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40: The New 20

A lot of people get depressed on their birthday. Not me. The fact that I turn 40 today is almost a freak of nature.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVXIK1xCRpY&fs=1&hl=en_US]

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. But nevertheless, I’m still here.

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 implodes. 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 40, 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 five years.

I’ve learned to stop over-thinking and manage the OCD. When you learn to stop over-thinking, a lot of things that used to be daunting become a lot easier. You also find yourself in a lot of precious moments that were always there. But you didn’t notice them because you were sick with worry.

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. There’s still the coffee and cigars, but the stuff that made my life unmanageable has been brought to heel.

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 40. I feel much younger than I did at 30.

I don’t know what comes next, but I have much less fear about the unknown.

And so I think WILL have a happy birthday.

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You Think Too Much

I have friends who spend a lot of time raking the same problems over the coals in their heads over and over again. The worry consumes them. I always tell them, “Don’t over think these things. That’s how you get the tumors and shit.” I know, because I used to let worry incapacitate me.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdZXmnLmhFM&fs=1&hl=en_US]

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

But I’ve learned something in my recovery from OCD and the related binge eating addiction: When you learn to stop over-thinking, a lot of things that used to be daunting become a lot easier. You also find yourself in a lot of precious moments that were always there. But you didn’t notice them because you were sick with worry.

I’m a lot happier now that I quickly file an article right after writing it. I move on to the next item on the agenda more quickly and am a lot more productive at work as a result. Does that mean my stories need more editing? Not that I’ve noticed. But hell, that’s what editors are for anyway.

By making doctor appointments and just getting the next blood test or colonoscopy, I do away with a lot of physical pain that worrying used to cause me.

That doesn’t mean I never worry or think about anything. What’s the use of having a brain if you never think about things? There are also a lot of people out there who don’t do nearly as much thinking about their lives as they should.

But there’s a fine line between useful thought and white noise, and my challenge has been to keep myself on the right side of that line. I’ve learned to pick my mental battles more carefully.

It’s easier said than done. If you’re a chronic worrier and someone tells you not to worry you want to punch that person in the face, right? I sure did. When the worry is rushing out of every corner, you can’t even begin to figure out how to shut the valves.

I eventually did it by getting years of intense psychotherapy. I had to peel back each layer of worry and figure out how it all got there. It sucked. A lot. Every painful memory of childhood came to the surface and I had to deal with it head on. Prozac definitely helped. Without getting all the therapy first I don’t think the medicine would have worked as well as it has. In the end, all the Prozac did was fix the flow of my brain chemistry, which was hopelessly out of whack from years of self-abuse.

Delving into the 12 steps through OA was huge, too. Eliminating flour and sugar from my diet cleared out my head in ways I never thought possible. Sugar and flour consumed in massive quantities gummed up my mental gears as bad as any bottle of whiskey would have done.

Letting God into my life was the most important move of all. [See “The Better Angels of My Nature“]

Yeah, I still worry about things. But not like I used to.

It feels better that way.

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The Anxiety Attack

Overcoming fear and anxiety is a major theme of this blog, and people who think they’ve experienced it often ask me to describe what it’s like for me.

Mood music:

It’s been about four years since experiencing a real anxiety attack, but I remember the feeling well.

It starts with a worry. Maybe it’s concern that Sean and Duncan are sick. Kids below the age of 10 spike fevers all the time, especially in the winter. But when it would happen, I’d start to ponder all the worst-case scenarios.

That worry would simmer into full-blown fear that something awful might happen. Because of the loss I’ve had in my life, the anxiety attacks would always come back to that fear of loss.

If I had an argument with my wife, my brain would spin on that, and it would escalate into full-blown fear that she might leave me. That was never a real danger, mind you. But escalating fear is part of the process.

If I had a sore toe or a pain in the shoulder, it would escalate into fear that I might be having a heart attack. A history of particularly vicious Crohn’s Disease left me prone to the constant fear of impending death.

Then the anxiety attack would move from the worry stage to the point of physical discomfort. I’d start having trouble breathing. My chest would throb and hurt. I’d get the pin-and-needle feeling in the feet that one would get if those body parts fell asleep.

By the end of the anxiety attack, the imagined pain would be replaced by genuine physical pain.

The overall experience would last anywhere from 10 minutes to a few hours.

As the attack eased, I would go looking for comfort. I always found it in the food or the wine.

In one particularly inspired moment, I took two Vioxx pills with a few swigs of wine. I was on Vioxx for back pain, and was pissed when the drug was taken off the market for causing real heart attacks.

Two minutes after swallowing the pills and alcohol, full-on wooziness kicked in. It felt good for a few more minutes, until the thought sparked into my head that maybe I was woozy because I was about to overdose. It’s also worth mentioning that I was doing house work during all this.

