Anxiety Level Green

A while back I wrote about the various stages of anxiety based on the first five colors of Newton’s primary color system. In the last week, I’ve realized that I’ve been at level green for at least three months.

Mood music:

At the time I wrote it, my description for Level Green was:

Green. This anxiety appears when the less-frequent stresses spark up. Yesterday was a perfect example in my world: I was already ramped up from spending the previous evening at the hospital holding vigil while my father faced emergency surgery that ultimately didn’t happen. The plumber was coming to install a new dishwasher, and to pound my mind into submission, I went on a chore spree. Then my cell phone died for good, and I had to spend the afternoon replacing it. The latter two events are problems we’re lucky to have, since the alternative is being too broke to afford these things. But it sent the day on a trajectory I hadn’t anticipated. The only cure for this one right now is to reach the end of the day and go to bed.

In the last several months a lot of stress has been in my life. My aunt and father died a week apart in June and my stepfather died in late July. A relative has been in legal trouble and there’s been a lot of wrangling about how best to help him.

Meanwhile, I’ve taken on responsibility for the site of the former family business, which is in sorry shape and in need of costly repairs. I’m learning more about the legal, real estate and financial systems than I ever cared to know.

I’m grateful for everything I’ve been learning along the way, but it’s a rollercoaster. Rollercoasters elevate the heart rate, and this ride won’t end after a few minutes. It’s time to address the low-level anxiety that keeps my chest tight, my head sore and my legs heavy.

All in all, life is good, and I’m learning to manage the added family business without letting it bleed all over the other parts of my life. Wife, kids and work are all well, and I’ve gotten through the last few months without collapsing into a bottle of numbing liquid. I’m admittedly pleased about the things I’m learning along the way, because it puts me in a better position to provide for my family going forward.

I’m glad that at this stage of my life I can see the feelings for what they are and act accordingly.

Swim Upstream by Eddietheyeti — “Swim Upstream” by EddieTheYeti

April 19, 2015April 19, 2015

Two Days, Three Shitty Anniversaries And One Bloody Month

Today — April 19, and tomorrow, April 20 — we have a trio of tragedies to remember.

Full disclosure: I’m about to steal liberally from Wikipedia.

April 19, 1993: Waco, Texas

The Waco siege began on February 28, 1993, and ended violently 50 days later on April 19. The siege began when the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), accompanied by several members of the media, attempted to execute a search warrant at the Branch Davidian ranch at Mount Carmel, a property located 9 miles (14 km) east-northeast of Waco, Texas. On February 28, shortly after the attempt to serve the warrant, an intense gun battle erupted, lasting nearly 2 hours. In this armed exchange, four agents and six Branch Davidians were killed. Upon the ATF’s failure to execute the search warrant, a siege was initiated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The siege ended 50 days later when a fire destroyed the compound when a second assault was launched. 76 people (24 of them British nationals) died in the fire, including more than 20 children, two pregnant women, and the sect leader David Koresh.

April 19, 1995: Oklahoma City

The Oklahoma City bombing was a terrorist bomb attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. It would remain the most destructive act of terrorism on American soil until the September 11, 2001 attacks. The Oklahoma blast claimed 168 lives, including 19 children under the age of 6, and injured more than 680 people. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings. The bomb was estimated to have caused at least $652 million worth of damage. Extensive rescue efforts were undertaken by local, state, federal, and worldwide agencies in the wake of the bombing, and substantial donations were received from across the country. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) activated eleven of its Urban Search and Rescue Task Forces, consisting of 665 rescue workers who assisted in rescue and recovery operations.

Within 90 minutes of the explosion, Timothy McVeigh was stopped by Oklahoma State Trooper Charlie Hanger for driving without a license plate and arrested for unlawfully carrying a weapon. Forensic evidence quickly linked McVeigh and Terry Nichols to the attack; Nichols was arrested and within days both were charged. Michael and Lori Fortier were later identified as accomplices. McVeigh, an American militia movement sympathizer, had detonated an explosive-filled Ryder truck parked in front of the building. McVeigh’s co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, had assisted in the bomb preparation. Motivated by his hatred of the federal government and angered by what he perceived as its mishandling of the Waco Siege (1993) and the Ruby Ridge incident (1992), McVeigh timed his attack to coincide with the second anniversary of the deadly fire that ended the siege at Waco.

