Me and the kids have a tradition Sean calls Saturday Morning Ritual.
Sean and Duncan yank me from my nice warm bed at 6 a.m. or earlier and we go downstairs to the living room for computer games, TV or Legos — sometimes all at once.
I basically just sit in my chair by the window, drinking my coffee and watching whatever the kids are up to. I also repeatedly bark at them to keep their voices down, because waking Mom up before she’s ready on a weekend is simply not advisable.
It shouldn’t surprise you that I cherish this ritual.
I also pull up the iTunes library and start waking up to whatever music is on my mind. So guess what? I’m adding something to the Saturday Morning Ritual. I’m going to share some music.
I was lucky enough to stumble over a string of live performances from both bands this week, and simply must share it with you. My favorite thing about these is Mick Mars, one of the most underrated guitarists ever. The guy has a bone disease that forces him to stand in the same place for the whole performance. He’s been through the wringer. And WATCHING him play is simply awe-inspiring. So let’s begin …
Snowpocalypse and the Fear of Loss. The author remembers a time when fear of loss would cripple his mental capacities, and explains how he got over it — mostly.
The Ego OCD Built. The author admits to having an ego that sometimes swells beyond acceptable levels and that OCD is fuel for the fire. Go ahead. Laugh at him.
Fear Factor. The author describes years of living in a cell built by fear, how he broke free and why there’s no turning back.
Prozac Winter. The author discovers that winter makes his depression worse and that there’s a purely scientific explanation — and solution.
Have Fun with Your Therapist. Mental-illness sufferers often avoid therapists because the stigma around these “shrinks” is as thick as that of the disease. The author is here to explain why you shouldn’t fear them.
The Engine. To really understand how mental illness happens, let’s compare the brain to a machine.
Rest Redefined.The author finds that he gets the most relaxation from the things he once feared the most.
Outing Myself. The author on why he chose to “out” himself despite what other people might think.
Why Being a People Pleaser is Dumb. The author used to try very hard to please everybody and was hurt badly in the process. Here’s how he broke free and kept his soul intact.
The Addiction and the Damage Done
The Most Uncool Addiction. In this installment, the author opens up about the binge-eating disorder he tried to hide for years — and how he managed to bring it under control.
Edge of a Relapse. The author comes dangerously close to a relapse, but lives to fight another day.
The 12 Steps of Christmas. The author reviews the 12 Steps of Recovery and takes a personal inventory.
How to Play Your Addictions Like a Piano. The author admits that when an obsessive-compulsive person puts down the addiction that’s most self-destructive, a few smaller addictions rise up to fill the void. But what happens when the money runs out?
Regulating Addictive Food: A Lesson in Futility. As an obsessive-compulsive binge eater, the author feels it’s only proper that he weigh in on the notion that regulating junk food might help. Here’s why the answer is probably not.
The Liar’s Disease. The author reveals an uncomfortable truth about addicts like himself: We tend to have trouble telling the truth.
Portable Recovery. Though addiction will follow the junkie anywhere in the world, the author has discovered that recovery is just as portable.
Revere (Experiences with Addiction, Depression and Loss During The Younger Years)
Bridge Rats and Schoolyard Bullies.The author reviews the imperfections of childhood relationships in search of all his OCD triggers. Along the way, old bullies become friends and he realizes he was pretty damn stupid back then.
Lost Brothers. How the death of an older brother shaped the Hell that arrived later.
Marley and Me.The author describes the second older brother whose death hit harder than that of the first.
The Third Brother. Remembering Peter Sugarman, another adopted brother who died too early — but not before teaching the author some important lessons about life.
The Tire and the Footlocker. The author opens up an old footlocker under the stairs and finds himself back in that old Revere basement.
Child of Metal
How Metal Saved Me. Why Heavy Metal music became a critical OCD coping tool.
Insanity to Recovery in 8 Songs or Less. The author shares some videos that together make a bitchin’ soundtrack for those who wrestle with mental illness and addiction. The first four cover the darkness. The next four cover the light.
