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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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Shamed to Death

Why do people with mental and physical illness choose a slow, painful death over recovery?

Mood music for this post: “Estranged” by Guns N Roses:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpmAY059TTY&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Last week I went on a tirade against 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, and The Boston Globe’s Kay Lazar shed light on a a particularly galling case.

It’s true that the healthcare industry and many employers make it hard for sufferers to come out into the light. There’s the fear of getting fired or blocked from career advancement. There’s the fear of people defining you by your illness.

But even when there’s a workplace full of loving, supportive people and friends willing to accept a person no matter their issues, it can still be hell for a sufferer to break free, because no matter how accepting their environment, embarrassment is a powerful wall.

It’s like people who are too embarrassed to get a colonoscopy because of how the procedure is done. No one has to know about it except their doctor and maybe a couple family members. But they avoid the test anyway because they still find it embarrassing. Then they end up dying of colon cancer a few years later.

Embarrassment is a powerful thing. It keeps a person from seeing things as they really are and keeps them from facing their demons.

It’s not always bad to be embarrassed. God put the emotion in us for a reason. If we’re a jerk to someone or we get caught doing something unethical, we should feel shame.

But we shouldn’t feel shame over an illness and shouldn’t be embarrassed about getting help.

Morris L. Roth, president and CEO of Pikes Peak Behavioral Health Group, made the point in a recent column he wrote on how mental health is essential but often misunderstood:

One in 17 suffers from a serious mental illness. And only 40 percent of those will seek treatment.

You are likely to encounter someone in your family, workplace, school, church or community who is experiencing mental health challenges. If you don’t, you’re still impacted by the cost to our society in unemployment, disability, incarceration and homelessness associated with untreated or misdiagnosed mental illnesses.

Many cases of mental illness, even mild depression, go untreated because of the shame and discrimination connected to a long-ago era when mental health patients were locked away in insane asylums, sometimes for their entire lives. Patients were considered “defective” and “incurable” due to a lack of effective treatments. At times, treatments were barbaric.

We’ve come a long way in treating clinical symptoms of mental illness. For most, symptoms can be easily managed. But we’ve made far less headway with societal discrimination. Consider the 2001 Canadian study of people with schizophrenia that found that social withdrawal had a “great impact” on their lives, while the hallucinatory and delusional symptoms of the illness had the “least impact.”

Today, our clients are living proof that persons with even the most severe of mental illnesses can function normally and contribute to society.

Our experience as the community mental health provider in the Pikes Peak region is that a person with a mental health disorder, whether lifelong or temporary, is capable of many remarkable things, if given an opportunity.

Amen to that.

As someone who has been through years of mental therapy and as a lifelong Crohn’s Disease sufferer who has had to have the unpleasant test mentioned above too many times to count (my colon is basically a tube of scar tissue, so they have to keep an eye on it), I’m going to share a couple secrets with you:

1. Most of the people around you have medical procedures all the time that would seem embarrassing on the surface. It’s a necessary part of life. The body is a machine that needs frequent maintenance. It’s as simple as that. There is absolutely no reason you should feel ashamed about taking care of yourself. OB-GYN appointments are never fun for women, but most of those I know have the scruples to keep their appointments. Cervical cancer is not a good alternative. Suicide isn’t a very good alternative to therapy, either.

2. There is no need to feel embarrassed in the presence of a doctor. If you think this stuff is fun for them, you’re out of your mind. Therapists have heard things from their patients that are probably a lot more off the wall than anything you will tell them. They’ve heard it all. Doctors in general have seen it all.

3. If you never seek help, you’ll never know how good your life could be.

Just some thoughts from someone who has faced embarrassing situations more than once.

I got over the shame, and I’m better for it.

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Pills Can’t Kill Pain at the Source

The author has written much about his binge-eating addiction, but not so much about the pills — until now.

Mood music for this post: “I Don’t Like the Drugs But the Drugs Like Me” by Marilyn Manson:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EefPcht54c&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

A fellow addict in OA recently asked me how pills fit into my overall haze before I found recovery. She asked because when sharing my story I mention how taking Prednisone as a kid for Crohn’s Disease started me down the road to a food obsession.

Truth is, I never think of pills as part of my core problems in the past. But in hindsight, they certainly do play a role.

In addition to the mental pain I’ve had my share of physical pain. Migraines have been a frequent companion. So has back pain.

A lot of my troubles on those fronts were in my head; anxiety attacks and depression made me feel all kinds of aches and pains, including migraines  and sensations in the chest I was convinced were heart attacks. They weren’t, but I could believe just about anything when the fear and anxiety took over.

The back pain was very real. One time in 2003 paramedics had to cart me from my house because I was in so much pain that I couldn’t get off the sofa in our third-floor loft. I spent much of that week out of work and on the couch. The OCD and depression were already starting me on the deepest slide of my life and I was missing a lot of work anyway, but that’s the only time I can remember taking a ride in the back of an ambulance.

I would spent a lot of time incapacitated from lower-back pain, and one specialist after another would fail to pinpoint the problem until I found a chiropractor who within a day had pinpointed the source of my problem to three rogue vertebrae in the mid-back that kept closing shut on the nerves that are threaded through the middle. The pain would collect in my lower back, which left other doctors looking in the wrong place.

