For those, like me, who struggle with suicide, particularly how the Catholic Church feels about it, I have something useful a good friend sent to me this afternoon, presumably after reading this morning’s post.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/jrRfoEEDENo
From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
“2282 Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide.
2283 We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.”
Thanks to my friend for sharing.
I think the language shows that the Church doesn’t see this issue in the black and white way we often think it does.
So if you know someone who died by their own hand and it tortures you to think about where in the afterlife they are, take comfort in knowing that they may not be in such a bad place after all.
And do something to honor them, like doing things to raise awareness about mental illness.
Some people get depressed on their birthday. Not me. The fact that I turn 41 today is a freak of nature. But a year into my forties, I know I have more cleaning up to do.
Mood music:
Item: 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. Either way, here I am.
Item: 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 hardens. 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 41, 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 six 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.
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 41. feeling a lot better about myself than I did at 31. In fact, 31 was one of the low points.
But I’d be in denial if I told you everything was perfect beyond perfect. I wouldn’t tell you that anyway, because I’ve always thought that perfection was a bullshit concept. That makes it all the more ironic and comical that OCD would be the life-long thorn in my side.
I just recently quit smoking, and I’m still missing the hell out of that vice. I haven’t gone on a food binge in nearly three years, but there are still days where I’m not sure I’ve made the best choices; those days where my skin feels just a little too loose and flabby.
I still go to my meetings, but there are many days where I’d rather do anything but go to a meeting. I go because I have to, but I don’t always want to.
And while I have God in my life, I still manage to be an asshole to Him a lot of the time.
At 41, I’m still very much the work in progress. The scars are merely the scaffolding and newly inserted steel beams propping me up.
I don’t know what comes next, but I have much less fear about the unknown.
It’s Wednesday morning. I’m working from home, face behind the computer. My kids and two neighborhood kids are tearing though the house, overturning everything in sight. Then the phone rings.
Mood music:
“It’s been five years,” the voice on the other end says. “Can’t we fix this?”
It’s my mother. I saw her at my cousin’s wedding two weeks ago but we largely avoided contact. We’re six years into an estrangement that I think is the result of shared mental illness.
Can we fix this?
I really don’t know.
I want to. I’ve never been happy about what happened, though I felt and still feel that the split was necessary.
Some folks think this stuff is simple. Life’s too short not to get along, they say. But life is far more complex than that. Relationships with a history of abuse? That’s one of the most complex and confusing beasts of all.
I’ve had a lot of love and blessings in my life in the last few years. I’ve come far in overcoming addictions and mental illness. Even the family discord has served a purpose. Somewhere along the way, I’ve found myself.
It would be nice if I could mend some more relationships. But I have to be careful.
At the wedding, my Uncle Bobby, the last of the siblings that included my grandmother, took me aside at one point and said life is too short to hate.
He is absolutely right.
But hate has nothing to do with it.
Mistrust, hurt feelings and deep disagreements over right and wrong? Absolutely. But not hate.
If it were about hate, all this would be cut, dry and easy.
I’ve always had this stupid idea that I needed to be everyone’s friend. Even when I was bullying someone, I’d turn around and try to be their friend. I always wanted everyone in my family to like me, even when I was busy hating them.
I’ve carried that into adulthood and got obsessed about it with things like Facebook. This morning I glanced at my friend count and it was 1,713. I could have sworn it was 1,715 a few days ago. So I started looking around to see who might have gotten mad at me. I noticed that three relatives had disconnected from me. A year ago that would have bothered me a lot more than it did this morning.
“At least my ‘friends’ seem to be sticking around,” I thought to myself.
Sarcasm aside, I do think I’m turning a corner with this whole like-dislike thing. Slowly, it’s sinking in that I need to do a better job at listening to my own words. At the beginning of this blog is a post called “Being a People Pleaser is Dumb.” I wrote about how I wanted to be the golden boy at work more than anything back in the day, until I realized it was absolutely impossible to please everyone all the time. In fact, some people are unworthy of the effort.
I’ve had to learn that lesson all over again in the social networking world.
When people walk away from me online, I figure it’s because they don’t particularly enjoy this blog. So be it.
You can’t be everyone’s friend. You shouldn’t be everyone’s friend.