Rockit Records Revisited. The author has mentioned Metal music as one of his most important coping tools for OCD and related disorders. Here’s a look at the year he got one of the best therapy sessions ever, simply by working in a cramped little record store.
The Rat in the Church Pew. The author has written much about his Faith as a key to overcoming mental illness. But as this post illustrates, he still has a long way to go in his spiritual development.
Running from Sin, Running With Scissors. The author writes an open letter to the RCIA Class of 2010 about Faith as a journey, not a destination. He warns that addiction, rage and other bad behavior won’t disappear the second water is dropped over their heads.
Forgiveness is a Bitch. Seeking and giving forgiveness is essential for someone in recovery. But it’s often seen as a green light for more abuse.
Pain in the Lent. The author gives a progress report on the Lenten sacrifices. It aint pretty.
A couple months ago I told you about my friend Penny Richards, whose beautiful 25-year-old daughter was killed in a motorcycle accident in November. I read her blog every day, and let me tell you: The stuff she’s writing is going to help a lot of grieving people get through their melancholy in years to come.
I really wish she didn’t have to be the one to set the example because she has to carry around deep pain these days. But for those who suffer from depression, her experiences simply need to be shared.
And so I direct you to the latest in her blog, where she describes the depression she now feels:
“It’s another grey, cold day, and I’m more of a believer than ever that the weather influences your attitude. If the sun would shine and the temperatures feel warmer, it would go a long way to making the darkness retreat for a while.
“I’m sure there are many things tougher to endure than depression but one of them is living with someone who is living with their own depression. I used to think your dad was taking your death harder than I was. I used to think I wasn’t grieving the “right way” because he seemed so much more hopeless that I felt. His depression seems more consistently deeper than mine. It’s easier for me to put mine aside for a time. His settles in and stays for a while. Little things are triggers us both, but more often for him.”
In the book “Lincoln’s Melancholy” by Joshua Wolf Shenk, we see how long periods of gloomy weather drove Lincoln to suicidal thoughts in the 1840s, two decades before he was president.
She’s also brutally correct in her assessment that depression hurts the people around the sufferer. Big time. It’s impossible for bystanders to get inside a depressed person’s head and truly understand. It is beyond one’s comprehension. That makes helping your friend or loved one pretty difficult. Meanwhile, your melancholy hangs on them like a stench.
My family knows this all too well, especially my wife. How she has dealt with it all these years is simply beyond me.
And years ago, when my best friend was sinking into a suicidal depression, I didn’t really get what was going on until after he took his life.
Penny has wisdom to share by the bucket. It just sucks that the buckets are filled with tears.
So learn from her, and take some time to learn about her daughter. I never really knew P.J., though I remember her hanging around the Eagle-Tribune newsroom all the time when her mother was a lifestyles writer and I was night editor.
But I’ve since been inspired by her life story, as told my many people. She died too soon, but when she lived, she really lived, and brightened the lives of everyone around her in the process.
It’s a story that really helps us understand how to spend the time God gives us, whether its 100 years or just 25.
The author finds that he gets the most relaxation from the things he once feared the most.
Mood music
A strange thing happened to me on the way to recovery: I started finding peace and relaxation in the very things that used to fill me with fear and spark anxiety attacks. [See Fear Factor]
It used to be that relaxing meant holing myself up in the bedroom watching endless episodes of Star Trek. I watched a lot of the news, too, which instead of relaxing me would send my brain into an endless spin of worry about things happening at the far corners of the world.
Lying on the couch all weekend — sleeping for a lot of it — was relaxation.
Then Sunday night would arrive and I’d go into a deep depression about the tasks that awaited me the next day at work.
Writing — the very thing I earned a living from (and still do) — filled me with dread. Oh, I loved being a journalist even back then, but I was always in fear of not getting a story perfect. I would sit on a story for hours; writing, re-writing, polishing and reading it aloud multiple times to make sure it “sounded” perfect.
If I had to make a business trip, the heart would pound. I’d obsess about the travel itself and whether I would actually make it there alive. Conferences filled me with dread. What if I didn’t manage to cover every piece of news coming from the event?
