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I Thought I Was Perfect. I Was Just Stupid

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.

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I Am The Facebook Superstar. Hear Me Whine

This statement, which made the rounds awhile back, is deadly accurate when it comes to how we all behave on Facebook:

“Welcome to Facebook. Where love stories are perfect, shit talkers tell the truth, everyone brags they have the perfect life and claim to be in love with their partners. Where your enemies are the ones who visit your profile the most, your ex-friends and family block you, your ex-lover unfriends you. Where you post something and people interpret whatever the hell they want.”

When we de-friend someone on Facebook, our motives are always pure:

–Someone may post too much stuff (I’m fairly sure this is the reason when someone nixes me, though I don’t care. I do what I do. You either get something from it or you don’t).

–Someone may complain about their job constantly.

–Someone may go on constantly about how sad they are.

–Someone may go on about how cool they are.

–Someone may trade love notes with their significant others in sickly sweet fashion.

Easy come, easy go.

It’s funny, the things that offend us in the world of social media. The funniest part is that we usually do the very same things that others did to offend us in the first place.

On Facebook and Twitter, we all have the chance to get our 15 minutes of fame in ways we could only dream about a decade ago. We all have a podium and we can say whatever the hell we want.

Some would say this is the beginning of something bad; some severe downgrading of the human race.

I don’t see it that way.

Do people annoy me on here? Sure. Just like I’m sure I annoy people.

I have an honor code I try to live by, but I’m a writer and I have a machine in place to proliferate what I write. I figure why write a public blog if no one’s going to read it? That would be a stupid waste of time. So I get the stuff out there.

Those who feel overwhelmed or offended are free to de-friend me or block my posts from showing up in their main news feed. I’m not offended. You have all the choice you want on here: Friend someone and be interested in what they post, or be uninterested and walk away.

It’s very simple, really.

If someone complains about their job, more power to them. I personally think it’s a stupid idea, because current or potential employers will inevitably see your whining and that’s pretty career limiting. I recently warned one friend — a good friend — against doing it. But he’s free to keep doing it.

If people get sickly sweet on Facebook, we all have the right to tell them to find a hotel room.

If someone feels relief from posting updates on how sad or empty they are, I’m fine with it if it helps them feel better. And if I disconnect from them, they still get to do what they need to be sane and I get to leave their room if I don’t like it.

At one point, I had to admit that my obsessive-compulsive demons were latching onto the Facebook friend count, and that each loss of a connection felt like a personal blow. My mind would spin endlessly about why someone felt the need to disconnect from me. Was it something offensive I did? Did I hurt someone or come off as a fake?

But I’ve come to see that sometimes it’s the right thing for a person to do.  This blog covers a lot of heavy stuff. A lot of people have become daily readers and tell me my openness has inspired them to deal with their own issues. But for others, especially those with a lot of pain in their lives, every post is going to feel like a baseball bat to the head.

Then there’s the heavy volume of content that flows down my news feed, which can dominate the news feeds of people with a smaller number of connections.

I admit it: I can be very hard to live with in the House of Facebook. I’m the loud obnoxious guy who hogs the dinner table conversation.

But some of you are hard to live with, too.

I love most of you anyway. Because as dysfunctional as you are, you’re still family. Sort of.

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Brain to Body: Drop Dead

I drove two hours yesterday to participate in a security event at Dartmouth and drove back this morning. A great experience, but I’ve gotten little done since then. I really hate inactivity.

I like to cram as much as I can into each day, and I like to throw everything I have into my job. But all I can do is sit in this chair, trying to motivate myself to move, pounding head be damned.

But I really can’t move. I think my brain has told the rest of me to drop dead.

Still, I’ve found that there’s a lot I can do in this paralyzed position:

–I can help the kids do their summer workbooks

–I can help Sean with his latest writing project

–I can chat with two old friends on Facebook

So it’s not a total waste. I’d even say that’s time well spent.

I just wish I could bust out a security blog post. But nothing is striking me today.

So I’m doing something I think will give me a second wind. I’m making a music playlist. Let’s see how this works:

http://youtu.be/umeZtszNShk

http://youtu.be/geTHEO7IcgQ

http://youtu.be/p5sRQ2jqV8Y

OCD Diaries

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I Talk To Myself. So What?

