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Mister Rogers’ Mother Was Right

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

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

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

The man was so right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m grateful for the reminder.

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Sympathy for the Unsympathetic

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

Mood music:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I am grateful for your kindness and good intentions.

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

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The Agony of Awards

This will seem strange to some of you, maybe even ungrateful and insulting — but lately I’m looking at some of my old writing awards with disdain.

I should be proud of those awards. I earned them.

But every time I look at them, it’s another reminder of just how fucked up I used to be. We need reminders so we don’t repeat the same mistakes, but some memories are best left in the trash can.

One of those awards was for my coverage of the RSA security conference in 2005. When I think of just how brutal that experience was, the award becomes less of a prize.

At the last job, there was an annual award ceremony called the Bull’s-Eye Awards. They’d have a nice dinner and after the awards were handed out there would be karaoke, talent shows and the like.

I would practically lose my mind obsessing about the awards in the month leading up to the ceremony. It was a stupid thing to do, but that’s where my head was at five years ago.

I got my one or two awards each year, but the glow was always short lived. The pressure would be on to top it next year.

My perspective has changed.

I won’t lie: Getting awards today doesn’t suck. I have one in my office from my current job and I’m proud of it. I’m proud of it because I wasn’t trying to earn it. I was just doing my job and enjoying it. I wasn’t obsessed about pleasing my masters. I just did what felt right. That made winning it a lot sweeter.

But the bigger point is that I really don’t care about awards anymore. If I get them then great. But I’m never again working myself into a stupor over trying to win one.

It’s just not worth it for pieces of glass and plastic.

I recently thought of breaking the awards from the last job as a sort of exorcism. I decided that would be immature and foolish. In the end, whatever my emotions were back then, they gave me those awards because they liked my work. They didn’t have to do that.

And despite my frame of mind back then, the folks at TechTarget were always good to me. The job I’m in now is so much better, but part of it is my own change in attitude.

So the awards will stay where they are, on the side table of my work area at home.

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When The Grass is Greener on Your Side

I had an eventful trip to the therapist this morning. I had a migraine and was trying hard not to puke all over his nice blue carpet. There was couple’s counseling going on in the office next door, and the walls seemed awfully thin.

You could hear pretty much everything, including the wife going into a rage at her husband. Their therapist seemed to be making a valiant effort to hold it all together.

My therapist was uneasy about the whole thing. I think he was annoyed that it was distracting us and it was none of our business, though we couldn’t avoid hearing it.

But for some reason a warm feeling came over me, despite my head feeling like it had a knife lodged in it.

I felt bad for the people next door, and I’ve seen friends’ marriages fall apart lately, which hurts a lot.

But for all my challenges and quirks, I wasn’t having to do the kind of appointment that went on next door.

Marriage is work. Always will be. But I love my wife more and more every day. She’s built a business from nothing. She stays true to her Faith. She’s a super mom. She’s been tolerating my shit for many years. I’m proud of her. And we make a point to talk things out instead of letting things slide.

So in the therapist’s office, listening to the dysfunction next door, I was feeling like the grass is greener on my side of the street, despite some of my more recent struggles.

I’ve been going several weeks between appointments the last year. But this has been a rough winter.

I’ll be making weekly visits for a while.

And that’s fine with me, because I’ve done enough therapy to know it works if you keep at it.

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Crohn’s Disease and Metallica

Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” album. Which reminds me: It’s nearly the 25th anniversary of my last major attack of Crohn’s Disease.

Mood music:

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

It might seem bat-shit crazy of me to intertwine these two things, but the fact is that the “Master of Puppets” album is probably what helped me get through that attack. That, and the book “Helter Skelter.” I read that book twice as I lingered on the couch, rising only for the frequent bloody bathroom runs that are the hallmark of Crohn’s flare-ups.

But man, I listened to Master of Puppets nonstop. It tapped right into the anger I was feeling as a 16-year-old still reeling from his brother’s death and under the influence of Prednisone.

I had plans back then. I was going to lose 30 pounds, grow my hair long and find myself a girlfriend. I was going to live a life closer to normal. Not that I knew what normal was back then. As an adult, I’ve learned that normal is a bullshit concept, really. One man’s normal is another man’s insanity.

When the blood reappeared and the abdominal pain got worse, I wasn’t worried about whether I’d live or die or be hospitalized. I was just pissed because it was going to foul up my carefully designed plans.

When I listened to the title track to Master of Puppets, the master was the disease — and the wretched drug used to cool it down.

“The Thing That Should Not Be” was pretty much my entire life at that moment.

I related to “Welcome Home: Sanitarium” because I felt like I was living in one at the time. I was actually lucky about one thing: Unlike the other bad attacks, I wasn’t hospitalized this time.