Oh, and when writing, it had to be absolutely silent around me. Noise would interrupt the gears in my mind — except for the sound of my voice when reading my articles aloud.
I would go crazy about getting the kids to bed by 7:30 so I could lie comatose in front of the TV. If my wife wanted to talk instead, rage would build inside, though I would try not to show it. I sucked at hiding it, though, and in my own passive-aggressive way, she knew she wasn’t getting through. And yet she stuck around anyway. (See: The Freak and the Redhead: A Love Story]
I’m not sure when things changed. But here’s what relaxation and peace mean to me now:
–Family time. Of course, I’ve always craved being with my wife and children more than anything else. But it used to be that I wanted us all sitting around the house doing nothing. Now I love experiencing things together. Trips with Erin to Campobello Island off New Brunswick, Canada, the mountains of New Hampshire or Newport, R.I. for the Newport Folk Festival. Trips with kids in tow to Battleship Cove, Old Sturbridge Village, The N.E. Aquarium, The Museum of Science. I always cherished my time with them. Now I cherish it more. A lot more.
— Writing. For the life of me, I can’t figure out the reason for this, but writing is relaxing now. Other than when I’m with my wife and kids, writing is when I’m happiest. And I no longer re-read my stuff over and over again. I decided that’s what editors are for. Sure, I’m an editor. But every editor needs an editor. And no, I don’t read ’em back to myself anymore.
–Writing WITH music. In another bizarre twist, I went from needing quiet while writing to needing music. The louder the better. Henry Rollins. Motley Crue. Metallica. Thin Lizzy. Cheap Trick. All perfect writing music.
–Travel. Instead of fearing travel, I now relish it, though I don’t like being away from my family for too long. I start to miss them the second I hit the road. They’re on my mind the whole time I’m away. But I love to go places, see things, experience cities outside my own comfortable Bostonian walls. Last year alone, I visited Chicago twice, Washington DC twice, and went to San Francisco, Nevada, Arizona and New York.
One of the DC trips was in an RV with a group of IT security guys. That was the trip back from the Shmoocon security conference. It’s a 12-hour ride and it’s cramped. But I get to hang out with some of the smartest people in my industry.
Thursday, I leave on the RV for the trip down to DC for Shmoocon 2010. I’ll do a lot of writing for work this weekend. But I’m going to have a blast doing it. I’ll get impatient to be home by Sunday afternoon. I’ll miss my family. But I’ll be a better journalist for making the trip.
I’m determined to take the family to DC this year. There are logistics and financial realities to work out, but it’s going to happen.
I don’t spend much time wondering how I came to enjoy what I once feared. I know the answers.
Erin and the boys teach me something every day about living, whether it’s Erin showing me courage by quitting a steady job to try and make her own business work or Duncan, the youngest son, convincing his older, more skittish brother to go with him on a camping trip with the grandparents because “It’ll be fun, Seaney!” That was a couple years ago. Since then, Sean, who has overcome a lot of fears himself and made his Dad proud, relishes those trips as much as Duncan does.
But above all — and the family examples are a huge part of this — I think the transformation came with my conversion to the Catholic Faith. My bringing God into my life, everything has changed for the better. That includes my concept of rest.
To me, rest is not about lying down and shutting off. It’s about living to the best of your ability. When that living gets scary, I put my trust in God. And that makes everything come together.
Make no mistake: I still have a lot of work to do on these things. But I’m glad to be making the journey.
As Henry Rollins once sang:
No such thing as free time. No such thing as downtime. There’s only lifetime. It’s time to shine.
I wrote this in 2010, not long after starting this blog. Since then, Dad has had a series of strokes and has trouble walking, seeing and swallowing. His refusal to let it break his spirit reinforces my appreciation for him all the more.
Thanks for the inspiration, Dad.
The author has learned some surprising lessons from Dad on how to control one’s mental demons.
My father is on my mind this morning. I’m meeting up with him at a meeting of business owners who hope to learn more about a subject I’ve written about extensively for CSO Magazine: The Massachusetts data protection law. I find it odd that my father is reaching out to me for understanding on such a complex subject. I’m used to him giving me advice instead of asking for it.