April 20, 1999: Columbine High School

The Columbine High School massacre (often known simply as Columbine) occurred on Tuesday, April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Columbine, an unincorporated area of Jefferson County, Colorado, United States, near Denver and Littleton. Two senior students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, embarked on a massacre, killing 12 students and 1 teacher. They also injured 21 other students directly, and three people were injured while attempting to escape. The pair then committed suicide. It is the fourth-deadliest school massacre in United States history, after the 1927 Bath School disaster, 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, and the 1966 University of Texas massacre, and the deadliest for an American high school.

April is also a bloody month for other days, like the Virginia Tech massacre on April 16, 2007 and the start of such bloody conflicts as the American Revolution and the Civil War. I could mention dozens of other bloody events that happened in April, but I think this is quite enough for now. If you want a fuller accounting of the bloodshed, check out this article by Chaotic Ramblings

I pray for everyone who died in those tragedies. As I write this, the sun is shining through my window, warming my hands as I pound away on the keyboard. I’m going to make this a good day, despite those bad memories.

I suggest you do the same.

February 2, 2015

Heavy Metal Saved Me

I am your main man, if you’re looking for trouble. I’ll take no lip, no one’s tougher than me. I kicked your face you’d soon be seeing double. Hey little girl, keep your hands off of me…I’m a rocker.

“The Rocker,” by Thin Lizzy

A lot of people are amused to learn about my musical tastes. My work space at home and the office is cluttered with political and history-based trinkets, which would leave one to believe I listened to country or folk or maybe even some 1970s rock.

Heavy Metal music? It just doesn’t fit my image.

And yet, some 30 years ago, that music saved my life. And to this day, I listen to it faithfully. In fact, it’s become one of the main tools of my recovery from a life of mental disorder.

Let’s start from the beginning.

1984

This is the year my older brother died. But even without that, life was pretty miserable. I wasn’t exactly popular in school. I was overweight and the subject of ridicule. Emotions were understandably raw at home.

But that was also the year I began listening to heavy metal music.

It allowed me to escape the pain around me. The aggressiveness of the music gave me an outlet to process all the rage I was feeling. Without it, drugs and violence toward others might have been next.

My closest friend at the time, who lived two doors down, got me into the music — introducing me to the likes of Motley Crue and Thin Lizzy. When that friend died 12 years later, the music would again help me process my rage and keep me steady.

I’d be angry, hurt or scared, and I needed something to absorb my aggression. Heavy metal was the punching bag.

One of my favorite songs in 1984 was “Knock ‘Em Dead Kid” from Motley Crue’s “Shout At The Devil” album. The lyrics go something like this:

Heard a star-spangled fight/A steel-belted scream

Now I’m black/I’m black/I’m black

Another sidewalk’s bloody dream

I heard the sirens wine/My blood turned to freeze

You’ll see the red in my eyes/as you take my disease

For me, it was excellent therapy.

Around 2003, as I was going through a rough patch at work (my own shortcomings at the time more than anything else), that therapy took the form of Metallica’s “St. Anger” album. The album itself is far from their best, but the opening song, “Frantic,” tore a path straight into my soul.

The song came out a year before I started to come to grips with the OCD, and the guy in the video WAS me. The lyrics were me. I was frantic. I just didn’t realize it at that point.

Today, I listen to the music more for simple enjoyment than as an anger-management device. The anger went away some time ago.

The nostalgia is a big attraction for me, too. It takes me back to a time when I was in pieces; to a time when the music literally saved me. It has become something of a security blanket.

A lot of it makes me laugh as well — no small thing when you’re struggling not to take life too seriously.

How can you not find a live Motley Crue clip funny? Vince Neil sings every fifth word of most songs live. It’s amusing to watch.

The spikes-and-leather dress code make me laugh, too.

It reminds me not to take myself too seriously. And once I’m brought down to Earth like that, sanity prevails.