Though Master of Puppets came out in March 1986, it was that summer when I really started to become obsessed with it. At the end of that summer, the Crohn’s attack struck. The album became the soundtrack for all the vitriol I was feeling.

That fall, as the flare-up was in full rage, Metallica bassist Cliff Burton was killed in a bus accident in Europe. It felt like just another body blow. I found this band in a time of need, and a major part of the music was ripped away.

I recently found a track of “Orion” where Cliff’s bass lines are isolated. It puts my neck hair on end every time I play it.

Though Crohn’s Disease is something that sticks with you for life, that was the last brutal attack I suffered. I’ve had much smaller flare ups since then, but only days-long affairs and nothing that kept me confined to bed.

It still manifests itself in other ways. If my eating goes off the rails, I’m much more susceptible to irritable bowel syndrome. Too much information? Perhaps. But for those who need to watch for the signs in themselves and loved ones, it’s important.

If I feel joint pain, which I do once in awhile, that’s partly the Crohn’s Disease manifesting itself. People think it’s exclusively a disease of the colon, but it’s more than that.

In later years, some of the mental illness and addictive behavior was easily traced back to the childhood illness. The experience left me with some deep insecurities about what I could and couldn’t do, and instilled in me a biting fear of the unknown.

Given the severe food restrictions that were part of the treatment, I was destined to become a binge-eating addict.

With that in mind, it makes perfect sense that a lot of the same treatment I’ve had for OCD and binge eating has all but eliminated the Crohn’s symptoms.

Getting rid of flour and sugar and weighing out my portions has led to a lot less pain.

I know it’s not gone and never will be. Another bad flare up is not out of the question. I’m also a prime target for colon cancer later on. For that reason, I have to have colonoscopies every one to three years. My colon is a tube of scar tissue.

I have a theory that the Crohn’s has been mostly dormant all these years for the simple reason that it ran out of colon to attack. It attacked so thoroughly that the scar tissue formed a protective layer.

That’s probably not true, but it’s not an entirely unreasonable theory either.

I’ll just thank God some more that I’ve been spared the agony in recent years.

And I’ll listen to Master of puppets some more.

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We Need Routines, Part 2

Here’s one reason February has been such a bitch: My routine has been so far off the rails that it has been hard to keep my perspective. It hurts the whole family-work dynamic. For a person in recovery, routines are beyond huge.

Mood music:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YzKLRM-pr4&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]

Being the restless, boredom-shunning soul that I am, I always look forward to the next trip. I always miss my wife and children during these outings, but it’s also good to get out of the normal environment from time to time. It tests you and can even rejuvenate. I’ve also learned that recovery is portable. You can take your program just about anywhere. I’ve also learned that God is with me wherever I go, and that makes it much easier to approach life in a fearless way.

Here’s the problem: Do too much of this sort of thing and you hurt yourself and those around you. That’s exactly what I did in late January and the first half of February. I went to Washington and San Francisco within a two week period and came home violently ill. Served me right, but my family didn’t deserve having to carry on while I was passed out on the couch.

I thought I had the groove of a traveling man down pat, but I was being stupid.

Last week was a lost week of sorts. I was home a lot with my family, but mentally I was pretty vacant.

But it’s a new week. I’m in the office doing routine things. This afternoon I’ll go home and do more routine things. And I’ll be happy doing it.

I started on the path back to sanity yesterday by going to Mass. Driving there in a snowstorm wasn’t sane, mind you. But by the time Mass was over I felt so happy to be back. When you travel and focus on work too much, God gets the shaft, too.

That point was driven home to me when I did another routine thing last night and went to a 12-Step study meeting.

The main topic was fear and the things addicts do because of it. People discussed how their fears — over being accepted, over an abusive, drunken spouse, over work — made them drink, drug and binge eat. I sat there silent because I’m still too early in the Big Book-study process to share at these meetings, but I had a different, stranger take on fear than the rest of the room. I’ve lived in their brand of fear, to be sure.

My problem of late has more to do with the collateral damage caused when you lose the fear that held you back. You get a big lust for life, which may sound all well and good until you realize it’s just another extreme way of living.

Extremes are like absolutes: Both have caution signs plastered all over them. You go too far in one direction and neglect other, important parts of your existence.

I’ve always been a man of extremes. I’m either badly depressed like I was last week, shut off from the rest of the world, seeing only the calamities, or I’m ON — working, playing and grabbing on to every activity I only think I can handle at the time.

The middle speed in my engine rarely works right. It’s either all or nothing, and that’s a problem that may well plague me for the rest of my life.

But I’m not giving up without a fight.

