At a professional training workshop yesterday, the speakers had tons of good advice for being a good leader, but one item in particular hit me where I live: The suggestion that we act more like kids.
I’ve struggled mightily with that one over the years. As an OCD head case and addict, I often got confused on what it meant to be an adult vs. being a kid.
Being a kid meant reveling in my mood swings, breaking windows in the big unfinished condominium building behind my house, getting trashed in my basement and hiding behind boxes in my father’s warehouse chain smoking cigarettes. Being an adult meant pleasing the bosses at all costs, wherever I worked, spending 80 hours a week on the job. It meant having no patience for the mess my kids made around the house. It meant not taking chances.
In recovery, things have come into better focus.
I’m learning that being a better man means learning to be a kid again.
Not a kid in the sense that you’re being a spoiled, whiney brat. Not a kid in the sense that you’re obsessed with toys and cartoons. I’m talking about rediscovering the curiosity we had as children, and having the open mind children tend to have because they haven’t yet been tarnished by the big bad outside world.
I learn from my kids all the time. Both are intensely creative and have a beautifully simple way of putting things, while grownups go into a frenzy trying to put their challenges into the proper words.
Lately, my 2-year-old niece, Madison, has been reminding me a lot about the importance of curiosity.
Her favorite question is “why?” She asks it repeatedly with a twinkle in her beautiful eyes. She notices everything in a room and asks about it.
That’s exactly how a journalist is supposed to behave. But for a time I lost my curiosity. I was too locked inside my own head and scared blind about venturing too far out into the world.
In recovery, I’ve gotten those things back, though I’m still learning how to channel it properly.
In yesterday’s training session, one of the speakers brought me a few steps closer to channeling the power of the inner child again. One of her slides included this quote from Dr. Seuss: “I like nonsense. It wakes up the brain cells.”
Since I’ve destroyed a lot of brain cells in my day, I need all the nonsense I can get. Not the nonsense of misbehaving, selfish adults, but that of a child and the things that come out of a child’s mouth.
The same speaker gave us some fascinating statistics about learning. One is that kids under 5 learn about 700 new items per day. The number steadily shrinks as we get older and set in out ways.
So the goal is to adopt a “beginner’s mind” no matter how much we think we know it all.
There are a lot of times where I think I’m too far advanced in life to learn anything new. Roughly translated, I suffer episodes of thinking I’m better than everyone else.
That’s bullshit, of course. But it’s really how I would think in my sicker moments, even the moments where I was busy hating myself.
I’m a lucky guy. My bosses sent me to a training session about professionalism and leadership, and I’ve learned a lot so far. But some of what I’ve learned will carry me far beyond the confines of my work space.
I’ve noticed something interesting in the halls of recovery: Some folks cling to their program so tightly that their addictive behavior latches on to the program itself. In my opinion, this can get unhealthy.
To find recovery in Overeater’s Anonymous (mine is a binge-eating addiction), the only requirement is to want to stop eating compulsively. It’s very simple. There is no “OA diet.” But there are a few different food plans people choose from. One is based on a “Dignity of Choice” pamphlet that outlines a few different plans. Then there’s the so-called “Grey Sheet” plan (included among the options in “Dignity of Choice”) a lot of recovering food addicts cling to like a passage from The Bible.
For them (not everyone, but quite a few people), there IS NO OTHER WAY. If you’re not following the food plan outlined there, you are not abstinent.
There’s also the mindset that you HAVE TO ABSTAIN FROM FLOUR AND SUGAR and have nothing in between meals to be abstinent. Eat an apple in between lunch and dinner and you break your abstinence and have to start over.
To me, this is an extreme that causes a lot of people to fail. In fairness, some people need the most rigid plan available to be well because their mental state demands the most brutal discipline to stay clean.
I get and respect that.
What I don’t get or respect is when someone following that plan tells someone they’re not being abstinent if they’re doing their own plan differently.
But not everyone can do it that way. There are many reasons for someone to do it differently. If you have diabetes, for example, following my exact food plan could be bad, maybe even lethal.