January 25, 2015

For Parents With Kids Freaked About Winter Storms

With a blizzard in the New England forecast this week and next month’s 37th anniversary of the Blizzard of 1978, I thought this might be of use:

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/6-WMbP1RcC4

I got a message awhile back from a mom who reads this blog regularly. I’ll keep her anonymous but share some details of the note:

“My son, only 7, has suffered from pretty severe anxieties about weather over the past 3 or so years. It took me forever to figure out what was going on (the doctors couldn’t) and finally found an amazing counselor for him that has given him the tools to deal. But still it is a lot for a little kid.”

Since this one really hits me where I live, I’m going to take a stab at offering something useful. But be warned first that I AM NOT a doctor. It’s also important to note that one person’s perfect solution might make things worse for another individual. What I offer is simply based on my own personal experience and some of what I’ve read from smart people in the medical community.

Tricky stuff, mental illness is.

I do think there’s good news for children who suffer:

1.) Getting the right help early will spare him/her from a lot of pain later on.

2.) Children seem to learn things like coping mechanisms more readily than adults.

3.) If a kid has to deal with any form of mental anguish, anxiety is probably one of the more natural, normal reactions to life. Even the healthiest of children live with a certain level of fear. My kids are healthy boys, mentally and physically, but they still crawl into bed with Mom and Dad in the middle of the night because their minds are spinning with worry over a ghost story they heard in school.

What really resonated with me is that this child gets anxiety over the weather. It’s been nearly 35 years since I watched in fear as the ocean rose up and ripped apart my neighborhood along the northern edge of Revere Beach in Massachusetts during the Blizzard of 1078..

Houses were torn from their foundations. Schoolmates had to stay in hotels for a year or more while their homes were rebuilt. The wind tore the roofing off some of the pavilions lining the beach.

Every winter since then, every nor’easter riding up the coast filled me with anxiety. The TV news doesn’t help. Impending storms are more often than not pitched as the coming apocalypse.

From the late 1970s straight through the 1990s, I’d shake from weather reports mentioning the Blizzard of 1978 with each new storm. As a young adult, I developed a pattern of throwing a blanket over my head and going to sleep. That’s exactly what I did in 1985 when Hurricane Gloria grazed us and, at age 21 in August 1991, when New England took a direct blow from Hurricane Bob.

My step-sister still likes to bring up how, on the morning Hurricane Bob was coming, I came into her room and yelled at her to wake up, telling her, “This aint no (expletive) Gloria.” That was me in OCD mode.

That rough weather scared the heck out of me as a kid, I think, was perfectly normal. Carrying that same fear and anxiety well into adulthood? Probably not so normal.

In more recent years, I’ve overcome that fear, and I actually like a good storm now and again. I love to drive through the snow. And when Washington D.C. got smacked with 30-plus inches of heavy snow in a blizzard in 2010, I gleefully walked the streets as the storm continued to rage.

That’s my long-winded way of saying this 7-year-old probably — hopefully — will grow out of his weather-based anxiety, and hopefully sooner than I did.

I think the best thing his mom can do is talk him through it, explaining that weather changes all the time and we usually get through the rough stuff just fine, even if a tree is blown over.

I’d tell him it’s ok to be concerned about a coming storm, but that the storm always passes and is followed by the sun.

When the TV news starts to hype up a storm, make fun of them for making mountains out of molehills. Sometimes, the hype is warranted, like when Hurricanes Katrina and Andrew came along. The Blizzard of 1978 certainly lived up to the hype. But most of the time, the media exaggerates the importance of a storm, and they deserve to be picked on for it, especially if it makes a little kid feel better.

Now, for those seeking a more scientific, medically-grounded piece of advice on treating childhood anxiety, I once again direct you toward the excellent WebMD site. I did some digging and found some helpful tips, which include the following:

Professional counseling is an important part of the treatment for depression. Types of counseling most often used to treat depression in children and teens are:

Cognitive-behavioral therapy, which helps reduce negative patterns of thinking and encourages positive behaviors.
Interpersonal therapy, which focuses on the child’s relationships with others.
Problem-solving therapy, which helps the child deal with current problems.
Family therapy, which provides a place for the whole family to express fears and concerns and learn new ways of getting along.
Play therapy, which is used with young children or children with developmental delays to help them cope with fears and anxieties. But there is no proof that this type of treatment reduces symptoms of depression.

Hope that helps!