I called Erin, who was at her friend Sherri’s house, and told her what I did. Sherri, a nurse, said I’d live, and I started to calm down. But for a few minutes I was in full anxiety attack mode.

Though I spent years doing intense therapy to get the OCD under control, the fear and anxiety didn’t start to recede until I started taking Prozac.

When the fear and anxiety went away, it was one of the best feelings you could imagine.

I started to be hungry for all the experiences that used to generate the anxiety.

Life has been SO MUCH BETTER since then.

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An Exaggerated Response

A reader asked me for my thoughts on “rollercoastering,” that exaggerated response to life’s normal challenges that creates high drama and the feeling of being on a rollercoaster. Hell yes, I’ve been on that ride.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_I6y5-GuLPM&fs=1&hl=en_US]

Here’s what my new friend had to say by e-mail (name kept anonymous to protect privacy):

“Part of my addiction(s) is experiencing an exaggerated response to normal life events. Granted, I have a history of creating drama and placing myself in bizarre situations, but my program of recovery has helped that tremendously over the years.”

Here are three examples of how I’ve been down that road:

—Obsessing about girls I liked (long before I met Erin). I always had the fear of not being loved, and my dating life in high school was pretty much non-existent. In a couple of cases, I would fixate on a girl (two, actually, though not at the same time) because she was nice to me. Being friendly signaled an interest in romance in my mind. So I would call them too much and think about them all the time, which, naturally, got in the way of everything else I should have been focusing on. If translating human kindness into a mating call isn’t an exaggerated response to something more normal, I don’t know what is.

—Obsessing about an impending job performance review: Job reviews are a normal part of a job. Sure, they can be stress-inducing, especially right before it happens. But my anxiety attacks would begin weeks — sometimes months — beforehand. During that time, I would go on vicious food binges. It would always be a waste of emotion, because the reviews would go fine, especially when Anne Saita was my boss.

—Obsessing about travel: I used to have a massively exaggerated response to business trips. Mostly, I would worry about the plane blowing up in flight. That’s because I always had a fear of loss. I’m also a control freak, and when you’re in a plane you have no control. It’s funny to think back on, because now I love travel.

Exaggerated responses are a trademark of OCD cases.

How did I get beyond it? Well, I haven’t completely. There are still days — a lot of them — where I’ll have an exaggerated response to the basics. Messy rooms are an example. I just can’t leave a messy room messy. When you have two children below the age of 10, that’s asking a lot.

But my exaggerated reactions are are a lot less than they used to be.

It’s taken years to minimize the drama. It took extensive, emotionally draining therapy, a spiritual awakening and a 12-Step program. Medication has helped, too.

But make no mistake about it: Keeping the exaggerated responses at bay is a life-long challenge.

This much I can tell you: I’m a lot happier now that I’ve learned to limit those rollercoaster rides.

File:The Scream.jpg

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Bully’s Remorse

There was a kid in high school everyone used to pick on. He had a monotone voice and was frail. Kids were terrible to him, including me.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:5Qy0zLjQy3czoj0yZ7DFkk]

For you to understand what I’m about to get into, a review of the 12 Steps of Recovery are in order, with special emphasis on 8 and 9:

1. We admitted we were powerless over [insert addiction. Here’s mine]—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. [Here’s what I’ve come to believe]

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

So I’ve been thinking about my former classmate a lot these days. I haven’t seen or heard from him since the day we graduated 23 years ago. I often wonder where he is, what he’s doing and if he’s ok.

He was the kid everyone made fun of — brutally. And I was probably one of the biggest offenders for the first two and a half years of high school. On the surface he took our taunts with an expressionless face. How he reacted out of view I can only imagine.

There were a lot of bullies at Northeast Metro Tech (it used to be “Vocational School” and we all called it the Voke) and I was made fun of a lot. I was picked on for being fat, for my lack of skill in sports and other things real or imagined.

So what did I do after being picked on? I turned around, found the kids who were weaker than me and attacked them verbally and physically. Mostly verbal, but I remember throwing punches on occasion. Some of it was the reaction to getting picked on. Most of it was from the growing chip on my shoulder over my brother’s death and other unpleasantness at 22 Lynnway in Revere.

By junior year, I had lost a lot of weight and grown my hair long. I was deeply into metal music by then and I started to make friends among some of the so-called metalheads. He had also latched onto metal as a refuge from his pain (he was also pretty religious), and we started to relate over music.

Junior and senior year I made a big effort to be nicer to him, and in the mornings before classes began I would hang out with him. Or, I should say, I let him follow me around. I was still a jerk but was trying to be nice because I was under the influence of another brother, Sean Marley.

So why have I been thinking about him? Because I don’t feel like I did enough back then to set things right. It’s one of my big regrets.