I also feel that if an apple between meals keeps you from binge eating, that’s what you do. If the more extreme among us tell you you’re not abstinent if you do that, they’re wrong.
In my view, folks who get that way become addicts of a different sort. The compulsive behavior centers around the program itself.
Don’t get me wrong. If doing it that way is what you have to do to stay away from the binges that made your life unmanageable, more power to you. It’s certainly better than the type of addictive behavior you displayed before finding the program.
What makes me uncomfortable is when that person tries to force their way onto everyone in the room.
There are also sponsors who insist you do your program exactly as they do, with no differences whatsoever. Even if another medical condition forbids you from eliminating all flour and sugar, these particular sponsors won’t work with you. That’s their choice, and they’re entitled to it. Some believe they’re not qualified to guide someone with a plan that’s different from their own. In some cases, that kind of sponsor comes off like someone on a power trip.
In some cases that’s true. In other cases, those folks are just afraid of breaking their own abstinence by letting a sponsee do something different. I understand that fear completely. Nobody wants to have a relapse. That’s the recovering addict’s biggest nightmare.
The problem is that when you give a sponsee no room to do it differently, you’re doing them more harm than good. Someone hungry for recovery gets turned off and walks away to resume their self-destructive behavior.
I sponsored four people at one point, and I eventually decided I had to take a break from it because I was worried that I wasn’t in the best position to tell these people what to do.
Call it the fear of making someone worse while trying to help them.
It just goes to show that addictive minds never heal completely. When you put down the addiction that made you into a monster, you tend to redirect your compulsive nature onto other things — including the recovery plan itself.
This isn’t a criticism of people who are like that.
It’s just an acknowledgement of how hard and complicated recovery can be.
Seeing The Neighborhoods perform at the Joe “Zippo” Kelley benefit last night reminded me of my old friend Danny Waters. He shared in many of the adventures — good and bad — of my youth.
Mood music:
It was Sean Marley who introduced me to Dan. It was 1986 and I dropped in on the Marley residence (2 doors down from me) on a Sunday morning. Sean and Dan had been up late the night before, drinking. Dan had a mop of blond hair and I couldn’t see his eyes.
The two were delighting in the sounds of a Randy Rhoads solo on a live bootleg one of them had acquired. That would be the first of many times the three of us would hang out like brothers. I was the little brother, and sometimes they treated me like it, laughing over and mocking something stupid I said. I gave them plenty of fodder.
At one point, Dan was living in a house at the very end of Pines Road, a street directly across from my house that ended in a boat ramp leading down to the water. I’d go there and check out his guitars. The man could play.
He was brutally shy, though, and he would be there one minute and gone the next. He also had an almost super-human ability to consume massive amounts of beer without dropping dead, though one time, after downing 20 beers, he practically spent the next 24 hours chanting, “I’m not well.”
The very first time I drank myself into a puking spree was in his apartment next the the Northgate shopping plaza on Squire Road. I sat on his bathroom floor for a long time counting the tiles. That somehow made me feel better.
I would get loaded in his company many times after that. I learned to hold my liquor, and the drinking parties would often alternate between his apartment (he later moved to an apartment off Revere Beach Parkway) and my basement in the Point of Pines.
Dan was good friends with Zane, a kid I wrote about in a previous post. Zane jumped off the top of a building in 1988. It would not be the last time Dan lost a close friend to suicide.
I always felt like Dan was more Sean’s friend than mine, and to an extent that’s true. Those two were joined at the hip between the mid 1980s and 1990s. I never would have met Dan or found common ground with him if not for the friend we had in common.
Dan and Sean also played a lot of guitar together. They eventually let me join in as singer. We wrote a few songs, but I can’t really remember them.
As the years progressed, Dan and I would hang out without Sean quite often. The three of us still hung out all the time, but at one point Sean was in an intense (some would say Sid-and-Nancy-like) relationship with a girl who looked like that singer from The Cure. The two fought as often as they took breaths, and their fights would usually start at one of the parties at my place or Dan’s.
