Something interesting happened yesterday. The OCD was running hot all afternoon and kicking my ass. Then, when I wasn’t expecting it, it gave me a second wind that worked out for everyone.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:4AAwBktkUB8LXGy5xNW3Rc]
I was running around trying to get things done before going to a National Information Security Group (NAISG) meeting and the kids were in their usual state of after-school chaos. Duncan was sitting over his homework, not really getting anything done, and he kept messing up the table cloth.
That table cloth, wrinkled and out of place, drove me absolutely insane.
In a classic moment of OCD run ragged, I repeatedly walked up to the table and fixed the cloth. Duncan would immediately get it rumpled up again (not on purpose — the thing just doesn’t fit the shape of the table and is easily knocked out of place) and I just kept coming back and trying to fix it.
I was fully aware that I was having an OCD episode, which is progress in itself, because once upon a time, an OCD attack would overtake me without my knowing what hit me. Erin came into the kitchen and, before she could point out what I was doing, I looked up and acknowledged that the table cloth was freaking me out.
Then Duncan finally got his homework done and the tablecloth was back in place.
As I wallowed in the tired moment, the phone rang. It was my sister-in-law. She needed a babysitter in a pinch. She was upset about it, too. Grandma was already coming to watch the boys, and I told her to bring the niece over.
When something like this happens, my first instinct is to make things as easy as possible on the babysitter. So the OCD kicked in again and before I knew it, I was getting everyone’s dinner on the table and shifting around the bedtime routine to make Grandma’s life easier.
By the time everyone got here, the food was on the table and I was ready to head to my NAISG meeting.
I’m glad I could do that.
It just goes to show what a two-faced bitch OCD is.
And that is my curse. I have to keep the OCD at bay because it would destroy me if left to run hot around the clock. I went through all kinds of hell to bring it under control.
But every once in awhile, I’m glad I have it, because it can come in handy.
I don’t want it most of the time.
But sometimes, I’m afraid of what life would be like without it.
One of the big things I’ve struggled with over the years is when it’s OK to be alone and when it’s not. I spent a lot of years in isolation. I’m slowly realizing isolation and alone aren’t necessarily the same thing. Isolation never amounts to anything positive for me. Alone does — when I let it.
I seem to always be around people these days. There are the folks in my 12-Step program, including my sponsor and the three people I sponsor. There are the one-to-three meetings a week, and the daily phone calls. For someone who hates the telephone, I spend a lot of time on it these days.
I spend a lot of time around parents of the boys’ classmates. I spend a lot of time around business associates. When there’s downtime, I increasingly seek out friends. Fortunately, they seek me out, too.
But while it’s never good for me to be isolated, I’m finding that I DO need to be alone sometimes.
Not alone in a brooding, depressed state. That better fits the isolation category for me. It’s more like being alone in a state of prayer or creativity.
I’ve come to treasure the alone time I get first thing in the morning, when I can listen to music, write or just flop my head back. My relationship with the car has changed. Instead of using it as a place to isolate and feed my addiction, it’s now a place for reflection, music and sightseeing.
It used to be on business trips that I would isolate in my hotel room whenever I didn’t have to be out in public. There’s a lot of trouble you can get into with yourself when you’re holed up in a hotel room.
Now, I make some alone time for myself so I can walk around the city I’m in and take it all in. Yesterday I roamed the streets of NYC and spent a lot of time at Ground Zero in contemplation and prayer. I continued praying as I walked back across the Brooklyn Bridge to my hotel.
It was excellent.
Later in the evening, it was time to mix with people again and I did — having a long overdue reunion with my cousin Andrew and meeting his beautiful bride-to-be, Violet. We inadvertently wound up in a gay bar, but it’s not like there’s anything wrong with that. And the other patrons were friendly and polite. It’s been years since I saw Andrew. Shit, I remember when he was small enough to fit in a beer mug.
Afterwards, it was time to be alone again. I went back to the hotel and read myself asleep, which didn’t take much.
If the whole concept of isolation vs. being alone is confusing to you, it should be.
It’s certainly something I’m still trying to figure out.
I’m getting there. Slowly but surely.
Of course, it’s time to go mix it up with people again, so off I go to listen and then write about day 1 of the CSO Security standard.
Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing on Sept. 11, 2001. Here’s my own account.
Mood music:
I was assistant New Hampshire editor at The Eagle-Tribune and I arrived in the newsroom at 4:30 a.m. as usual. I was already in a depressed mood. It wasn’t a sense of dread over something bad about to happen. It was simply my state of mind at the time. I wasn’t liking myself and was playing a role that wasn’t me.