At our 20-year high school reunion in 2009, someone mentioned seeing him at a bus stop going to work.

Sometime soon I’m going to track him down. I have a couple leads on his current whereabouts.

I simply want to say I’m sorry. Someone once suggested I want to make amends to make myself feel better; that I want everyone to see how cool I am doing things like this and writing about it. Maybe there’s some truth to that — the first part anyway. But it’s about more than that. I want to get to know the dude again, if he’s up for it.

If I get to make my amends, you won’t be reading about it here. Righting a wrong will be good enough for me.

bullies

 

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We Need Routines

Being the restless, boredom-shunning soul that I am, I always look forward to the next trip. But today I’m back to a more mundane routine, and I couldn’t be happier. As great as it is to bust out of the norm from time to time, we need our routines. Especially me.

Mood music for this post: “Back in The Saddle” by Aerosmith: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDKxUt9UkmU

For starters, a routine is vital for someone in recovery from addiction and mental illness. I’m on a strict food plan to keep the urge to binge eat at bay. I also need to be in bed at a certain point, typically around 9 p.m., because I’m up and at ’em at around 4 the next morning.

When I travel, I’m up just as early but I’m almost always in bed much later the night before. There are friends to meet up with in whatever town I’m visiting, or the parties sponsored by security vendors. It’s also hard to get the perfect ingredients for my food plan, so I wing it slightly. I stay abstinent and sober, but I eat more restaurant food than I’m comfortable with.

Being back on routine means I can weigh everything I eat on my little scale and have the normal bed time. I’m also glad to be back in the office, since I really feed off the creativity of my co-workers. This morning, my first time in the office this month, I arrived to see that my office mates had a little fun with the run-in I had with the U.S. Secret Service last week:

My next trip is in a month, and I know I’ll be looking forward to it.

I also know my routine will make me itchy after a few weeks.

That’s just the way I am.

But for today, I’m glad to be looking at a more mundane day.

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The Trouble With Wanting It All

Ever since I got over my fear and anxiety I’ve had a bottomless appetite to do it all. I want to travel everywhere. I want to see everything. And I want to participate in as many events as possible. Sometimes that gets me in trouble. Here’s an example.

Mood music: “Serve the Servants” by Nirvana: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aztw2s3PZzY

Columbus Day Weekend there are two events I badly want to be a part of. One is something my security friends put together called HacKid. It’s going to be an epic experience for the kids, and I’ve been planning to be there.

The idea is to provide an interactive, hands-on experience for kids and their parents which includes things like:

–Online safety (kids and parents!)

–Make a podcast/vodcast

–How to deal with CyberBullies

–Physical Security

–Gaming competitions

–Interactive robot building

–How the Internet works

–Food Hacking

–Basic to advanced network/application security

–Website design/introduction to blogging

–Manipulating hardware and software for fun

–Meeting & interacting with law enforcement

–Building a netbook

–Low-impact martial arts/self-defense training

Up until this weekend, it was a given that I’d be dragging Sean and Duncan there.

Then, yesterday, the phone rang.

It was someone involved with the Cursillo retreat weekends at St. Basil’s in Methuen, Mass. It’s a Catholic retreat, and it’s very intense.

He asked me to be on team for the men’s retreat happening THE SAME WEEKEND as HacKid.

On the surface, it’s a no-brainer, right? HacKid is going to be a blast, and I’ve already written a CSOonline.com column throwing my support behind it.

But it’s not that easy.

As readers of this blog know by now, finding my Faith was central to my learning to manage a mental disorder and all the addictions that came with it. Without God, I am nowhere. That may not sound cool to some people, but I don’t care.

There’s also the fact that last weekend I was on here grousing about how I was giving God the short end of the stick lately.

I want to do both, but I can only do one. For a control freak like me, that truly sucks.

But I know there’s really no choice for me here. I have to choose Cursillo. My own Cursillo more than two years ago made a huge, lasting impact and I need to give back.

When God comes calling, you don’t say no. That’s a real pain in the ass, but it’s what I believe.

So I’ll be on team for the men’s weekend, and I’ll give it my all. The timing is also good because right after that I’ll start helping out with Haverhill’s RCIA program. My spiritual side will be finely tuned by then. Not perfect. Definitely not without sin. But I’ll be in the groove.

Meantime, I’ll just have to do other things to help HacKid succeed, not that they need my help. When my friend Chris Hoff gets motivated to do something, it’s a foregone conclusion that he’s going to get it done.

But I CAN write about it and make sure as many people know about it as possible, so that’s what I’ll do.

It’s still going to suck missing the event.

But my security friends will understand.

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Dirty and Fried

It’s been an eventful week and I am close to fried. But before I collapse, I have many hours of travel ahead. As daunting as that may seem, I’m feeling a strange sort of satisfaction this morning.