Times where it was just me and Dan included a 1988 show at The Channel headlined by The Neighborhoods, the 1991 Lollapalooza festival with Rollins Band, Body Count, Nine Inch Nails and Jane’s Addiction, and low-key nights in his apartment, drinking and watching late-night TV.
One night I freaked out because I consumed two beers and an entire stick of marijuana by myself in the concrete storage room beneath the front patio of my basement hangout.
The fellow who gave it to me was about 500 pounds and wore a black trenchcoat, even during the summer. He died Valentine’s Day 2009 of a heart attack. I lost touch with him as I became focused on career and learned after his death that he had led an admirable life of aiding the mentally disabled. Anyway, I was freaking out because, in the midst of lying on my bed enjoying the high, I suddenly got the idea that I just might have a heart attack. That’s one of my earlier memories of an anxiety attack.
I called Dan.
He drove over and found me pacing up and down the driveway in a blue-green polka-dotted bathrobe I used to own. It was well after midnight.
He took me to Kelly’s Roast Beef and bought me a box of chicken wings. The binge-eating addiction was well under way, and I downed the whole thing in seconds. That calmed me down. I settled into a state of high where I’d let out a “heh heh” every few seconds.
Kelly’s was always a favorite place for me to binge eat away my troubles. It was as good as any drug or liquor store.
Sean got a kick out of the retelling later.
Later, Dan and Sean got into a scrape and I failed to return the favor and come to their aid. It was the fall of 1991, around the time that photo of the three of us above was taken. We were at Kelly’s and as we started walking back we noticed 10 punks were following us.
I freaked and walked ahead, ducking into what was then a bar-restaurant called The Driftwood. I looked back to see the punks circling Sean and Dan, kicking the shit out of both. I had a bartender call the cops and went back outside. By then it was all over. Dan had a black eye. The two limped their way back to the Pines. I stayed a few paces in front of them.
If I could relive that moment, I would have stayed with them and taken my beating, too. It would have made me a better friend. I’d also enjoy retelling the story today, because I wouldn’t look so pathetic in the rear-view mirror.
In 1996, I was living back in The Point of Pines and me, Dan and Sean would walk to Kelly’s every Sunday morning for coffee.
They would usually walk a few paces ahead and talk about a Skinny Puppy song or whatever else I wasn’t paying attention to because I was starting a deep descent into a dark place marked by fear, anxiety and vicious binge eating. Those days, Sunday was for getting myself into a state of anxiety and depression about the upcoming work week. The job was fine. I wasn’t.
Sean was in much worse shape than I was. I don’t know how aware Dan was of just how bad he was getting, but I was all but oblivious. I was too locked inside my head to see what was happening.
Thank God Sean had Joy. She did everything she could to bring him out of his deepening depression. He took his life anyway, but I love her all the more just for being his wife and shouldering a burden I was too self-absorbed to share at the time.
The day Sean died, I spent much of the afternoon frantically trying to reach Dan. When I finally got him on the phone, he collapsed into a pile of rubble on the other end. It’s not a stretch to say that was one of the worst moments of my life. I knew how tight they were, and Dan was more of a loner than I was, which meant he wouldn’t have as much of a support system as I had. I alienated my support system, of course. But that’s a story for another post.
Dan and I continued the Sunday walks into the spring of 1997. We always bought three cups of coffee. We always left the third cup on the beach wall for Sean.
That spring, Dan dropped out of my world. I wouldn’t reconnect with him until 2009 on Facebook. I spent all the time in between thinking he hated me for not doing enough on my end to help Sean. I eventually learned I was just being stupid.
Today Dan is doing just fine. He got married, had two beautiful daughters and lives in Texas.
He plays in a band called Three Kinds of People.
I miss him, and know we’ll never hang out like we used to. But when I think of how we both managed to survive a lot of ugly shit, it makes me happy.
I had my monthly appointment with the therapist this morning. Sadly, I ran out of time to hit the Starbucks drive-thru on the way. He’s one of those stress-reduction specialists who thinks I should quit coffee, avoid cigars and do yoga every morning.