“Blizzard of ’78,” by Norman Gautreau, depicting the devastation of Revere Beach following The Blizzard of 1978:

December 11, 2014

Torture Was Another Bad Response to Fear

The CIA’s use of torture during the Bush era was more insidious than previously revealed and did nothing to prevent terrorist attacks, the Senate Intelligence Committee says in a report.

No surprise there. I’ve said it before: The fear that drove us after 9/11 led to a lot of inhumane behavior in the name of safety and security. And the American people — scared out of their wits — were perfectly fine giving government carte blanche to do what it wanted. In the process, American ideals were compromised.

Mood music:

The report is long, but here’s the synopsis from CNN:

The majority report issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee is a damning condemnation of the tactics — branded by critics as torture — the George W. Bush administration deployed in the fear-laden days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The techniques, according to the report, were “deeply flawed” and often resulted in “fabricated” information. …

“In many cases, the most aggressive techniques were used immediately, in combination and non-stop,” the report says. “Sleep deprivation involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours, usually standing or in painful stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads.”

To be fair, America is imperfect and has done more right than wrong in wartime. Also, good people will argue that brutal enemies need to be stopped by any means possible, and that the torture of suspected terrorists was nothing compared to the carnage unleashed on 9/11 and in subsequent years, as terrorists beheaded innocent Americans and shared video footage with the world.

I’m not an expert at this level of intelligence gathering, nor do I pretend to be. Vilifying the CIA may be fun sport for some people, but it doesn’t solve anything.

And, remember, we the people essentially ordered the government and military to do whatever was necessary after 9/11.

Fortunately, as the years pass and more evidence of wrongdoing is revealed, more people have come to their senses. We’ve seen that with all the backlash against things like warrantless wiretapping and many other things revealed in the Snowden leak.

Yet no matter the danger we face, torture contradicts our ideals. It feels wrong in my gut. It didn’t always feel wrong, but then I was under the spell of fear like many other people.

So what do we do with the information contained in this Senate report?

Many will use it to say they told us so and as a reason to bash all of government and the CIA in particular. That’s human nature and it’s fine by me. But after that, we need to find a better way forward. We need to come up with better examples of a more humane approach. We need to build a discussion around that and keep up the pressure until government heeds our will.

In the final analysis, the government and its activities are a reflection of us, and we have to take responsibility for what went on in the last decade.

That includes me.

American Flag Spy

November 12, 2014

40 Years Ago in Amityville

Some of you have seen the “Amityville Horror” and instantly think of it as the story of a haunted house. I never believed it, but I’ve always been drawn to the murders that started the whole thing off.

This week marks the 40th anniversary of the murders, in which Ronald “Butch” DeFeo was convicted of killing his parents, two brothers and two sisters. I’ve always had an interest in it because at its bare core, this is the story of a family so dysfunctional it couldn’t survive.

Filmmaker Ryan Katzenbach is about to release the final installment of his film series about the murders, with a huge focus being on the DeFeo family itself: Who each of them were, what they aspired to and what tore them apart.

Ryan released a video earlier in his project, paying respect to the family that bears sharing here:

Coming from a family with more than a little dysfunction, I always find myself grateful after thinking about this story. Family members will yell at each other, hit each other and stop talking to each other, but in most cases nobody gets shot over it. That’s something to be thankful for.

As for the DeFeo family, below is something I wrote about the case in 2010.

The Amityville Obsession

Posted on September 28, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the twists and turns are so random.

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

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

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

Addendum, Nov. 14, 2011:

I recently came across photos of what the house looks like now. It really is a beautiful place. More recent owners have put a lot of work into the house, and it’s bright and cheerful decor almost make you forget what happened there.

October 29, 2014

In InfoSec, Fear Shouldn’t Be a Barrier

As some of you know, I’ve been deliberately signing up for uncomfortable, even scary tasks at work. Not scary in the grand scheme of normal life, but they are things a guy with a journalistic background doesn’t come to easily.

This time I’m managing an incident management schedule. Managing schedules in any form is something I suck at, so it’s appropriate that this responsibility has crashed into my wheelhouse.

Mood music:

Truth be told, I didn’t take this job for the specific purpose of facing fears. I’m nuts, but not to that extreme.

But I did want to be part of a security team instead of merely writing about what other people do. To do that, getting outside my comfort zone was inevitable. It’s something I wouldn’t have done 15 years ago.