I’m slowly warming to the idea that if some people don’t like you it’s because you have the stones to take a stand on the things you believe in.
You either like me or you don’t. It’s all good.
I’m connected to a lot of people I’m not particularly fond of these days. It’s nothing personal. I just find find the whiny, woe-is-me status updates grating. Facebook is full of that stuff, along with all the self-righteous, pre-manufactured statements people wrap their arms around.
But it’s your profile.
Do what you want with it, and I’ll do what I want with mine.
Yesterday I wrote a post over at my information security blog about famed hacker Kevin Mitnick and how he is conducting himself in the limelight. Is he redeeming himself after a life of crime?
That’s the point a lot of people seem to be debating. Should a man or woman who has made mistakes in life apologize in every interview, at every conference, behind every closed door?
I’m reminded of that scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” where Indiana Jones tells Marion Ravenwood that he can only say he’s sorry so many times. “Well say it again anyway!” she says as she slams down a tray full of shot glasses. In the same scene, she notes that everyone’s sorry for something.
But when do you reach the point where you need to make your amends and get on with life? I have my half-baked theories.
In Mitnick’s case, he did his crimes and served his time. He has used his hacking skills for good in recent years. I know many people in the security community who consider him a friend.
I don’t think he needs to say he’s sorry anymore. Using his skills for the greater good is good enough to me. And as for his conduct in promoting his book, “Ghost in the Wires,” I don’t mind. If you write something, your goal is to have as many people read it as possible. I can be shameless in proliferating this blog, but I don’t apologize. I don’t write it so it’ll sit there on the Internet being read by five people a year. You can’t be useful to people if they don’t know you’re there.
Writing this thing is partly my way of paying it forward. It’s a lot more useful than repeatedly telling everyone I’m sorry for the way I used to be. After awhile, the apologies ring hollow unless they’re backed by real change.
When you change, apologies become less necessary.
If you have to keep apologizing, then you probably still have some behaviors to change.
Here was the question, as posed to me on Facebook:
“Bill, do you think prednisone had anything to do with your OCD? You are the second person I know to have Crohn’s and depression, I have taken the drug in the past and it definitely messed with me mentally.”
The short answer is that I don’t know. I’m not a doctor and I can’t speculate on scientific questions I know nothing about. All I have are scientifically unsupported theories based on personal experience. I’m willing to explore the question from that perspective.
Of this I have no doubt:
Prednisone had brutal side effects that linger to this day. It damaged my vision, making glasses necessary at all times. It sparked migraines that still come and go. It gave me mood swings that have never really left me. And it had plenty to do with the binge-eating habit that has hounded me as an adult.
Prednisone does an excellent job of cooling down a Chron’s flare up. If not for the drug, chances are pretty good I wouldn’t be here right now. More than once the disease got so bad the doctor’s were talking about removing my colon and tossing it in the trash. Each time, the medication brought me back from the brink.
But there was a heavy price — literally and figuratively.
The drug quadrupled my appetite, which was already in overdrive because of the food restrictions imposed upon me during times of illness.
It corrupted my relationship with food forever.
But I can’t say it was the cause of me developing OCD. There are many reasons I developed the disorder. Prednisone may have had a role, but I’ll never know for sure.
But that’s fine with me.
At this point, it doesn’t matter how I got it. I have it, and the best I can do is manage it with all my coping tools, with extra help from Prozac and the 12 Steps of Recovery, which I use to control the addictive behaviors.
I’ve always been fiercely protective of my children. Part of it is that fear of loss. I’m like Marlin the clown fish in “Finding Nemo.” Like Marlin, I’m starting to realize I need to let the kids have some adventures.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/E5H8DwJI0uA
Any good parent is going to be over-protective to a point, and that’s how it should be. God gave us these kids to nurture, and we have to make sure they make it to adulthood and beyond.
But we’re also supposed to teach them how to survive adversity. For all my talk in this blog, I haven’t always done that part very well.
Some of it is my own background. Having watched my parents divorce, a brother die and a best friend commit suicide, I’ve had an overwhelming urge to shield Sean and Duncan from danger at all costs. That kind of compulsion is tailor-made for someone with OCD, because we drive ourselves mad trying to control all the things we are absolutely powerless to control.