I do keep the cigars to a minimum, but coffee is about all I have left. And I will never do yoga. It’s just not my style.
I always make it a point to walk into his office with a large cup of the boldest coffee brew I can find. He looks at the cup and says, “Oh, I see you’ve brought drugs with you.”
I like my therapist.
I guess that’s why I do these things.
When I like someone, I needle them.
While I’m on here, I’d like to remind you that a benefit show for Joe “Zippo” Kelley is tomorrow night in Salem, Mass. Details HERE.
Two old friends have a son who’s been through the meat grinder too many times in his 12 short years. Some think he should settle in for a lesser life than he’s capable of. I say bullshit.
My young friend’s name is Mark. He lives in a city on the North Shore of Massachusetts. That’s all I’ll reveal about his identity. But his parents will know this is for him and will hopefully share this with him:
Dear Mark,
Because of the mental and physical challenges you face, some grownups think you should set your sites low. They think you’re not cut out for college or a career as, say, a scientist.
They mean well. They know what you’ve been through and they don’t want you to get hurt. But if I’ve learned anything in my own journey through hell, it’s that you can’t always hide from hurt and disappointment. Life is hard. But it’s supposed to be.
It’s how we find out what we’re truly made of.
Item:Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a pampered child whose world view changed when he was crippled by polio in 1921. A lot of people would have given up right there, but he rebuilt his life, became a mentor to other polio victims and was the longest-serving president in history, dealing with war and economic calamity that could have broken the spirit of healthier leaders. Through it all, he carried on an outward cheeriness that put people at ease.
When I was a kid there were plenty of roadblocks. I missed a lot of school because of Crohn’s Disease and lost a brother when I was only a year older than you are now. My studies suffered, and I was put in a lot of the classes where they put the problem children.
Things worked out, though. I got married and had two kids that are much smarter than I was at that age. I have a job that’s allowed me to do a lot of excellent things (excellent to me, anyway).
You shouldn’t settle for anything less than the life you want.
Item:Abraham Lincoln suffered crippling depression his whole life and lost two of his four children, all in a time before anti-depressants were around. He led the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery.
There will be setbacks and those can be discouraging, but you CAN survive them with the right perspective.
Item: The drummer from Def Leppard had an arm ripped off in a car wreck. A lot of people thought his career was over. Twenty-six years later, he’s still drumming.
So just keep trying, and never give up on yourself. Nobody can hold you back. Only YOU can hold yourself back.
One more thing: Having a good life doesn’t mean you get to live without the bad stuff from time to time.
It’s easy for people who fight mental illness and addictive behavior to go on an endless, futile search for the happily ever after, where you somehow find the magic bullet to murder your demons, thus beginning years of bliss and carefree existence.
A few days ago, rumors wafted around the Internet about Facebook shutting down in mid-March. Panic ensued, illustrating just how addictive this thing has become.
Call me nuts (well, I am a little nuts). But as a guy who’s recovering from a runaway addiction, I know it when I see it.
And since an addict is forever playing a frustrating game of whack-a-mole, I admit the thought of Facebook going away panicked me a little, too.
There are times when I’m embarrassed by my own Facebook behavior. Sometimes I’ll stare at it for hours even if there’s really nothing new happening. It’s easy to use it to be a busybody and nose around in other people’s worlds, though some folks are only too happy to supply the fodder.
Last summer my friend Linda noted that I changed the settings on my Facebook page to allow wall comments. It amused her because it was my birthday. She knows me well. Truth is, I wanted to see the birthday messages. I have an ego to stroke.
I suffer from an inflated ego. It’s a side-effect of where I’ve been. I have this odd fear of being forgotten. And I didn’t want to be forgotten on my birthday. It sounds ridiculous. But there it is.
OCD types have big egos. Achieving big things is one of the ways we try to fill in that hole in our souls. In my profession, getting access to the major power players of information security is a rush. I feel like I am somebody as a result. When I don’t make it to a big security conference, the wheels in my head start spinning. I start to worry that by not being there, I become irrelevant.