Back when I was deep under the spell of OCD, his advice was the last thing on Earth I wanted. A little background on Dad: He was always the easy parent. If we kids asked him for something and he said “we’ll see,” it usually meant yes. He would fall asleep watching TV by early evening, while my mother was out with friends, giving us the run of the house. I could always count on him to take me to the Osco Drug store in Lynn to buy a new Star Wars action figure every Sunday, followed by a trip to Friendly’s for some black raspberry ice cream.
He knew that sometimes, when he was still asleep, I’d go in his wallet and grab myself some cash. But he never called me on it. Well, once he did, when I was in sixth grade. He called school looking for me because $100 was missing from his wallet. That time I wasn’t the culprit.
He runs a business in Saugus, Mass. that sells ladies shoes, gloves and all the other things girls go looking for when they need to dress for their prom or wedding.
As a kid, I always felt like the business was his favorite child. He worked hard and expected me to work hard.
He didn’t like to see me resting. If he caught me doing so, he’d give me something to do. Rake the leaves. Take out the trash.
As a teenager with a chip on the shoulder the size of a baseball, I grew to resent this. I especially hated it when he’d make me do deliveries with him on the truck. I sucked at the manual labor thing, and he’d always be on me to lift boxes “with my legs, not my back.” Good advice, it turns out. But I didn’t want to hear it.
My friends and some ex-girlfriends remember him walking around the house in his saggy underwear, hairy belly and other things hanging out for all to see. He didn’t care. It was his house. But he was always nice to the friends, and they all in turn got a kick out of his lack of modesty.
He also keeps his emotions largely to himself. The only time I ever saw him cry was when my brother died.
As my mental health really started to come unhinged, he started to grate on me. If I got a promotion at work, he’d ask how much of a raise I got. I’d tell him. He’d reply with a “That’s it?”
He also has terrible eating habits that have led to a variety of health problems. Much of my binge eating is inherited from him. He’ll down a large tray of stuffed cabbage or a box of frozen Devil Dogs as naturally and as easily as most of us take a breath. I’m pretty sure he’s part shark.
But as I approach my 40th birthday, I’m really starting to appreciate the guy and everything he taught me. I started to feel this way a long time ago, actually, but now that I’m keeping this blog, the memories are more vivid and the appreciation is in better focus. I used to see his stiff upper lip as a weakness; the result of cold emotions.
But I’ve learned the value of keeping a stiff upper lip when times are tough. And I’ve realized that it’s not the result of something cold. I think it’s more a case of him trying to be strong when people around him are falling apart.
He’s also far more giving than he might admit. If one of his employees is in a jam, he usually helps them out of it. I remember when one employee, his wife pregnant, needed a little extra financial help. My father gave it, but was quick to say something to the effect of, “I’m paying for this kid and I didn’t even get to have any fun.” I laughed hard when that employee told me about it. He laughed hard, too.
I’ve also come to appreciate his work ethic instead of being insulted by it.
As I’ve gotten over my fear and anxiety in recent years, I’ve come to see work as one of the most honorable responsibilities one can have. Your providing for family and, if you’re lucky like me, you get to do something you love that just happens to be important as well.
He certainly provided for his family. He still does. Without his prodding, I’m not sure I would have had the career success I’ve had. I also love to watch him with my kids. They are always at ease around him, and Duncan will grab his security blanket and sit with him.
The kids have always been good judges of character.
People ask me if he was upset when I converted from the Jewish Faith to Catholicism. He wasn’t upset at all. In fact, he likes to tell people that those of different religious stripes are really going to be surprised when they die and discover that it’s the same God for everyone.
The old man has been through a lot. He watched one of his children die and watched two more go through all kinds of mental and physical hurt. His marriage to my mother collapsed and was probably doomed from the start. He’s suffered a lot of illness himself.
Yet he still stands tall, even with the bad back and the bad knees. He’s taught me a lot about pressing forward despite life’s demons.
Even at work, my quirks were easy to see. It surfaced in the form of my over-intensity on deadline; my habit of hovering over page designers; my overbearing nature toward the reporters I managed on the night shift.
