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When Playing It Safe Makes Things Worse

I had coffee with a friend from the security industry yesterday. I thought I was coming to offer feedback on something having to do with the profession. Then he told me about a mental-emotional problem.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:4DA95pyBe6QORPGvTEuMWQ]

He told me he had a bunch of medical tests and they discovered that a small corner of his brain doesn’t work as well as it should. The result is that his short-term memory frequently takes a dive.

There are far worse problems to have. But his main concern is that it’s keeping his career from going where he wants it to.

We went back and forth about whether he should make his condition public or whether he should pursue other medical options.

As I sipped my iced Starbucks it became clear that something else was going on.

His biggest problem, I discovered and told him, is that he’s held back by fear — fear of what might happen if his short-term memory acted up in the midst of a job he really wanted to be doing.

He admitted that his recent career moves have involved a lot of playing it safe, doing things where there’s the least opportunity for failure at the hands of his mental tick.

I’ve been down this road before. And you know what? Playing it safe never helps. In fact, it just makes things worse.

Several years ago, when it became clear to me that my brain didn’t work normally, fear engulfed me until my self esteem was reduced to an ash pile. I held back in my work as night editor of The Eagle-Tribune. I tried playing it safe, never going toe to toe during disagreements with other editors.

Then I decided that the solution was to get out of there and find something less stressful to do. I opted to go back to straight reporting and went to TechTarget. Fortunately, the job turned out to be far more challenging than I expected. I realized this right at the time I decided to tackle my mental illness head on.

Luckily, my boss was a nurturing soul who was willing to let me go for the throat and get better. Miraculously, my work didn’t suffer. In the years to come, in fact, my workmanship would get better.

Now I do a lot of stuff in my job that’s out of my comfort zone. I give talks in front of groups of people. I get on airplanes. I venture an opinion on topics that I know will draw heavy disagreement. I give my boss a hard time when I don’t agree about something.

A few years ago, the very idea of doing those things would have scared me into an emotional breakdown.

I’ve screwed up along the way. But I’m still here.

I do my job well enough, often enough. And the more I succeed, the more confident I get.

Had I played it safe because of the things that might have gone wrong because of my OCD and anxiety, I wouldn’t be doing what I love today.

It’s not worth worrying about the mistakes you might make. You WILL make mistakes. And most of the time, you’ll be the only one to notice.

When my kids worry about making mistakes, I play them some Def Leppard and remind them that a one-armed drummer makes mistakes, but that all you can hear is him driving the heartbeat of the song despite a missing limb.

He could have retired from music and that would have made his life worse.

But he took a chance and designed a drum kit that helped him get past his problem.

Call me overly idealistic. Tell me I’m blowing sunshine up your collective asses.

It’s what I believe. Because I’ve been down this road.

My life today is far from perfect. It can get messy at times.

But it beats the hell out of playing it safe.

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Caught On Camera: The Aging Process

Remember that post I wrote about the time I tried to be Jim Morrison? Well…

Mood music:

My stepmom found some photos of the younger me during a recent cleaning spree. Here I am, with long hair and very large glasses, circa 1992:

That hair was halfway down my back before I decided to chop it a year later. Now, nearly 20 years later, the hair is ON my back. I still have pretty big glasses, though.

That’s not the only thing that hasn’t changed, though. Review the next set of before-after pictures and see if you can spot the common elements between 1992 and 2011:

Those who find the common element will win… absolutely nothing.

By the way, that younger Bill Brenner may look better than I do, but I wouldn’t change a thing. I may be uglier, but I’m a lot happier than I was when those long-haired photos were taken.

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You Can Change Your Name, But You Can’t Hide Who You Are

An epilogue to yesterday’s post about Lynn, Mass.: A reader reminded me yesterday of the time some Lynners tried to get the city’s name changed so the “Lynn, Lynn city of sin” insult could no longer apply.

Mood music:

From my friend Katherine Doot: “Thought they wanted to change the name to Ocean Park some years ago? So it was Ocean Park Ocean Park never go out after dark?!”