I talk to myself all the time. Sometimes I get caught, and it embarrasses me. But over the years, the habit has served its purpose.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/IKpEoRlcHfA

I know I look ridiculous when I do it. Maybe I even look a little crazy, though much less so since the invention of the Bluetooth ear device. One morning in New York City, I was walking down a street chuckling over all the people with Bluetooth devices in their ears, looking dead ahead while flapping their lips.

“I’m cooler than they are,” I thought to myself. “I don’t need a funny-looking thing in my ear to talk to myself.”

I’m the type who will talk to myself loudly while walking around in public. I’ve gotten stared at plenty of times for that. I’ve also been known to read news articles back aloud to myself, whether they’re articles I wrote or was editing.

Past colleagues have gone nuts over the habit, especially the editors I worked with at The Eagle-Tribune.

What do I talk to myself about? Usually I’m planning all the things I have to do during the day ahead. Or, after work, I’ll list all the important tasks I took care of that day. Back when my OCD, fear, anxiety and depression burned out of control I would talk aloud to myself about all kinds of worries. Those conversations would go in endless circles and wipe me out.

I know I look like the crazy guy on the street when I do this. But I can’t help myself.

But it’s better than it used to be.

For one thing, I don’t read stories I’m writing or editing back to myself aloud anymore. I did that because I lacked confidence in my writing and editing abilities, and was terrified of turning in work that was less than perfect. I still turned in a lot of crap, so in hindsight I wasted a lot of time.

Now I read it back silently with metal music blaring in my headphones. It’s a lot more fun that way.

People who talk to themselves are usually considered crazy. I think of Crazy Mike of Haverhill and a lot of characters I used to know in Revere. But they are usually harmless. They’re so wrapped up in the conversations they have with themselves that they don’t notice the people around them. They’ve never bothered me. I do feel for them, because I’m sure some of it is loneliness. No one else will talk to them. It’s tragic, really.

I’ve always been more fortunate. Even when I’ve weirded people out, they still talk to me.

As annoying as it can be to others, I think talking to yourself is actually one of the sanest things you can do. It can be painful when taken to excess. I speak from experience. But it’s also a good way to clear the mind of cluttering thoughts.

It’s like everything else in my OCD-infested world. I’m forever trying to figure out how much is too much or just enough to keep my brain working.

If that means I’m still crazy, so be it. I’m in good company, at least.

OCD Diaries

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Hitting Bottom and Staying There

I’ve gotten a lot of questions about hitting bottom. Specifically, after I hit bottom, how long did it take for things to start looking up? I got bad news for those craving the quick fix.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/yUSn0u2GIjE

The first point worth making is that I didn’t hit one bottom like you usually see in the movies, where the addict falls so low that the clouds part and they see the light in huge, dramatic fashion. Reality is slower than that — and more boring.

I didn’t just hit one bottom. I hit a series of bottoms. And I stayed down there for a while each time before I even considered pulling myself up.

One crash was a couple months after my best friend took his life. I was binge eating with more zeal than ever, and I don’t think I cared at that point if my heart gave out. I was too crushed to care much about anything.

I had just been handed the job of editor for the Lynn Sunday Post, a paper that was already dying. I would be its pallbearer. The job included double duty as a writer for North Shore Sunday. I worked 16-hour days, six days a week.

Work was all I had at that point. Erin and I were engaged (realizing life is too short, I proposed a month after Sean died), but I was still trying to please my masters, so work came first. On Sundays, my only day off, I was sleeping through the entire day.

By the summer of 1997, I realized I had to push back or end up in an institution somewhere. Fortunately, my boss at the time saw that I was physically deteriorating and stepped in.

In December 1998, I was 285 pounds and collapsing under the weight. My father was too, and wound up getting quadruple bypass surgery. That was another slap in the face to warn me that I had to clean up. I lost 100 pounds, though I did it through unhealthy means that would blow up in my face several years later.

In late 2001 I realized that I was never going to please the managing editor I worked for at The Eagle-Tribune. He was forcing me to be the type of manager I didn’t want to be — an asshole. So I told him I was going higher up the food chain to get reassigned. And that’s what I did. They put me back in the night editor’s chair, which helped for a short time.

By late 2004 I was out of The Eagle-Tribune and in a job I loved. But I was putting enormous pressure on myself and the physical toll was showing. All my personality ticks were in overdrive: the obsession with cleanliness. The paranoia over my kids’ safety. A growing sense of fear that kept me indoors a lot.