I’ve gone crazy over all the usual things. I see a mosquito bite or two on their legs and I go into a fit of lunacy because mosquitoes can carry dangerous diseases. Letting them out of my sight would fill me with dread.
But I also remember something else from childhood: After my brother died, my mother, who was already overbearing, became absolutely suffocating. I think she wanted me to stay in whatever room she was in straight on through adulthood.
Naturally, I rebelled.
Thank God I did, because without taking some chances in life and breaking free of your protective sphere, you amount to nothing.
I can’t put my kids through the same thing, no matter how much I worry about them.
Learning to better control my OCD had been helpful. When I learned to break free of the fear and anxiety, I stopped going crazy over the little things.
This summer I’ve suddenly realized how far I’ve come.
Sean and Duncan have a couple new friends from the neighborhood. One boy’s family runs the farmland all around us and is accustomed to exploring all the woodland trails. Sean and Duncan now run off with their new friends, hanging out in a secret fort they built in the woods and digging holes in the mud by the culverts.
A funny thing has happened here. I find myself kicking the kids out of the house on sunny days, telling them to go explore and enjoy the outdoors.
A couple years ago, the prospect would have terrified me. Now it feels natural.
This doesn’t mean I no longer worry about my kids being in danger. I worry about it all the time. I don’t think that’s the OCD. I think it’s the normal reaction from a parent who adores his children.
But now, when I get uncomfortable about it all, I remember a scene from the movie I mentioned at the beginning of this post: Marlin and Dory are inside a whale, and Marlin laments that he failed to keep a promise to his son. The exchange went something like this:
Marlin: “I promised I’d never let anything bad happen to him.”
Dory: “That’s a funny thing to promise. If nothing ever happens to him, then nothing will ever happen to him. Not much fun for little Harpo.”
Kids need adventure. They even need to experience adversity. That’s how they learn to be good, strong adults.
Let me tell you about the time I wanted to be perfect, how the urge nearly ruined me and how I learned to accept — if not embrace — my flaws.
One of the great delusions an OCD sufferer labors under is the notion that he/she can achieve absolute perfection. Maybe the goal is to be the perfect employee. Maybe it’s to be the perfect parent and spouse. In some cases, the goal can even be to be the perfect addict.
The suicide drive for perfection is closely tied into the OCD case’s compulsion to control as much of their environment as possible.
Why yes, everything you’ve heard about OCD and control freakism is true. People like us crave control like a junkie craves a shot of smack to the arm. It grabs us by the nose and drags us down the road until our emotions are raw and bleeding.
That’s why I used to be such an asshole at The Eagle-Tribune. Every story I edited then went through three more editors and then to the page designer. Along the way, everyone after me had to take a whack at it. I’d hover over the poor page designers because it was the closest thing I had to control. Ultimate control would have meant laying out the pages myself. That would have been a stupid thing to do, mind you. I couldn’t lay out a news page to save my life.
When I was the assistant news editor for the paper’s New Hampshire editions, I was out a week when my son Sean was born. I came in one night to catch up on e-mail and saw the message where my boss, Jeff McMenemy, announced my son’s birth. In it, he joked that I probably stood over the doctor and told him how to deliver the baby.
I wanted to punch him.
I saw red.
Because I knew that was something I could easily be pictured doing. It hit too close to the truth.
All along, I just wanted to be perfect. The perfect editor, in the latter case.
I wanted to be the perfect family man and thought the way to be it was to do as many chores as I could. The problem was that I wasn’t there for my family emotionally. That still happens sometimes.
The drive for perfection always takes me to the brink of disaster.
But all the treatment I’ve received for OCD and addiction has cooled down that compulsion. It still surfaces from time to time, but it’s no longer a feeling that stalks me every minute of every day.
Sometimes my work gets sloppy, but most of the time I do a better job than I used to because I don’t try to get it perfect. As a result, I enjoy what I do more, even if it gets messy sometimes.
Erin has noted a few times that I’m more of a slob now that I’m better. I leave books, socks and gadgets lying around the house.
Somewhere along the way, it stopped being about perfection.
Now I just do the best I can and hope it’s enough most of the time.
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.