I had forgotten about that, but it’s true. That was one of the movements afoot the year I covered the city as a reporter in 1997. I thought it was a stupid idea from the start, and I’m glad most people didn’t take it seriously.

My first concert was a festival headlined by Motley Crue in 1985 at Manning Bowl in Lynn. That was at the start of the band’s “Theater of Pain” tour. I have fond memories of singer Vince Neil badly mispronouncing the city’s name as “Leeeee-innnnn!”

If the city had been named Ocean Park, he might have pronounced it correctly and I wouldn’t have that fun memory of mangled language today. That would suck.

My main point is this, though: You can change your name, but it isn’t going to change who you are or who you should be.

If you don’t like yourself or your city, a name change is a stupid and ineffective way of trying to hide in plain sight.

You want real change for a city, you have to change the politics and clean up the streets. I think Lynn has made good progress on both fronts.

If you want real change for yourself, you have to identify what you don’t like and rebuild yourself.

Lynn Shore Drive

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Prayers For A Friend and His Wife

Dave Lewis, a good friend from the information security community, posted this yesterday: “My wife, Diana, was diagnosed with leukemia today.”

Mood music:

Many of you know Dave (@gattaca on Twitter) as founder of the Liquidmatrix Security Digest. He is also senior security analyst at AMD and someone who works tirelessly to promote events that make security professionals smarter and better.

I’m asking those who read this to keep Dave, Diana and their young daughter in your prayers.

I’ve been through plenty of rough stuff in my life — we all have — but no matter how many body blows a person has absorbed, something like this is going to be overwhelming.

I wish Diana a quick recovery.

Dave’s a strong soul, and I know he’ll do all the right things to pull the family through.

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A Happy Memory From A Difficult Time

It’s sometime in October 2008. I’ve just given given up flour and sugar to get control over a binge-eating addiction.

Mood music:

I’m irritable and sick, going through all the aches and pains that surface when toxins start to drip from the pores.

I’m coming up the stairs from work, anxious to get all the chores that await me over with.

I open the door to find Duncan sitting in his chair at the kitchen table.

He’s wearing a bib and a bowl of soup is in front of him. It’s button soup, he tells me. He made it in school (Pre-K) after being read the book of the same name, in which “Daisy tricks her stingy Uncle Scrooge into making enough soup for the whole town–using just one button.”

“Daddy, have some button soup. It’s on your diet!” Duncan says as I come into the room.

He’s got that big, gaping smile of his, excited as hell because in the magic of the classroom, he discovered something his Daddy could eat. He knows his father needs encouragement, and he’s eager to deliver.

When you really become serious about kicking addictions, God puts the right people in front of you to make the cold turkey period a little more bearable. I truly believe that.

It’s the Grace that helps you move those one, two or three steps at a time.

On that gray, gloomy afternoon, Duncan was there.

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Not What God Wants Me To Be, But Not The Person I was

The title of this post is a popular saying among those who use the 12 Steps to bring their addictive behavior to heel. It’s a good line to keep in mind when you’re ready to lose patience with yourself and slip into self-loathing.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/jYpydtdlWxA

There’s a lot about myself that still has to change. I still get angry too easily. I still get self absorbed. I still give in to OCD thinking and actions, even when I know better. I still suck at saving money. Little problems still turn into big crises in my head.

But I don’t see a reason to beat myself over it, because I used to be much, much worse.

A temper today involves angry thoughts and self pity. As a young punk a temper meant punching dents into walls (I lacked the muscles to make a hole), flipping off people on the highway for cutting me off or, worse, getting touchy when I cut them off. It also meant unleashing a torrent of verbal vitriol.

Getting self absorbed back then meant spending what I wanted, eating what I wanted and making the decisions I wanted with no regard for anyone else. I still fall into that behavior, but I catch it more quickly than before and correct myself as much as possible. Doing service has been good for me because it gives me fewer opportunities to stray. Being a husband and father has helped, too.

Giving into OCD today means I may go on a cleaning spree at the moment I need to be doing other things. It means I may check and re-check my laptop bag to make sure the machine is inside, dooming myself to a longer, more traffic-laden commute in the process. It means I’ll occasionally run short on patience. But back then, it meant being blinded to everything around me by obsessive worrying about things that in hindsight were a lot of nothing. Which, in turn, led to the selfish behavior.