I was already headed toward one of my emotional breakdowns and the job was a catalyst at that point. By day’s end, I would be seriously reconsidering what I was doing with my life. But then everyone was doing that by day’s end.
I was absorbed in all my usual bullshit when the NH managing editor came in and, with a half-smile on his face, told me a plane hit the World Trade Center. At that point, like everyone else, I figured it was a small plane and that it was an accident. Then the second plane hit and we watched it as it happened on the newsroom TV.
I 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.
I remember being touched by a column she wrote the next day. She described picking her son Jack up from school and telling him something bad happened in the world that day. His young response was something like this: “Something bad happens in the world every day.”
Sometimes, kids have a better perspective of the big picture than grown-ups do.
I got home very late that day and hugged Erin and Sean, who was about five months old at that point. I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of world he would grow up in.
In the days that followed, I walked around in a state of fear like everyone else. That fear made me do things I was ashamed of.
A week after the attacks, Erin and I were scheduled to fly to Arizona to attend a cousin’s wedding. The night before were were supposed to leave, I gave in to my terror at the prospect of getting on a plane and we didn’t go. It’s one of the biggest regrets of my life.
There are two types of head cases headed for a breakdown: There’s the type that tries hard to get him or herself killed through reckless behavior, and then there are those who cower in their room, terrified of what’s on the other side of that door. I fell into the latter category. I guess I tried to get myself killed along the way, but I did so in a much slower fashion. I started drinking copious amounts of wine to feel OK in my skin, and I went on a food binge that lasted about three months and resulted in a 30-pound weight gain.
A few months ago I found myself in lower Manhattan for a security event and I went to Ground Zero.
Gone were 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.
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, and while some sadness lingers, I am grateful.
So here’s what I’ll be doing this weekend, the ninth anniversary of the attacks:
When I was sick with the Crohn’s Disease as a kid, I lost a lot of blood and developed several side ailments. I’m told by my parents that the doctor’s were going to remove the colon more than once. It didn’t happen. They tell me I was closing in on death more than once. I doubt it was ever that serious. But nevertheless, I’m still here.
When the OCD was burning out of control, I often felt I’d die young. I was never suicidal, but I had a fatalistic view of things. I just assumed I wasn’t long for this world and I didn’t care. I certainly did a lot to slowly help the dying process along. That’s what addicts do. We feed the addiction compulsively knowing full well what the consequences will be.
When I was a prisoner to fear and anxiety, I really didn’t want to live long. I isolated myself. Fortunately, I never had the guts to do anything about it. And like I said, suicide was never an option.
I spent much of my 30s on the couch with a shattered back, and escaped with the TV. I was breathing, but I was also as good as dead some of the time.
I’ve watched others go before me at a young age. Michael. Sean. Even Peter. Lose the young people in your life often enough and you’ll start assuming you’re next.
When you live for yourself and don’t put faith in God, you’re not really living. When it’s all about you, there no room to let all the other life in. So the soul shrivels and implodes. I’ve been there.
I also had a strange fear of current events and was convinced at one point that the world would burn in a nuclear holocaust before I hit 30. That hasn’t happened yet.
So here I am at 40, and it’s almost comical that I’m still here.
I’m more grateful than you could imagine for the turn of events my life has taken in the last five years.
I notice them now, and I am Blessed far beyond what I probably deserve.
I have a career that I love.
I have the best wife on Earth and two boys that teach me something new every day.
I have many, many friends who have helped me along in more ways than they’ll ever know.
I have my 12-Step program and I’m not giving in to the worst of my addictions. There’s still the coffee and cigars, but the stuff that made my life unmanageable has been brought to heel.
Most importantly, I have God in my life. When you put your faith in Him, there’s a lot less to be afraid of. Aging is one of the first things you stop worrying about.
So here I am at 40. I feel much younger than I did at 30.
I don’t know what comes next, but I have much less fear about the unknown.
Back at Salem State College there was a friend I would smoke cigarettes with outside the commuter cafeteria. We’d talk about everything from politics to Nirvana, his favorite band at the time. This was back when Kurt Cobain was still alive.
He eventually picked up a guitar and teamed up with my friend and fellow journalist Greg Walsh, forming the band Zippo Raid.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/nnyVCQrFN7Q
I lost touch with him after college, but I’m thinking of him lately. Joe Kelly, affectionately known as Joe Zippo, died in his sleep earlier this month.
