leaning on him.

He tolerated it. He started introducing me to Motley Crue, Ozzy Osbourne, Van Halen and other hard-boiled music. I think he enjoyed having someone younger around to influence.

As the 1980s progressed, a deep, genuine friendship blossomed. He had indeed become another older brother. I grew my hair long. I started listening to all the heavy metal I could get my hands on. Good thing, too. That music was an outlet for all my teenage rage, keeping me from acting on that rage in ways that almost certainly would have led to trouble.

We did everything together: Drank, got high, went on road trips, including one to California in 1991 where we flew into San Francisco, rented a car and drove around the entire state for 10 days, sleeping and eating in the car.

This was before I became self aware that I had a problem with obsessive-compulsive behavior, fear and anxiety. But the fear was evident on that trip. I was afraid to go to clubs at night for fear we might get mugged. When we drove over the Bay Bridge I was terrified that an earthquake MIGHT strike and the bridge would collapse from beneath us.

I occupied the entire basement apartment of my father’s house, and we had a lot of wild parties there. Sean was a constant presence. His friends became my friends. His cousin became my cousin. I still feel that way about these people today. They are back in my life through Facebook, and I’m grateful for it.

He was a deadly serious student at Salem State College, and his dedication to his studies inspired me to choose Salem State as well. Good thing, too. That’s where I met my wife.

In 1994, things started to go wrong for Sean. He became paranoid and depressed. He tried to hurt himself more than once. I didn’t know how to react to it.

That fall, he got married and I was best man. I absolutely sucked at it because I was so self-absorbed at the time that there was no way I could effectively be there for someone else, even him.

Over the next two years, his depression came and went. He was hospitalized with it a couple times. By the summer of 1996, he was darker and more paranoid than I’d ever seen him. But I was so busy binge eating and worrying about my career that I didn’t pay enough attention.

Those two deaths pushed me along the road to a very dark place.

A lot of my own depression would follow, as would a lot of self-destructive behavior.

Fortunately, I got therapy, medication and a 12-Step recovery program for compulsive binge eating. I also let God into my life.

All I want to do now is thank God for that and say Happy Birthday to my brother.

And get on with the show.

Posted on

Hitting Bottom

The author didn’t hit rock bottom before he got help. He hit several bottoms.

Mood music for this post: “Coma White” by Marylin Manson:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQPJYnr48yU&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

You’ve heard a million variations of the story from people who have battled depression and addiction. At some point they hit bottom and have that moment of clarity when they realize they have two choices: Get help or die.

Nikki Sixx from Motley Crue’s moment of truth was in December 1987, when a dose of heroin left him clinically dead for minutes until an EMT plunged a needle into his chest and got the heart pumping again.

People ask me all the time about my big moment. The answer is that there wasn’t that one dramatic moment of hitting bottom.

It was more a series of bottoms. It was a multi-staged crash.

One crash was a couple months after my best friend took his life. I was binge eating with more zeal than ever, and I don’t think I cared at that point if my heart gave out. I was too crushed to care much about anything.

I had just been handed the job of editor for the Lynn Sunday Post, a paper that was already dying. I would be its pallbearer. The job included double duty as a writer for North Shore Sunday. I worked 16-hour days, six days a week.

Work was all I had at that point. Erin and I were engaged (realizing life is too short, I proposed a month after Sean died), but I was still trying to please my masters, so work came first. On Sundays, my only day off, I was sleeping through the entire day.

By the summer of 1997, I realized I had to push back or end up in an institution somewhere. Fortunately, my boss at the time saw that I was physically deteriorating and stepped in.

In December 1998, I was 285 pounds and collapsing under the weight. My father was too, and wound up getting quadruple bypass surgery. That was another slap in the face to warn me that I had to clean up. I lost 100 pounds, though I did it through unhealthy means that would explode in my face several years later.

In late 2001 I realized that I was never going to please the managing editor I worked for at The Eagle-Tribune. He was forcing me to be the type of manager I didn’t want to be — an asshole. So I told him I was going higher up the food chain to get reassigned. And that’s what I did. They put me back in the night editor’s chair, which helped for a short time.

By late 2004 I was out of The Eagle-Tribune and in a job I loved. But I was putting enormous pressure on myself and the physical toll was showing. All my personality ticks were in overdrive: the obsession with cleanliness. The paranoia over my kids’ safety. A growing sense of fear that kept me indoors a lot.

That was probably the deepest bottom to date, the one that made me realize I needed to get help from a therapist; help that led to my OCD diagnosis.

The next bottom was in late 2006, when I had developed many of the mental health tools I use today. But my brain chemistry was such a mess I couldn’t get past the fear and anxiety attacks. That’s when I decided to try medication, which has worked far better than I ever thought possible.

The last bottom was in the summer of 2008. I was finally finding some mental stability, but I surrendered to the binge eating during therapy and was back up to 260 pounds. And it was hurting my health in a big way. I kept waking up in the middle of the night, choking on stomach acid. I couldn’t find clothes that would fit me. I was getting depressed again.

And so I started checking out OA and by October was headlong into my 12-Step Program of Recovery.

I immediately dropped 65 pounds, and have maintained the same healthier weight of 198 pounds for more than a year.

All these events were bottoms.

I hit bottom for different things.

Hopefully, I’m done.