With this blog, when I write something that really connects with people, the ego grows a few sizes larger.
I’m somewhat ashamed about this. But I also think it’s a common thing among us. When people say they want their birthday to pass quietly without hearing from people, I don’t buy it.
Everyone wants some attention. That is exactly why Facebook took off.
People suddenly found they had a way to project themselves in ways never before possible. Wannabe writers suddenly got to become “published” writers because they had a platform to do it with. For the most part, this has been a good thing, because a lot of those writers are very good.
But it’s also become an outlet for a never-ending supply of mind junk. And I’m only too happy to consume it.
There’s small comfort in the fact that I’m not alone.
For me it’s complicated further by my profession. In the media world I exist in, proliferating your content is vital to survival. If nobody sees the content, why would anyone want to advertise with us?
So I can’t completely put Facebook down and walk away.
I also use it to push out the contents of this blog. I won’t lie: Some of it is driven by my OCD impulses, some of it is because I badly want to break some stigmas.
Facebook, Twitter and the like are like a rushing river. Throw a toy boat on the water and it’ll be gone from view in milliseconds.
So we throw duplicate copies of the toy boat into the current every few hours.
I’m no better than the other people who worried about Facebook going down.
I also know people who can stay off Facebook for days and weeks at a time. I envy them.
The best I can do, since I can’t extract myself from Facebook, is be a positive voice and give people something they might be able to use while I’m here.
I’ve always wondered if I was a narcissist. I’ve been wondering even more since last week, when someone asked me when I reached a point in my recovery where I stopped being self-absorbed. I had to be honest and tell her I still get self absorbed. All the time.
People with obsessive-compulsive tendencies are basket cases about being in control. Maybe it’s simply control of one’s sanity. Usually, it’s control of situations and people you have no business trying to control.
I went looking for a definition and found this on Wikipedia:
Narcissism is the personality trait of egotism, vanity, conceit, or simple selfishness. Applied to a social group, it is sometimes used to denote elitism or an indifference to the plight of others. The name “narcissism” was coined by Freud after Narcissus who in Greek myth was a pathologically self-absorbed young man who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool.
So, let’s see…
I’ve never fallen in love with my reflection. Usually, when I look in a mirror, it’s to make sure I don’t look too fat. I don’t get people who insist on having their bedroom or bathroom fitted with wall-to-wall mirror. I’ve also gone through long periods of hating myself.
But I am guilty of thinking I’m better than the guy sitting next to me. I probably think I’m a better writer than I really am. There are days when I think a little too highly of myself.
Here’s a fact about addicts: We are among the most selfish people on the planet. Or, as Nikki Sixx says in the final track on Sixx A.M.’s soundtrack for The Heroin Diaries: “You know addicts. It’s all about us, right?” That selfishness usually leads us to do stupid things that make us feel shame. In the midst of that shame, we lie.
That sort of behavior can overwhelm us, no matter how much we want to be better people. Putting ourselves before others is the hardest drug of all to resist.
In OA, those of us in recovery from our compulsive eating disorders rely on a set of tools that go hand in hand with the 12 Steps. There’s the plan of eating, writing, sponsorship, the telephone and literature. There’s anonymity. And there’s service to others.
The plan of eating is what’s most necessary for me, but I think my favorite tool is service.
When I do service, the people I may be trying to help are helping me as well. If it’s through OA, everyone is supporting each other. It’s the same at church, be it through school activities or actively participating in Mass. That’s why I do lectoring. Actively participating in Mass helps me to pay attention to what’s going on instead of sitting there locked inside my head.
Service forces me out of my usual role of being a selfish little bastard.
It may not be a cure for narcissism, if I even fit that description. But it makes it manageable.
There’s a lot of good in my life today. I’ll never take it for granted like I did back then.
Have I led a tragic life? No fucking way.
I’ve lost a lot of people I cared for and my body has been through the meat grinder. But that can never take away the blessings.
And it’s not over yet.
To understand this, just think about your own life. You’ve no doubt experienced sickness and death, family dysfunction and career ups and downs.