I bring this stuff up because everyone has a cross or six to carry on a daily basis, and it’s easy to give in to the worst kind of thinking and write yourself off as a failure.

In times like this, it’s also helpful to remember what Clarence the angel scribbled in the book he gave George Bailey at the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life” — “No man is a failure who has friends.” I used to think I had no friends. Then I realized the problem was that I was ignoring my friends in favor of isolation.

We all have something to offer and to live for. We’re all screw-ups — nothing like the people God wants us to be.

But if we’re just a little better than we once were, that’s huge.

I’m going to keep working on being who God wants me to be. It’s an almost impossible task, because how do you ever really know what God wants you to be (until you’re dead and he tells you directly, anyway)?

He always leaves clues, though. So instead of feeling sorry for ourselves we can simply do the best with the clues we’ve got.

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A Relationship That Changed for the Better

Since my father’s stroke last month, I’ve had some long talks with Dianne, my step-mom. Those conversations illustrate how much we’ve both changed over the years. Or is it just me who has changed?

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/S4v-_p5dU34

Let me be honest: Ours has never been an easy relationship. I spent the better part of my teens and 20s resenting her to the core. Our quarrels had all the drama of a TNT series. The two of us in the same room was like throwing a match on gunpowder.

I’ve often wondered who was more at fault along the way. Knowing myself as I do now, I tend to think the trouble was more my fault than hers, because she had the misfortune of joining the family right as I was hitting my malcontented, conflicted and rebellious teenage years. I had a chip on my shoulder the size of an ashtray and I was full of hatred for a lot of reasons real and imagined.

A look at the broader picture shows how she was really at a disadvantage.

My brother died only a few months after she appeared on the scene, and she was home the night he had that final asthma attack. She plunged the adrenaline needle in him while waiting for the ambulance because that’s what you were supposed to do in the event of these attacks. But his number was up, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

She was also there a couple months before, in October 1983, when Michael had a similar attack that almost killed him that night. The doctors didn’t think he was going to make it that night, but he bounced back from the brink just in time, just like I bounced back from the brink more than once when the Croh’s Disease was attacking me so bad that the doctors were ready to pull out the colon and throw it in the trash.

I guess I was just a little luckier than he was.

Anyway, me and Dianne were always in conflict. I thought she was in the marriage with my Dad for his business success. I fought constantly with the step-sister she gave me. I was jealous of the step-brother she gave me because he was suddenly the cute youngest kid. Before my parents divorced it was Michael, Wendi and me, the youngest. Being sick, I was also spoiled rotten. Then the step-siblings came along and Michael died, making me the oldest son, a title that carried a lot of pressure.

I blamed it all on Dianne.

Of course, she also gave me a beautiful half sister in late 1985 who came along at just the right time, bringing joy to the family I never thought we’d see again. I was always grateful for that.

But still we fought. By the late 1990s we were barely speaking to each other. The resentment and hurt ran too deep on both sides. Then, sometime in 2000, things started to change. We met in a small breakfast place on the Revere-Malden border and talked it out, civil in a way that had been inconceivable just a year earlier.

I don’t remember the contents of the conversation exactly. But somewhere in there, we agreed that something had to change. I think the change really set in after Sean was born a year later. Becoming parents gave her a whole new respect for me and Erin. Actually, I think that for me, becoming a parent was when I finally started to grow up. A decade into parenthood, I get a lot of what she was trying to tell me back when I was a self-seeking kid.

Fast-forward to 2011. I know now that back then I was looking for people to blame for my pain and she was too good a target to pass up.

She has stuck by my father through all kinds of illness and turmoil. She loves him deeply, and worries about him constantly.

Nothing has made that clearer than the past month.

I’ve watched her push past the point of exhaustion and borderline madness to care for him.

She’s lost a lot of sleep and you can see it in her eyes. This month has been vastly more brutal for her than the rest of us, except, of course, for Dad. She’s gone over the cliff for him. That’s what love is all about.

I’m sorry I ever doubted her feelings for him when I was younger.