I feel awful for his friends and family. One of my close friends, Mike Trans, told me he was planning to go hunting with him soon.
As I read up on what Joe was doing in all the years since Salem State, it’s clear that he lived his life full throttle and touched many, many people.
I’m breaking from my usual tales of mental illness and addiction to honor his memory and shine a spotlight on some folks who are doing the same.
When life gets me down, I think of folks like Joe, who plow through life’s challenges and show others how to live. That’s one way I find the strength to forge ahead.
The full obituary is below. Thanks, Joe, for being my friend in college, and for spreading rays of sunshine across a lot of other lives.
Joseph S. Kelley, Jr. (he was known around Boston as Joe Zippo / played in bands like Black Barbie; Zippo Raid; The Jonee Earthquake Band; Joe Zippo & the Raiders; etc)
January 10, 1970 – August 8, 2010
STEWARTSTOWN, NH – Mr. Joseph S. Kelley, Jr., 40, of Stewartstown, NH, passed away unexpectedly on Sunday, August 8, 2010, at his home.
Born on January 10, 1970, in Malden, Mass., Joe was the son of Joseph Kelley, Sr. and Marie (Valley) Kelley. Joe was a graduate of Malden High School, and he attended college at Salem State in Massachusetts. He was a sponge for knowledge and loved being in school.
Joe was a person who loved to help people and that drove him into the field of healthcare. For many years, he served as an EMT in Salem, Mass., and he was in the process of becoming licensed as an EMT in New Hampshire. For a time he also worked as a dialysis technician for the Fresenius company in Mass.
He also loved nature and to be outdoors, and he enjoyed hunting and just walking in the woods whenever he could. He also adored his two nieces who will miss him dearly. Joe also was a man of deep faith, and loved his church.
Joe is survived by his parents, Joseph, Sr. and Marie Kelly of Stewartstown, NH; his sister, Jennifer Doucet and husband David of Barton, Vt.; his godfather and uncle, William Kelley of Woburn, Mass.; his godmother, Patricia Piazza of Florida; his two special nieces, Rebecca and Annabelle Doucet; as well as numerous aunts and uncles and cousins, all of whom he loved.
There are no calling hours. A memorial Mass will be held on Friday, August 13, 2010, at 11 a.m. at St. Brendan’s Catholic Church in Colebrook with The Rev. Craig Cheney as celebrant.
Expressions of sympathy in Joe’s memory may be made to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, 501 St. Jude Place, Memphis, TN 38105.
Condolences may be offered to the family on-line by going to www.jenkinsnewman.com.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this place, especially after talking to one of my best friends, Mike Trans, who I happened to meet in that room. I also met a brilliant writer named Peter Bebergal and Al McLeod, another close friend who is godfather to my son, Sean.
Things were stormy at home during this period (1989-1992). I wasn’t getting along with my parents, though in hindsight that was more my fault than theirs. My sister was in the throes of a serious depression and was suicidal much of the time.
The world was a stormy place, with an imminent war with Iraq on the horizon (the first Gulf War). Back then, my fear and anxiety was wrapped tightly around current events I had no control over. I was convinced we were all getting drafted into the army and I wanted to live life to the fullest first.
I spent a lot of my time in high school fucking around, so I had to go to NSCC to shore up the academic side of my brain. I managed to do that somewhere in those years. But mostly, I hung out in that smoking room.
Getting there was easy, because NSCC’s Lynn campus was only five minutes from my house. Back then, I either hid in the basement of the Revere house or in the smoking room at the opposite end of the Lynnway. These were intervals of bliss between the painful periods.
There, I seemed to get along with everyone. I met Mike and Peter (you should read the book Peter co-authored with Scott Korb called “The Faith Between Us,” by the way. It’s a life-changing read I’ll blog about in a future post).
I met people who were in the Student Government Association and Program Council, so I joined those groups, making new friends like Ann Ball, Michelle Lesnever, Trish Bean and Samantha Lewis. Peter led a poetry group, so I joined that. My band Skeptic Slang was coming together, so we used poetry readings in the cafeteria as a place to jam.
These people were a first for me. I didn’t feel the need to put on my armor around them. I felt like I could be myself in a world where everything else was awkward. Being myself meant binging a lot in private and getting my fill of pot and alcohol, but I did most of that stuff in private, anyway. Around these new friends, my normal side — what came closest to normal for me, anyway — could come out for fresh air. I wrote a lot of bad poetry and song lyrics to share in the poetry group and dove into student government activities as if it were the United States Senate. Looking back, we all had some growing up to do. But I think we were still smarter than the real senators of the day.