Since then, I go to the chiropractor every other week. He mashes the vertebrae back into place with his elbow and it’s all good from there.

But during the worst of the back pain I was on all kinds of pain medication. And naturally, they were addicting.

The doctors had me trying so many things I can’t remember most of the names, though one was Celebrex and another was Flexeril. The former was basically the equivalent of four Advils and the latter was a muscle relaxer. Taken together, they send you to la-la land.

At one point, I was on those two pills and a third, the name of which I can’t remember. I’d drive to work before taking them, because I noticed that when taken together with coffee, the mixture was buzz the hell out of me. It was a functional buzz that allowed me to do my work, but like all buzz-inducing fixes I found I needed it long after the drugs stopped working on the back pain.

I gave myself what in hindsight was an amusing panic attack once when, during a morning of house cleaning, I thought it would be an excellent idea to make the best of having to do chores by downing a Celebrex with two glasses of wine. I was buzzing nicely by the time I was scrubbing the counter in the upstairs bathroom. Then I remembered that there had been recent news reports about Celebrex carrying a heart-attack risk.

I freaked out, convinced I was going to be found dead on my bedroom floor. Erin was at her friend Sherri’s house at the time, and I called over there, remembering that Sherri is a nurse. I told Erin what I did and she asked Sherri for an opinion. Sherri said I’d be fine and to get back to cleaning. That’s what I did.

After going on Prozac I had some surgery on my throat to control snoring that was fed more by my obesity than my any problem in the throat. They gave me Vicodin do get through it and I would lie on the couch in bliss while under it’s spell. But I learned something that week: Pain meds can screw with the Prozac and keep the latter drug from working.

That led to a couple bad months of depression that took me into the Christmas season, which always screws with my head without chemical help.

I often wonder how much of the pain was depression induced — in my head, as my father-in-law might say. The reason is that in recovery I haven’t needed any of those pills.

In fact, one day I decided to clean out the cabinet where we keep most of our medication and I found several bottles of the pills I had been given for back pain. One of them had morphine in it, and when I chose to stop taking that one I remember lying on the couch in agony with withdrawal (and that was only after a couple weeks of taking it). The pills I found were mostly expired. Throwing them in the trash was a wonderful thing. It was like breaking out of a cage I never thought I’d be able to leave.

Today I only take one drug: Prozac. Yes, it works for me, though I believe it wouldn’t be working as well had I not gone through all the therapy and development of coping tools first.

Which sort of summarizes the big lesson for me: You can fill the hole in your soul with all the food, booze and pills you can get your hands on and the numbing part feels nice at first. But then you learn that nothing can dull pain that starts in the soul for long.

The only way out is to take the fight directly to the source of that hole.

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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 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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The Fear of Current Events

Digging through storage boxes the other day, I found old, 20-plus-year-old copies of Time Magazine, Newsweek, Mother Jones and a host of others. There had to be four years of them, well over 200 volumes.

And so I was reminded — again — of all the fear I used to carry around.

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, especially the one where New York and Paris are destroyed in nuclear attacks.

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.

Most recently, in 2005, I had a long panic streak over the bird flu in Asia, which was predicted to be the next great pandemic, as deadly as the one in 1918-19.

I would read every magazine and every website tracking all these world events as if my personal safety depended on it. If a hurricane was spinning in the Atlantic, I would watch with deepening worry as it edged closer to the U.S.

When did all this stop? It’s hard to pin an exact date or year on it.

I only know it stopped.

One day the anxiety attacks stopped. Then I started to crave all the experiences I once feared. Not the terror attacks, plane crashes and pandemics, mind you, but the traveling, the public speaking and more intensified writing. One day I started craving those things with the same vigor with which I craved all the junk I polluted myself with.

Therapy — years of it — and Prozac definitely played a role. So did my deepening Faith.

Whatever it was, I’m glad it happened.

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Just Like a Car Crash

The author is in a pretty good mood for a guy who cracked up his car last night.

Mood music for this post: “Stigmata” by Ministry:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbMbTx6HyvE&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Last night, on the way home from an OA meeting, I cracked up the car. Badly.

The good news is that nobody was hurt, though my car is another story. The front end is smashed in. Oddly enough, the headlights, while popped out of place, are intact and working. Even the front bumper looks unscathed. The grill and hood are a mess, on the other hand.

The other person involved in the accident was very nice, as was the cop who pulled up, surveyed the scene and took the report.

Now I’m sitting here remembering 1997, the year my 1996 Ford Escort was smashed no less than three times.

Now I have to work from home, call the insurance folks and file the accident report with the Haverhill Police, Registry of Motor Vehicles and my insurance agency. This, on top of an already jam-packed day where I’m trying to get a lot of work done ahead of the trip to Washington later this week.

But strangely enough, I’m not depressed. Much. I don’t even think it would be accurate to say I’m stressed. Much. I’m certainly annoyed. A lot. But I’m not undone. Not one bit.

I’m not binge eating or drinking.

I’m not melting down from an onrush of fear and anxiety.

I’m just intent on doing what needs to be done today, and I feel calm.

Compared to how I reacted after those 1997 accidents, that’s some heavy-duty progress.

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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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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.