If you haven’t, you will.
In between the rough patches, I fell in love with and married the best gal on Earth, had two precious children who keep me laughing and loving, I’ve enjoyed a lot of success in my career, traveled to a lot of cool places and found God.
That stuff doesn’t suck.
Then there’s the joy I feel every day in recovery. All the great friends I have, doing a job I love and having the OCD under control.
Would I want to go through the bad stuff again? Of course not. But the weird truth is that I’m not sure I’d change the past, either. It’s easy for someone to wish they had a lost loved one back in their life and that they were less touched by illness.
But without having gone through these things, would I be where I’m at today?
I was talking to a priest the other night about therapy and getting diagnosed with a mental disorder when he frowned. “Everyone struggles with something,” he said. “It’s not good to slap a label on them and make them be defined by it.”
Back in the fall I was going over a talk I was to give at an upcoming Cursillo retreat. I mentioned the words “mental illness” in there because my struggles with that are partly what brought me to my Faith. The priest stopped me cold:
“I don’t think you should use those words,” he said. “EVERYONE struggles with something. If you throw out labels someone will get offended.”
A few years ago, that would have pissed me off. I would have seen it as the priest belittling me as I was trying to be honest about myself. I also would have cursed him for not understanding the nature of mental illness.
But this guy deals with emotionally distraught people all the time. He has seen people act in rational and irrational ways in his day, and knows that sometimes we have to be careful with words.
It’s also commendable that they don’t want people to have labels.
Some people use the labels they’re given to limit themselves, even feel sorry for themselves. As a kid, I used my Crohn’s Disease as an excuse not to do a lot of things. I cried flare-up the day I had to get in a swimming race during gym class. I used it as an excuse when the stress was getting to me at The Eagle-Tribune and I opted to stay home than spend another night in the newsroom.
Later, after I was diagnosed with OCD, I was tempted to break out the mental illness card when I was scared to death of a business trip that required getting on a plane. I laugh when I think back at that one, because today I love flying. And besides, at that point I wasn’t about to out myself. I was still too afraid of the stigma.
But I disagree with those who say a diagnosis is a bad thing.
I resisted getting treatment for years because I was terrified of what a diagnosis would mean. But I sank so low at one point that I became willing to do whatever it took to be sane.
Here’s what I’ve learned:
–A diagnosis can be a useful thing, if you’re willing to use it to make yourself better.
–Using a diagnosis as an excuse not to do things is pathetic. To do that is to be a slave to fear. I only started to get better after I faced down the fears.
–A diagnosis isn’t a label that’s tattooed on your back like a scarlet letter. It only defines you if you let it.
–Other people might still try to label you, but they’re just being stupid and they can’t stop you from achieving your full potential.
Yeah. I have a label on my back. But it’s not an excuse to get away with bad decisions.
It IS something that reminds me that I have to take care of myself.
I write all the time about my recovery, but I sometimes neglect to mention that many of my OCD quirks continue, even though I’m not paralyzed and anxious like I used to be.
I don’t need an OCD screening quiz to know what I’m up against. Here are five signs that the condition is always there below the surface:
–1. The other day, after putting away a new pair of boots and new pants, I opened and closed the drawer two or three times to make sure everything was in place.
–2. When Duncan was doing his homework yesterday, the table cloth on the kitchen table kept wrinkling up. I knew it was pointless to fix until he was done, but I kept trying to do so repeatedly.
–3. Whenever the kids pull the bottom cushions off the couch, it makes me CRAZY.
–4. Whenever I get ready to leave my office in Framingham, I check the position of the chair once or twice to make sure the leather arms aren’t rubbing up against the desk.
–5. When I’m in the car, I put my Android phone in one of the empty drink holders. Obsessed with keeping it from going into locked mode, I repeatedly flick at the device with my index finger.
Don’t worry. I’m fine. Though these little things persist, the insidious parts of the condition have not come back — namely the fear, anxiety and out-of-control worry.
Those are the things that make a disorder impossible to live with.