This much I know: I’m always closest to the middle gear when I follow a rigid routine. That includes three weighed-out meals sans flour and sugar, an early bedtime because I rise early, at least two 12-Step meetings a week, regular check-ins with my sponsor, regular visits to the therapist, and daily prayer. It should also include time set aside after work to catch up with my wife and kids.

This is the stuff I need to work on, and I don’t tell you all this in a search for sympathy. We all have issues to work on every day. We all have our good days and bad days. I’m nothing special. I just happen to have a blog where I can process this stuff aloud. 

The blog has become another important part of my routine.

But my use of it can become unbalanced, too.

This is just one of the crosses I carry.

But 10 of my crosses are absolutely nothing compared the Cross Jesus carried. I just forget from time to time.

Some of you think that kind of talk is nonsense.

Nobody’s perfect.

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Learning to Adapt and Liking It. Maybe

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

Mood music:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can change how I deliver my posts, however. 

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

The other things will be worked out in March.

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

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

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Search and Destroy

In the haze of my sickness of recent days, I’ve been listening to a lot of music. It’s not like I can do much else. This afternoon, I’ve turned my obsessions over to The Stooges.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFfnAvqf1pw&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]

The opening lines to “Search and Destroy” drag me kicking and screaming back to the mid 1980s, when destruction was my idea of a job well done.

I’m a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm

I’m a runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb

I am a world’s forgotten boy

The one who searches and destroys.

I used to hate everyone and everything back then. Burning objects and plowing rocks through glass wasn’t simple destruction. It was something to be done with craftsmanship and pride.

In the concrete storage room off the basement in my old Revere house I’d collect beer bottles from the frequent parties I’d have down there. Every time the pile got big enough, and it never took long, I’d go in there, light up a cigarette and start throwing rocks.

If there was a large pile of broken glass on the floor at the end, I would consider it a good day’s work.

It would be like an afternoon of chopping wood, only… different.

I played a lot of records on my shitty little stereo system while I did that. The Ramones always got me in the mood for breaking things.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa6O0yFv1bE&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]

Van Halen’s “Fair Warning” album always did the trick, too. It’s been said that Eddie Van Halen wasn’t in a happy place during the recording of that record 30 years ago, and the darkness is all over his playing. I guess that’s why it’s my favorite Van Halen album.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3aW7oofNgs&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]

I don’t break things anymore. Not out of anger or depression, anyway.

But I still listen to the music and it still makes me feel better.

I like to think of it as progress.

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When Honesty Is A Lie

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

Mood music:

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

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

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

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

But the feeling is there. And it stings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I guess that’s just part of being human.

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

Instead, just help keep me honest.

(Image originally appeared on the SodaHead site )

 

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RSA 2005 (Fool in the Rain)

As I cover RSA Conference 2011, I can’t help but think back to my first RSA trip in 2005. This isn’t about security trends then and now. It’s about my state of mind back then.

Mood music (because I was listening to this one a lot back then):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGshAiRp64Q&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]

I had been writing for SearchSecurity.com for less than a year, and I was in the middle stages of an emotional breakdown. I just didn’t know it at the time.

Here’s what I do remember:

–Back then I was so afraid of the world that the very thought of getting on an airplane to cover this event made me stagger. I had several anxiety attacks in the month leading up to the trip.

–The plane ride was rough, and I had a four-hour layover in Denver. By the time I got to San Francisco, I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

—Pleasing my bosses and proving to them that I was the golden child was everything to me at that point, and I approached the conference with a “produce 10 stories or die trying” attitude that was wrapped in the fear of falling short.

–It rained constantly during the entire trip, and another thing I didn’t realize then was that bleak weather fueled my depression.

–I was sick for most of the trip. On the first full morning I woke up with a 102-degree fever and wondered how I would get out of bed. What got me up was a desire to spend as little time in that hotel as possible. The place was all concrete and brick, and I remember being terrified of what would become of the place in an earthquake. I wrote more than a couple stories that day.

–I was listening to Motley Crue’s comeback compilation, “Red White and Crue” nonstop for comfort.

–Once I got home, I was emotionally and physically sicker than ever. And in response, I binged and binged until I had packed on nearly 30 extra pounds.

That period was the lowest of the low.

In hindsight it was an important year in my growth as a human being, because I was finally starting to deal with the fact that something was seriously wrong with me and that I had to do something before I tore myself and my family apart. 

Today, I’m staring out a rainy window from the 14th floor of the hotel I’m staying in. The rain still has a depressive effect, but my program of recovery is keeping it manageable. My eating is strict and clean, and while I have done a lot of writing so far for the job, I’m not doing it to please the masters. I’m doing it because this is what I do and I love it.

I do miss my wife and kids, but that’s always the case when I’m away.

In any event, I’m in a much better place now than I was six years ago.

I’m grateful to God and everyone around me who makes it possible.