People in my industry assume I know how to conduct a penetration test, process software vulnerabilities and manage compliance operations. Truth is, I know how to write about this stuff, but I’ve never actually done these things. I never claimed that I had, but since my writing has veered unashamedly toward the side of security advocacy, I can see where people might make the assumption.

What I’m learning so far counts as baby steps.

In recent months, I’ve attended a training session on how to be an threat incident response manager and processed my first three vulnerabilities. I still can’t say I know what I’m doing, and I expect to screw up plenty when my time comes to jump into the fire. But the mechanics aren’t so alien to me now, and that’s a quantum leap.

A few years ago, the terror of the unknown and fear of failure would have kept me from doing any of this stuff. Training can seem like routine to some folks, but when you live with things like fear, anxiety, depression and OCD, the wall to climb looks much higher than it really is.

That’s not to say I’m going about all these things in a carefree manner. I still have my episodes of self-doubt. I still experience stress when thinking about how best to manage the new skills in tandem with the editorial and writing skills that encompass 90 percent of my job.

But unlike the old me, I know I can do it. I’m at peace with the mistakes I know I’ll make. I’m prepared to be the guy people talk about in meetings when the subject turns to who fucked what up during an incident. These days, I can show up.

All this training a gift. So is the fact that I can accept the gift. And even though mistakes are inevitable, I can accept that as part of the learning process.

feet standing on hot coals “Walking on Hot Coals” from the Wallpaper Converter site.

October 22, 2014

Ebola and the Disease of Hyperbole

For weeks, the main cable news stations have been obsessed with Ebola. While the appearance of Ebola in the U.S. is certainly new, I think the bigger problem is a disease that has dogged us since the dawn of TV news.

Hyperbole.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/-oUAekdWSO4

There’s no disputing that Ebola is a fearsome disease. The symptoms are brutal and the death rate is high. It’s been a problem mainly for Africa until recently, when a couple of healthcare workers were infected and brought to the U.S. for treatment. Then an infected man flew from Liberia to the U.S. and became the first official diagnosis of Ebola in America. Two nurses who cared for the now-dead patient have been infected.

None of that is good. But now the news networks are covering it like it’s an impending Armageddon. Every time people fall ill on a plane it becomes national news, with panicked reports of people with “Ebola-like symptoms.” With every such report, Facebook feeds fill up with people making comments about how we’re doomed.

This is where responsible reporting gives way to recklessness. So let’s dispense with the hyperbole and look at reality:

Ebola remains a disease people get from exposure to the bodily fluids of another infected person, which is why the two nurses got it.
It is not an airborne contagion, which means it’s very difficult to catch. You should be more concerned about flu, which sickens and kills thousands in the U.S. each year. The only U.S. death from Ebola thus far is from the man who caught it before leaving Africa. Stop watching CNN and go get a flu shot.
All the reports of sick passengers on planes thus far have turned out to be for things other than Ebola.
If you have a fever or a cough and are worried that it may be Ebola, calm down. We get colds and flu every year, and we never worried about it being Ebola until this freight train of fear got rolling.

I understand how fear spreads in these situations. Back when I suffered from severe anxiety, I would see world-ending clouds in every epidemic report.

In 2005, I had a long panic streak over the bird flu in Asia, which was predicted to be the next great pandemic, deadlier than the one that killed off a significant segment of the population in 1918-1919.

I would read every magazine and every website that were 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.

It was all part of the larger doomsday fear sparked by a combination of my mental illness and sensational media coverage. So, no, I’m not criticizing people for fearing Ebola. I know what it’s like to get that way.

Ebola may yet morph into something more deadly, but we’re not there yet. Chances are we’ll never get there — at least in terms of this becoming an airborne contagion.

My suggestion: Let’s focus on this one day at a time and keep our focus on the facts.

And for Goodness sake, turn off the news.

Image of Ebola virus

September 17, 2014

Pain Leaks from Mind to Body

Mental illness can lead to physical sickness. It’s a simple fact that some people find hard to believe.

Mood music:

I often hear people arguing over whether this person’s or that person’s aches and pains are “all in their head.” You know the type: There’s never any real underlying disease, but they’re always calling out of work with a headache or some intestinal discomfort.