But I was much better at keeping it together — on the surface, at least — around most friends back then.
Which brings me to another truth about people with mental illness and addictions: We do most of our suffering and self destructing in private.
There’s a scene in a “West Wing” episode where Leo McGarry, recovering alcoholic and chief of staff to the fictional President Bartlet, tells someone: “I don’t get drunk in front of people, I get drunk alone.” I ate alone. And I ran through my darkest, most obsessive-compulsive thinking alone. Most of the time, the two went hand in hand.
But there were times in my life where I hid it well.
As a student at North Shore Community College and later at Salem State College, I was really coming into my own in terms of my look and attitude. I played up the long-hair and metal image, stayed thin through bouts of starvation and read a lot of books so I could talk about them and appear smart.
That’s not to say I was walking around with fake skin. I was who I was at the time. In many ways I’m still the same guy. It’s just that I waited till the door to my room was closed and locked before I let the Devil out.
Despite what I’ve written about being the crazy-ass guy in the newsroom, I’ve been pretty good a lot of the time at putting on a calm, cool face, especially in more recent years. As I was diving deeper and deeper into the food addiction to dull the unpleasantness of going through therapy, I was being prolific as hell at work, writing a ton of breaking news and doing so with a smile.
At one point, a boss at the time marveled that I was so relaxed and zen-like for a guy who had just spent 12 hours covering a big news event. I laughed hard at that. I’ve been called a lot of things in my life, but zen-like was a new one.
On the drive home that day, I ordered $35 worth of junk in a nearby fast-food drive-thru and downed the contents of the four bags by the time I got home.
I was also pretty good at hiding my depression. Part of that is because my brand of depression has never been the suicidal variety that essentially makes the sufferer close down. Mine was more of a brooding depression in which I internalized my feelings and withdrew as often as I could. But on the job, I pushed all those feelings into the proper compartment and went on with life.
There’s light at the end of this tale. The therapy, medication, Spiritual awakening and loss of fear have gone far in making me the calm, zen-like guy on the inside as well as outside. I still carry the restlessness of OCD, but I manage it all better and don’t let the condition get in the way of the precious present nearly as much as before.
To those who knew me in the late 1980s and early 1990s: Don’t worry. I’m basically the same guy you knew back then.
The difference is that the man inside has gotten a lot better at being the man on the surface.
But make no mistake: I still have my bad days. I am human, after all.
There was a time when fear of loss would cripple my mental capacities. I got over it — mostly.
It’s 6:30 Sunday morning as I write this, and a snowstorm is exploding outside my living room window. Sean and Duncan are already playing games on the family laptop.
I’m enjoying the precious present moment, more so since I can remember when my mind used to spin so fast with worry that I would barely recognize the wonderful things in front of me. Including my kids.
In fact, I was often looking at the miracle in front of me and, instead of enjoying it, would work myself into an anxiety attack. Because there was always the chance I could lose it all. Fear of loss.
A word about Sean and Duncan: Sean is an 8-year-old third-grader, one of the smartest kids in his class. Duncan is a 6-year-old kindergartner, equally smart but with more of a romantic streak. He gets crushes on the little girls in his class on a regular basis. They get their brains and their looks from their mom.
They constantly dazzle me with their razor-sharp wit and their kindness toward others. They can pray the Rosary from memory better than many adults. They love unconditionally.
Before I found a treatment program for OCD, I was in constant fear of losing them and their mom to imagined illnesses and other calamities. In 2005, long before the current H1N1 pandemic, when a much more deadly flu virus was killing people in Asia and health officials were worrying that that might blossom into a pandemic as lethal as the 1918-19 Spanish Flu, I worried around the clock that these precious children might someday be stricken with it. I searched five pages of Google search results every morning to get the latest news of every new death.
Looking back, it all seems incredibly stupid. But it also makes perfect sense.
Since OCD is essentially a disease of worry in overdrive, my mind was doomed to always be seeking out something new to worry about. Since I’ve watched a brother and two best friends die, fear of loss was destined to poison my mental juices.