That was probably the deepest bottom to date, the one that made me realize I needed to get help from a therapist; help that led to my OCD diagnosis.

The next bottom was in late 2006, when I had developed many of the mental health tools I use today. But my brain chemistry was such a mess I couldn’t get past the fear and anxiety attacks. That’s when I decided to try medication, which has worked far better than I ever thought possible.

The last bottom was in the summer of 2008. I was finally finding some mental stability, but I surrendered to the binge eating during therapy and was back up to 260 pounds. And it was hurting my health in a big way. I kept waking up in the middle of the night, choking on stomach acid. I couldn’t find clothes that would fit me. I was getting depressed again.

And so I started checking out OA and by October was headlong into my 12-Step Program of Recovery.

All these events were bottoms. And I lingered there for weeks and months at a time.

There are reasons the bottoming-out process takes a long time:

1. You usually fall to the bottom slowly, so slowly that you don’t notice the movement.

2. Once you crash to the floor, you become so out of sorts that you don’t realize you’re in hell. It’s just another shitty day, followed by another, and then another, and then another.

3. It’s usually those around you who realize you’ve arrived in a bad place. But you’ve been causing them so much pain for so long that they don’t even realize it immediately.

Once you hit the bottom, the depression and self-destructive behavior intensifies.

http://youtu.be/zBEo5ZGGsO4

Then you wake up one morning and decide you’re so sick of life that something has to change. And you start making changes.

The changes end up taking a long time, too.

That’s probably not what you wanted to hear. But it does get better.

OCD Diaries

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Killed By Fear (Doctor Phobia and the C Word)

The Fredstock 2 benefit concert Erin and I went to Friday night hit me where I live for another reason besides a love of music: The event was also about raising awareness about colorectal cancer. I’m a high-risk case.

Mood music:

I never knew Fred Ciampi, the man the benefit is named for. He passed away this winter from colorectal cancer, and the benefit was also meant to help out his wife, Claudia DeHaven Ciampi-Biddle. (Donations can still be made by writing to Claudia@snowlionyoga.com. Please put Fredstock Donation in the subject.)

When I saw his picture, my first thought was, “Man, he was young.” In fact, he died just shy of his 40th birthday.

The other thing that came to mind was that it could just as easily be me in the obituary. The childhood Crohn’s Disease that reduced my colon to a tube of scar tissue also left me at a much higher risk for colon cancer.

It’s something I’ve had to live with since 1990, when I got a letter from my then-doctor recommending I get regular colonoscopies to monitor for possible colon cancer. As a 20-year-old I balked. You never really worry about cancer at that age. But I had the test anyway.

It was a good thing I did.

They found hundreds of polyps throughout the colon. These weren’t — and aren’t — the type of polyps that they typically worry about. These are more like skin tags. Specifically, they are part of the scar tissue.

The doctor was pretty stern with me. “You can’t wait five years between colonoscopies,” he told me. “This stuff can be dangerous.”

Naturally, I went eight years before the next one, and in those years I did some of the most vicious binge eating of my life. Each year that passed made me more fearful of what was going on inside.

I got the test done in 1999 because of some bleeding. Everything was fine, and I’ve done much better at getting a colonoscopy every other year to keep an eye on things. So far, so good, though I’m about a year overdue for the next one. I better make that call this week.

Perhaps I’m a fatalistic personality, but I won’t be a bit surprised if colon cancer is found in me at some point. I haven’t had a Chrohn’s attack since 1986 and I know my luck could run out sooner or later.

But I don’t really fear it like I used to. I figure I get the test frequently enough that anything they find will be at an early and treatable stage.

If I’ve learned anything from all this, it’s that fear and embarrassment is the deadliest risk of all.

People are too embarrassed to get a colonoscopy because of how the procedure is done. No one has to know about it except their doctor and maybe a couple family members. But they avoid the test anyway because they still find it embarrassing. Then they end up dying of colon cancer a few years later. Not in every case, but in many.

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

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

But we shouldn’t feel shame over an illness and shouldn’t be embarrassed about getting help, whether it’s for colon trouble or the mental illness and addiction at the heart of this blog.

I’m not saying Fred was like that. Like I said, I never knew him.

But I know a thing or two about fear, shame and embarrassment.