But that’s in the past. We talk to each other as grown-ups now. The respect is mutual. Things can never go back to the way they were.

Thank God for that.

OCD Diaries

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When Things Don’t Go As Planned…

Saturday, things did not go as planned. It was the day of Sean’s Scout camp out, and the forecast was for fair skies a few days before. Naturally, it poured the whole time. But it was a lesson in making the best of a bad situation.

Mood music:

We had a great day despite the torrents of water falling down on us. Kids love getting wet and muddy — for a little while, at least. The scout leader cooked up a storm under the big tent using nothing but cast-iron pots and charcoal heated in the camp fire. That I considered it a good day shows just how much I’ve changed in recent years.

When all your awesome plans get washed out, it can be frustrating when your brain works the way it’s supposed to. But when the traffic in your skull doesn’t flow properly — which is usually the case when you have OCD — a day that suddenly changes shape will spark a serious case of crazy.

In my case, that means high anxiety, followed by multiple temper tantrums, followed by addictive behavior — binge eating in my case — and then a migraine with the urge to throw up. Not necessarily in that order, but usually in that order.

A flight gets delayed or canceled? Bad reaction. Car breaks down? Bad reaction. A carefully constructed schedule ripped apart by shifting winds? Catasrophic reaction.

But I’ve put a lot of effort into controlling the OCD behavior and changing my overall outlook on life.

Saturday I benefited from that. Instead of focusing on the bad things (the rain and mud, the cold) I was able to focus on the good stuff (watching the kids have a good time, sitting in my over-sized lounge chair under the big tent, drinking coffee and writing down a ton of ideas for future blog posts.

Despite the deluge we were able to keep the fire burning all day, and that fire was much appreciated for those of us who don’t like to be cold.

The gray and wet also couldn’t take away the spectacular view where we were, atop Seven Sisters Road in Haverhill, one of the highest elevations in the city. You could see the Merrimack River for miles around.

A few years ago, this kind of day would have sent my OCD into overdrive. I would have felt like a caged animal. The laughter from the kids would have sounded like gunshots, and I would have cowered from the rain as if it were falling lava laced with every deadly disease on Earth.

I would have panicked at the sight of any mosquitoes and, in the bigger picture, I would have sat there feeling every bit like a victim. In this case, a victim of nature.

Like I said, the fact that I could instead enjoy a day like that — even taking inspiration from it — was almost freaky.

Because of the ongoing rain, the Scout leaders decided to send Sean’s group home at 8 p.m. They know how kids get when they wake up drenched the next morning, and didn’t want their first big camp out to be a souring experience. I was a bit bummed out by this, and found myself surprised by that for all the reasons I mentioned above.

So we went home to our warm beds.

The next day, we paid for our day of fun. I opened my eyes Sunday morning to a headache that stuck with me for much of the day, and I was full of crankiness and snark.

I just wanted to stay under the covers, but life doesn’t work that way when you’re a responsible grown up.

It took me a long time to peel myself off the living room chair, and I was rude to pretty much everyone in church.

But as the day progressed, my mood improved. It always does.

It was good to be able to have a better attitude when things didn’t break my way. But next time, I’ll want my sunshine back.

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Morning After The Twisters

This is one of those mornings where I wake up uneasy. Several tornadoes tore through our state yesterday, but that’s not it.

Mood music:

I used to panic at the sight of a yellow-green sky, because that’s usually a sign of imminent tornadoes and hurricanes. But as I looked out the window, all I could muster was a “meh.” I guess that’s progress.

But then I had other things on my mind.

Yesterday I visited my father in the hospital, where he’s been since Sunday night. He suffered a stroke, and looked like it. His mind was clear, but one eye was covered with gauze and the other was drifting off to the side.

I left the hospital to go back to work and drove right into an hour-long traffic jam. It turns out the Red Sox were playing. When that happens, the area around Fenway Park becomes a sea of humanity and a graveyard for drivers trying to get from points A to B.

On the plus side, I didn’t erupt into a white-hot temper tantrum like I used to when getting stuck in traffic. I wasn’t happy. The F-word escaped my mouth a half dozen times, but I didn’t beat on the steering wheel and scream like I used to. More progress.