It’s all in their head, you say?

Well, yeah.

It’s called psychosomatic illness, when mental anguish leads to physical sickness.

I’ve been there. Migraines. Brutal back pain. A stomach turned inside-out.

But it wasn’t always clear that what ailed me was in my head. As a child I was sick a lot with Crohn’s Disease, and that confused matters later on.

To throw the Crohn’s Disease into remission, doctors used the maximum dose of Prednisone, which caused migraines. You can read more about that in “The Bad Pill Kept Me from the Good Pill,” but the bottom line is that these headaches came daily and always made me sick to my stomach.

Later in life, I developed severe back pain, the kind that would knock me onto the couch and keep me there for weeks.

In the last month, I’ve gotten an unwanted refresher course in what all that was like. I wrecked my back and was prescribed Prednisone for my troubles. The mood swings and depression I remembered returned. Thankfully, I’ve turned that corner.

The earlier examples were all legitimate physical problems. But at some point my brain lost the ability to differentiate a real Chrohn’s flare-up or back spasm from an imagined one.

When the mind thinks the body has suffered a trauma, it has a habit of becoming real.

Doctors always warned me that mental stress could trigger Crohn’s flare-ups, and I guess it did, especially when my parents divorced. I’m fairly sure my brother’s death set off the last real flare-up in 1986.

The migraines and back problems, meanwhile, seeped seamlessly into the things that were going wrong with me mentally.

Anxiety attacks felt essentially the same as a heart attack, complete with the pain shooting from the chest to the neck and down the arms. Migraines followed. Work stress often sparked migraines and back pain.

While it was difficult to separate other legitimate physical problems from those stemming from mental distress, I can tell you that dealing with my underlying OCD, depression and anxiety made a lot of ailments mostly go away.

When you deal with what’s in your head, the pain in the rest of your body can be eased and even eradicated.

Psychosomatic illness still visits me on occasion. But it’s much better than the old life of perpetual pain.

black and white picture of a bald man with his face in his hands

August 11, 2014

What I Learned About Myself at DEF CON

I’m just back from Las Vegas, where I attended BSidesLV, Black Hat and DEF CON. I’m jet-lagged as hell and feel like toxic waste, but I’m also feeling pretty good about myself.

Mood music:

Here’s the thing about DEF CON: Attendance is huge, the lines are long and it’s easy to find yourself wedged between crowds of humanity moving in different directions. Like all of Vegas’ casinos, a thick cloud of cigarette smoke hangs in the air, and unhealthy food is easier to obtain than healthy food.

For someone given to fear and anxiety, the place is a nightmare — the trigger for every mental demon to come out.

As readers know by now, I have a history of fear and anxiety. I’ve written about how I’ve brought it under control in recent years, but the DEF CON experience really demonstrated how far I’ve come.

No matter what you tried to do at DEF CON, there were huge lines. Lines for coffee. Lines to get into talks. Lines for food. The kind of lines that snake around corners and continue into infinity.

A decade ago, I would have hidden in my hotel room the entire time. Actually, I would have just stayed home.

But I walked with the big crowds and stood in the lines. I kept calm and usually found a friend to talk to and pass the time.

Part of my success is having the ability to realize that the crowds aren’t there to torment me. Everyone’s trying to get somewhere. It’s not about me, ever. Knowing that makes me feel more secure in the crowd.

I’ve also learned to take breaks. Hiding in the room the whole time is bad; going there for one- or two-hour breathers is good. I did the latter a couple times a day, and it worked well.

I also made a point of getting to bed before midnight each day. I used to stay up all night, going from one party to the next. A couple years ago, I made peace with the fact that I’m getting too old for that. Prioritizing sleep allowed me to maximize the quality of my awake hours.

DEF CON did show me that I still have work to do on myself. Social awkwardness remains an issue. I have a lot of industry relationships on Facebook and Twitter, but I still get weirded out when I meet some of those people in person. People never look exactly the same as their Facebook pictures, including me.

I probably walked past people I know online a bunch of times. If you saw me and I didn’t come up and say hello, I apologize. In my awkwardness, I sometimes have trouble recognizing you.

So there you have it: Better with crowds and lines, still socially awkward. In the grand scheme of things, the journey in the right direction continues.