That smoking room — NSCC in general — was a happy place for me. Salem State topped it because that’s where I met Erin, but without the comfort of that cloudy little room, I might have lost whatever grip I had on sanity at the time.
A couple more side notes: In this room, Peter Bebergal said something that I would understand all too well later in life: “You can’t turn toast back into bread.”
I also remember sitting at a table with Al, talking about Revere, home to us both. We started talking about the Paul Revere School when it dawned on both of us that we had known each other before, during those middle school years. As I often like to remind him, I hated his guts back in Revere.
But it’s all good now.
By the way, I recently visited the Lynn campus of NSCC. It’s not as bright and shiny as it used to be. Back when I was there it was still a fairly new building, constructed on a site where buildings burned in the Great Lynn Fire of 1981.
Being the restless, boredom-shunning soul that I am, I always look forward to the next trip. But today I’m back to a more mundane routine, and I couldn’t be happier. As great as it is to bust out of the norm from time to time, we need our routines. Especially me.
For starters, a routine is vital for someone in recovery from addiction and mental illness. I’m on a strict food plan to keep the urge to binge eat at bay. I also need to be in bed at a certain point, typically around 9 p.m., because I’m up and at ’em at around 4 the next morning.
When I travel, I’m up just as early but I’m almost always in bed much later the night before. There are friends to meet up with in whatever town I’m visiting, or the parties sponsored by security vendors. It’s also hard to get the perfect ingredients for my food plan, so I wing it slightly. I stay abstinent and sober, but I eat more restaurant food than I’m comfortable with.
Being back on routine means I can weigh everything I eat on my little scale and have the normal bed time. I’m also glad to be back in the office, since I really feed off the creativity of my co-workers. This morning, my first time in the office this month, I arrived to see that my office mates had a little fun with the run-in I had with the U.S. Secret Service last week:
My next trip is in a month, and I know I’ll be looking forward to it.
I also know my routine will make me itchy after a few weeks.
That’s just the way I am.
But for today, I’m glad to be looking at a more mundane day.
The idea is to provide an interactive, hands-on experience for kids and their parents which includes things like:
–Online safety (kids and parents!)
–Make a podcast/vodcast
–How to deal with CyberBullies
–Physical Security
–Gaming competitions
–Interactive robot building
–How the Internet works
–Food Hacking
–Basic to advanced network/application security
–Website design/introduction to blogging
–Manipulating hardware and software for fun
–Meeting & interacting with law enforcement
–Building a netbook
–Low-impact martial arts/self-defense training
Up until this weekend, it was a given that I’d be dragging Sean and Duncan there.
Then, yesterday, the phone rang.
It was someone involved with the Cursillo retreat weekends at St. Basil’s in Methuen, Mass. It’s a Catholic retreat, and it’s very intense.
He asked me to be on team for the men’s retreat happening THE SAME WEEKEND as HacKid.
On the surface, it’s a no-brainer, right? HacKid is going to be a blast, and I’ve already written a CSOonline.com column throwing my support behind it.
But I know there’s really no choice for me here. I have to choose Cursillo. My own Cursillo more than two years ago made a huge, lasting impact and I need to give back.
When God comes calling, you don’t say no. That’s a real pain in the ass, but it’s what I believe.
So I’ll be on team for the men’s weekend, and I’ll give it my all. The timing is also good because right after that I’ll start helping out with Haverhill’s RCIA program. My spiritual side will be finely tuned by then. Not perfect. Definitely not without sin. But I’ll be in the groove.
Meantime, I’ll just have to do other things to help HacKid succeed, not that they need my help. When my friend Chris Hoff gets motivated to do something, it’s a foregone conclusion that he’s going to get it done.
But I CAN write about it and make sure as many people know about it as possible, so that’s what I’ll do.
I’ve written a lot in this blog about Sean Marley, my friend and brother, who took his life in 1996. It’s been unavoidable. He left a huge mark on my life in ways dark and wonderful. Yesterday was all about the latter.
With Erin working and the kids camping with their grandparents, I found myself in the rare situation where I had a lot of time on my hands. I used it wisely, visiting a couple dear friends who wouldn’t be in my life had it not been for Sean.
First, I drove to Lynnfield and visited Stacey Scutellaro Cotter, Sean’s cousin. I met her when I was 15 at one of the Marley family gatherings at their house on the Lynnway in Revere, which was two doors down from me. She spent her junior and senior years at Northeast Metro Tech, where I was going, and senior year I would drive to Winthrop to pick her up and drive her to and from school in my battered green Ford LTD.