Don’t let those things keep you from letting the professionals help you.

OCD Diaries

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Facebook Changed My Social Dysfunction

Going to see The 360s last night drove home an interesting point for me: The Facebook world and the real world are indeed two different places. And it may have made my social dysfunction worse.

Mood music:

First, I want to thank The 360s for a great show last night. When I leave a show with my ears ringing, feeling like I’ve been kicked in the gut, I know I’ve had a good, healthy dose of rock n roll. I need that sort of thing every day.

Here’s what was weird for me, and it’s nobody’s fault, really. Heck, it’s not even necessarily a bad thing: I’m connected with all the band members on Facebook. Seeing their status updates every day makes me feel like I really know them. But in person, we’re strangers.

I approached the band members, who looked at me puzzled, trying to figure out who I was. Once I introduced myself, they knew who the strange guy in front of them was and they were very friendly. Some of them read this blog, but in real life, in a dark club, I don’t really resemble the cartoon logo people associate me with. And outside of Facebook, we’ve never really talked to each other in a room.

And so I come off as the typical hanger-on at rock shows, the guy in the room who sucks up to the band so he can tell people he knows them. That’s not my goal, but I can see how I might come off that way. I can be a real train wreck sometimes.

In a way it’s kind of cool, because it goes to show that you can’t replace the real world with something found in cyberspace.

That’s actually a relief, because I sometimes worry that if I get too good at the social media thing, I’ll forget how to function when face-to-face with someone.

Actually, let me correct that: I’ve never really understood how to function when face to face. And that brings me to the main point of this post.

Even though I can comfortably give a talk in front of an audience and share my most embarrassing truths in writing, I remain socially dysfunctional.

I lose the ability to distinguish what I see in the people I share a room with from people I share a Facebook page with. So, once off Facebook and back in the real world, I forget how I should act around people.

I’ve gotten better at this stuff since crawling out of the black hole that is OCD and addiction. But I suppose I’ll always be fighting the battle at some level. And that’s OK.

My social awkwardness didn’t get in the way of what was a great night out with my wife. I had fun, and look forward to the next concert. I also didn’t need to feed my addictive side with binge eating or booze to get through the night. That’s some pretty good progress.

I just need to work on my real-world people skills. But then doesn’t everybody?

OCD Diaries

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You CAN Revisit Your Past (A Trip to Revere)

Erin had an audio conference to record Thursday morning, so to ensure a quiet house, I put the kids in the car and went to Revere Beach, the scene of my tumultuous, painful, angry yet beautiful upbringing.

I’ve written a lot about Revere in this blog. How could I avoid it? But I’ve been short on photos to show you. I fixed that problem with this latest journey back in time. Sean and Duncan had a field day picking up shells and jumping in the water — things I took for granted at their age.

The most striking thing about visiting my old home is that as a whole, Revere Beach is a far more beautiful place than I remember growing up. Part of it is because there was a massive renovation of the beachfront in the 1990s. Pavilion roofs ripped off in the Blizzard of 1978 were replaced, sidewalks were extended to the entire length of the beach and, most importantly, the Deer island sewage treatment plant has cleaned up the ocean considerably.

Here’s the rocks behind Carey Circle, just footsteps from my front door. I used to hide here during moments of anger and depression, chain smoking Marlboro Reds:

The house on the right is where Sean Marley grew up. My house was two doors down. During my teenage years, I spent more time in the Marley house than I did in my own. The house on the left is where Sean moved in after he and Joy got married. It’s also the house where his life ended:

My house, dead center, as seen from Pines Road, across the street:

A lot of dead jelly fish used to wash up on the beach. Here’s the private part of the beach, where the bored among us would blow up the dead fish with firecrackers and, on the fourth of July, the bigger explosives.

 This is the first house after Carey Circle, where the Lynnway becomes Revere Beach Boulevard. Me and my siblings used to hang out in this house in the 1970s and play with the kids who lived there. Their father allegedly had ties to the mob and, sometime in 1978 or 1979, he was gunned down in the kitchen. It was believed to be haunted after that, but I never really took that seriously. The house did creep me out, though:

The trip ended with lunch at Kelley’s.

A good trip, I’d say.

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Boredom: An OCD Case’s Worst Friend

Last year I wrote about how boredom is one of the most dangerous things an addict can encounter. It’s equally true for someone with OCD.