Still, it left me in a bad mood for the rest of the day. My mood sunk even further when I learned that Dad has some breathing difficulties AFTER I left.

I’m still in a bad mood, but at the same time I have hope. This stuff always works itself out, because God sends us helpers.

I mentioned this in a recent post about Mister Rogers:

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

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

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

–My family, especially my wife, and also my father and even my mother. My relations with the latter are in mothballs right now, but I think she tried to do her best for me. The help Erin has been to me is way too big to be measured here.

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

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

Fast-forward to the present. I’m uneasy, but I know that in the end, somehow, things will be alright.

My prayers are with those in the state that lost property and people in the tornadoes.

My prayers are obviously with my father.

The helpers are always around us, and they will help us through it all.

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For Veterans, A Holiday Here and There Isn’t Enough

Funny thing about holidays where we honor veterans: Everyone puts those who have fought for our freedom on a pedestal for the day, then the next day some of us go back to treating the same people like garbage.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/V-zqIS7vWbY

Flashback: September, 2010: I’m walking the streets of Brooklyn on a beautiful night, and a guy comes up to me. He has a hole in his head where his left eye used to be and burn scars up and down one arm.

I’m smoking a cigar, so he approaches me for a light. He tells me he was maimed in Afghanistan during military service and asks for some change so he can get a train to somewhere. He tells me he’s in New York looking for work and was stranded without money.

I give him the change from my pocket and then he’s gone.

Is he telling the truth? I have no idea, and I don’t really care. He just looked like a guy in pain who needed a few quarters to survive the next few hours, and that’s all that mattered at the time.

Flashback: Late April, 2011: I’m on Facebook one afternoon and I see a friend commenting that he’s disappointed that some of his friends have decided to “like” a page that makes fun of a fellow known in Haverhill, Mass., as Crazy Mike.

In any city there’s a guy like “Crazy Mike.” The stereotype is usually a long beard, ratty clothes and the fellow is usually living on the street. He talks aloud to no one in particular and falls asleep on playground equipment. People like to laugh at him.

A lot of these so-called crazy guys are homeless vets whose luck ran out somewhere between the battlefield and the hard re-entry into society.

After a few seconds of thinking this through (admittedly, a few seconds is never enough time to really think things through), my temper reaches full boil and I pound out a blog post called “Liking The Crazy Mike of Haverhill Page is Sad and Stupid.”

Discussion follows online, with a big question being if Crazy Mike was in Vietnam and, as a result, sick on the streets with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. One reader insists he is indeed a veteran, and that other homeless people keep stealing his medication. Someone else says she knew the family fairly well, and that Mike is not a veteran. He’s simply a guy who has a serious mental illness.

To me, it doesn’t matter if he was in Vietnam or not. Instead, two realities have my mind spinning like a top on fire.

One is that a lot of people assume he is a veteran, but treat him like shit anyway.

Another thing is that there are a lot of homeless who ARE military veterans, and most days we don’t give them more than a few seconds of thought before we walk on by.

It’s almost as if we honor them on holidays to make ourselves feel better about being the assholes we often are.

I say this as a guy who is admittedly one of those assholes. I’ve made my share of fun of people like this, and in the rear-view mirror, looking back at my own struggle with mental illness, it makes me feel ashamed.  Back when fear, anxiety and addiction had me by the balls, I used to walk or drive the other way when these guys approached. It makes me the last guy on Earth who would be fit to judge others for poking fun at someone less fortunate.

It would be high-minded of me to say we need to do better for our veterans. But it’s been said so often it’s pretty much lost it’s meaning. We like to praise our veterans on Veterans Day, Memorial Day or July 4. But once the holiday is past, we go back to our normal behavior. Because they’re homeless and, as a result, they’re dirty, scary and unpleasant to those who have lived far more comfortable lives. And, don’t you know, we LOVE to judge people even though we know nothing about them.

Let’s face it, folks. We need more than the occasional holiday to treat these people the way they deserve to be treated.

And with that, we can all go back to our holiday cook-outs.