We had a lot in common, most notably a love for metal music. Most importantly, we had Sean in common.
We fell out of touch after Sean died, but reconnected a couple years ago on Facebook. She got married the same year as me and Erin, and, like me, has two sons.
It was great to see the beautiful family she’s built with her husband, Tim.
From there, I went down to Revere to see Mary, another friend I met through Sean. I used to have a Thanksgiving Eve tradition where I’d go to her house and shoot the breeze with her mom. Her mom had a heavy Irish accent and all the word color you would expect with that. One of my favorite lines from her was that Mary “could use a good blow” — Irish-speak for a slap in the face. I can’t remember what Mary did to get that response, but we laughed hard, and I still do. Now Mary lives in Revere with a great husband and son. Her husband, Vinny, is a biker type, exactly the kind of guy I expected her to marry. I say that as a compliment.
We had a great visit. I love talking to her 5-year-old son, Johnny, who is currently having the obsession with Thomas the Tank Engine that Sean (my son Sean, not Marley) and Duncan had a couple years ago, before they decided Legos and Indiana Jones were way cooler. Johnny is a sweet kid. He gets it from his parents.
The ghost of Marley inevitably came up during both visits. We always revisit the same questions: Did we do enough to help him? Would he still be alive today if there wasn’t so much secrecy surrounding his illness back then?
Had you asked me those questions a decade ago, you’d have gotten different opinions than what I’d tell you today.
I spent the better part of 13-plus years convinced that I didn’t do enough to help him; that I was too wrapped up in my own little world to notice what was happening. I was also angry with his family, because I felt that they were far too secretive about what was happening, feeding the stigma and making it impossible for Sean to get the help he needed.
My opinion on these things has evolved in the last couple years.
I’m no longer angry about the secrecy. Was more openness and honesty required to deal with the unfolding tragedy? Absolutely. But Sean’s parents are a product of the world they grew up in. Back then, if you had a mental illness you were usually locked away. It wasn’t understood back then that this is a legitimate illness that can be treated.
I think the treatment Sean got was the best treatment available in the 1990s. Unfortunately, treatment wasn’t as good and effective as it became a decade later.
He suffered in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But he lived a good life and I wouldn’t have survived without his guidance. Before he fell ill, he lived life at 1,000 miles per hour. He left no stone unturned in his quest to understand the meaning of life.
And while his death cut me to the core, he left me many gifts as well.
I’m glad I got to appreciate two of those gifts yesterday.
For a lot of years, I didn’t have many friends. It’s not that people didn’t like me. It’s just that I chose to isolate from the rest of the world for a long time. People with mental illness and addiction do that sort of thing.
I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately, because these days I seem to be spreading myself thin making plans with a lot of people. It’s a problem that’s well worth having. A blessing, for sure.
I’ve gotten some good quality time in this week with my friends, the Littlefields. They’re staying in a beach house on Salisbury Beach and invited me over.
I spent all Wednesday morning there and some of last night. I’ve learned a few things about this family: Kevin’s oldest daughter, Courtney, has a razor-sharp wit. She keeps her old man on his toes, much to my entertainment. I’ve also learned that Matty, the 5-year-old, likes to run around outside in his underwear and that seagulls are terrified of him. He also kicks serious ass on the Xbox.
I’ve gotten the chance to catch up with many more friends this summer. Some of this is the Facebook effect, reconnecting with a lot of people from the past. But for me, there’s a lot more to it.
It was also too painful to talk to people. I was way too self-conscious to pay attention to anyone else. I was 280 pounds at one point, and didn’t want to be seen that way. I also had little in common with people in general. I was so isolated that all I did was watch science fiction shows on TV. Life can be limiting when all you have to talk about is Star Trek or Star Wars.
I filled up the rest of my time with work, trying hard to please the masters and working 80-hour weeks. That too is a great way to isolate. You don’t have to talk to too many people when you’re holed up in an office all the time.
When did the isolation break? Probably a few years into my recovery. Once I reached a point in therapy where I could start to manage the OCD and shed the fear and anxiety that always hung over me, I suddenly found myself hungry to see new places and meet new people. I’d say that turning point came sometime in 2007. I haven’t looked back.
I travel frequently for work, and when I do I always make time to see friends who live in whatever area I’m visiting — San Francisco, Chicago, Toronto, Washington DC, New York, etc.
As time goes on, the list of people to visit is getting a lot longer.