Mood music:

The mood music today is especially fitting for the topic. Like the addict who is bored, the OCD case who is bored gets an itch and restlessness that causes you to search and destroy.

I’m a street walking cheetah
with a heart full of napalm
I’m a runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb
I am a world’s forgotten boy
The one who searches and destroys

The opening lyrics apply. For the OCD sufferer, the heart full of napalm is the uneasy, anxious feeling that comes over you in the absence of activity. It makes you search and destroy — in my case, I search for things to worry about. The root of the problem is an OCD sufferer’s inability to live in the present.

This shouldn’t surprise readers of this blog. I’ve described it before. OCD is very much about worry spinning out of control. If it’s something routine, like sending an editor a flawless story, it’ll eat away at a lot of precious time. I used to write a story, read it back aloud, polish it, read it aloud again, then I’d still be afraid to file it for fear that it wasn’t absolutely perfect. I got home late many nights and lost a lot of sleep because of it.

When it was about health, I’d make myself sick for real by fixating too hard on what MIGHT happen. That’s when the anxiety attacks would come. In 1991, after a colonoscopy to monitor the Crohn’s Disease, I was informed that my colon was covered with hundreds of polyps — more scar tissue than polyps, but something that had to be kept an eye on. I was advised to get a colonoscopy every year to ensure it didn’t morph into colon cancer unnoticed. Good advice. So I let more than eight years pass before a bout of bleeding forced me to get one. Until then, I wasted a lot of time in fear that every stomach cramp, however small, was colon cancer. I’d spin it in my head repeatedly, rationalizing why I shouldn’t get the test. Just following doctor’s orders in the first place would have saved me a lot of over-thinking. That was clear when I had the test and found out everything was fine.

I can remember being a kid, always daydreaming about the future: what I’d look like and how cool my life would be if I were thinner, the clothes I would wear, the girls I would date and the music I would write.

As I sat in my basement pondering such greatness, I’d be binge eating, drinking and smoking and wasting the moment.

I’ve spent too much time thinking about plenty of other things. It ages you.

Boredom is a major troublemaker because left with nothing to do, you start thinking about everything that can possibly go wrong with your life. I would get into the negative thinking described above during the busiest of times. You can imagine, then, what happens inside my head when I’m bored.

It leads to the addictive behavior I described in “Boredom: An Addicts Worst Friend.”

I’m better at living in the present than I used to be.  But I still make sure I’m busy at all times. The alternative ain’t pretty..

Besides, there’s joy to be had in the kind of tired you feel after a day lived well.

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The Brady Bunch Offended Me

Sherwood Schwartz, creator of “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Brady Bunch,” has died at age 94. Naturally, I’m remembering how I hated “The Brady Bunch” for giving me a fake picture of family life.

Mood music:

I hated “The Brady Bunch” because it made me so angry that my own family was never like that. But then no one’s family is really like that.

I did like the movie adaptations that came out in the 1990s because the films mocked the feel of the original series. You had the family living in the 1990s but acting like they were in the 1970s. Some elements of the family were modernized, though: Alice the housekeeper and Sam the butcher get it on at one point.

When Mike asks Sam what he’s doing there in his robe in the middle of the night, rummaging through the fridge, Sam says, “Oh, just delivering some meat.”

Obviously, Schwartz’s point was to create the perfect picture of family, not because it reflected reality, but because it would be nice if it were reality.

Now that the chip on my shoulder has been filled in by time, experience and hopefully a little wisdom, I see “The Brady Bunch” as a nice idea, however unrealistic. In fact, the escape from reality was a welcome relief to a lot of people whose families were miserable and ugly. A little relief helps you regroup and carry on.

My problem is that I’ve always had a tendency to overthink these things.

I never took issue with “Gilligan’s Island.” As absurd as the show was, I’ve always liked the theme of people with nothing in common getting thrown together — forced to become a new family of sorts in order to survive.

I admit without shame that my favorite episode is the one with the Japanese sub pilot who didn’t realize the war was over; the one who complained that the Chinese stole the idea for water torture from Japan.

Despite how the younger, angrier version of me felt, the older me believes Schwartz did a lot of good for a society that tends to stew in its own, stinking, cynical juices.

Rest in peace. I hope you find the folks in Heaven to be something like the characters you created.