I also used to worry relentlessly about impending snowstorms and hurricanes for the disruptions they might cause.
Then there was the fear of loss in work form, where I’d constantly worry that if I didn’t slave away 80 hours a week at work, I just might fall out of favor with the bosses.
Whenever I had to get on a plane for business travel, I worried that maybe — just maybe — the plane might blow up in flight.
Then I found my faith and found treatment. It was along time coming, but it came.
Don’t get me wrong. I still worry about my wife and kids all the time. When a former colleague recently lost her only child in a motorcycle crash, a fresh wave of worry flooded in.
But I don’t spin mental webs about things that MIGHT happen like I used to. I hardly spin those webs at all today. I know bad things can still happen. But I’ve learned that there’s no fruit in fearing things that are completely beyond my control. All I can do is be the best husband and dad I can possibly be, keeping everyone safe and healthy and giving them all the love I have to offer.
Instead of dreading the snow, I’m enjoying it, even though I have to shovel out the car in an hour because I’m on schedule to do the readings at the 9:30 Mass. Instead of dreading the next business trip, I find myself looking for all the cool, historic places to check out at my next destination. I’ll work hard while there, but I always build in a few hours to take a look at the things I don’t get to see everyday.
I wasn’t looking for a soul mate when I met her. It was the summer of 1993 and I was doing just fine on my own.
Mood music:
I was in a band and we were busy pretending we were really something. This was long before I woke up one day, realized I really don’t know how to sing, and decided to spare the masses the agony of me trying to play vocalist.
I was driving around in a beat-up Chevy Monte Carlo. I had recently crashed it into the side of a van and the door was held shut with a bungee chord. I had recently tired of my long black hair and shaved my head for the first time. For some reason, that attracted her.
I was still a few months away from finding my calling as a journalist, and I was busy hiding from any real work. I pretended to work in my father’s warehouse but was really hiding behind boxes most of the time chain-smoking cigarettes.
I was starting to write for the college newspaper at Salem State College. She was editing the college literary journal, “Soundings East.” I joined the staff to get closer to her so I could make my move.
My first memory of her was on the drive home from classes one afternoon. Stuck in the vile traffic that often snarls the road from Salem to Route 114, I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw a red-headed (strawberry blond, to be more accurate) bobbing her head back and forth to music. I later learned she was listening to The Ramones, and I’m pretty sure she was bobbing her head way off key and off beat from the music. That’s one of the things that attracted me.
On our first date, I took her to meet my mother. The first time she took me home to meet her family, I had forgotten my glasses and was wearing prescription sunglasses and a Henry Rollins T-shirt. It was my first trip to Haverhill and getting home that night in the dark with sunglasses was an experience in mild insanity. But it was worth it. Her dad, by the way, was worried because he’d heard I was Jewish and pork chops were on the menu. I also met her whacky 12-year-old baby sister, who would eventually grow into the woman I would brand for life with the nickname “Blondie.” I taught Blondie the important things in life, like how to carefully put a string of tape on the back of a cat, to show how it would trick the cat into thinking it was under a piece of furniture and would, as a result, crawl as low to the ground as possible.
That wasn’t even enough to scare away my future wife.
She was well within her rights to run for her life. But she stayed, gave me two precious children and helped me to overcome my demons and become the man I am today. She also gave me an extended family that I cherish, even the father-in-law who is to the right of Attila The Hun. I make the latter comment with complete affection, by the way.
My demons weren’t easy for her to understand, to be sure. My path was not the same she had been on. Yet she stayed.
She listens to folk music and puts up with my Heavy Metal. She puts up with the off-color language I picked up during my Revere, Mass. upbringing, which still surfaces in times of anger or intoxication.
She’s dedicated to her Church, sings in the choir and is a Eucharistic minister. Her parenting is the reason my sons are smart and caring beyond their years. She had the courage to leave a relatively safe full-time job to try and build her own business, something that’s not for the faint of heart.
I would never have gotten on top of my OCD without her. My Christmas gift to her is the relative sanity I carry around today. I hope she likes it. 🙂