Rough as this has been, I accomplished a lot. I got four articles out of the conferences I attended — one extra than planned, thanks to the Secret Service.

I got to spend time with our cousins, who are always a blast, and Erin and I even got a date night on Solomon’s Island at the tip of Southern Maryland. Tuesday night, I drove into Virginia and had dinner at the home of Ann and Bob Ball. Ann is a dear friend of mine from the days of North Shore Community College in the early 1990s, and I’ve found a new political debate buddy in Bob. Too bad he’s not on Facebook. Their kids call me “Mr. Bill.”

But I’m ready to be home and back to the normal routine. I’ve pushed myself to the limit this week, and I’m finding it difficult to keep a lid on my addictive instincts. I’ve pulled it off so far, with plenty of help from others. Ann, for example, made me a perfectly abstinent salad the night I visited.

But there has also been a lot of meals in restaurants. I’ve made the best choices possible for my program, but restaurant food is still restaurant food, and I’m feeling the slight bloat of what I call dirty recovery. The motor is feeling gummed up, and it has clouded my head a bit.

It really hit me last night. While on our date, Erin and I visited a liquor store to buy a couple bottles of wine as gifts for people. As I walked around I found myself staring obsessively at the bottles of gin and whiskey. I started to want some.

I haven’t mentioned this much before, but this time last year I was really leaning on alcohol as a crutch to help me keep the food plan intact. It sounds stupid, because drinking inevitably leads to binge eating for me, but for some reason it helped calm me down enough to avoid the food at the heart of my most self-destructive addiction.

In fact, as late as December, I was swilling wine even as I wrote “The Most Uncool Addiction” post at the beginning of this blog.

I was starting to drink hard stuff, too. There were bottles of gin and brandy in the kitchen cabinet Erin used for cooking. One day, I decided to start drinking both. I was also drinking a lot of wine on a daily basis.

A couple weeks into that, I saw what was happening and decided that sobriety had to be part of my abstinence from binge eating. I was feeling dishonest about calling myself abstinent while drinking alcohol.

I’ve had my challenges since giving it up in late December. Free booze flows like a tsunami at the security conferences I go to, and I actually found myself feeling awkward without a glass of wine in my hand. But I pulled it off by keeping that hand busy with glasses of club soda and cans of Red Bull. Red Bull feeds another addiction, but as I’ve said before, people like me play addiction like a piano. When you put a lid on the addiction that’s most self-destructive in your life, a few smaller addictions bubble to the surface.

That’s the daily challenge for someone like me. But despite feeling like my food plan wasn’t as clean as it could have been, I have not binged. I haven’t touched alcohol, either.

That’s a victory.

But I still have some cleaning up to do.

Which is why it’ll be good to get home.

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A New Jersey State of Rage

It’s been one of those days: Six states in 14 hours. The plan was to do it in nine. Then I took a wrong turn in New Jersey.  It was the second anger management test I had in a week. I guess I passed. But for a few hours I seriously considered diving off the wagon head first.

Mood music: 

http://youtu.be/2spuprrj4Pg

The drive was going well enough. We made it to New Jersey in record time, then hopped on the turnpike. The plan was to take the turnpike to I-95 South into Delaware and points further south. Somewhere we missed the turn. Before we knew it we were almost in Atlantic City, a good two-plus hours off course from where we were supposed to be.

It took us nearly four hours to find our way out of the mess we had gotten ourselves into. A couple of nice people in a CVS helped me plot the course back to Maryland. It worked, but we hit bumper-to-bumper traffic the whole way across. We finally rolled into Lusby, Maryland, some two hours south of Washington DC, around 7 p.m., having left Haverhill at 5 a.m. in an attempt to make good time.

So here I am typing this at 9:24 p.m. I have to leave here at 4 a.m. to get to DC and I should be crashed out. I don’t want to bitch about a long day of travel because I don’t really like it when other people bitch about such things. In that respect, I can be a jerk. But it’s better if I get these thoughts out of my head.

It’s worth noting a few things about today:

–I didn’t go into the full-on road rage as I would have a decade ago. I flipped off no one. I didn’t punch the steering wheel in anger.

–I do admit that I was in a pretty dark mood for the rest of the trip. I scowled. I didn’t say much. I felt angry.

–Most importantly, in the flash of angry emotion, I considered breaking my abstinence and my sobriety. I seriously considered it. I didn’t admit as much, but the thoughts were there. I was simply at the breaking point.

It would have been awful had I carried out the angry instinct, given all the work I’ve put into my 12-Step program. I thank God that I didn’t.

But it’s a scary reminder that I’m never far from a relapse. I have to work my program hard — definitely harder than I have of late. I’ve kept it together, but I’ve been getting sloppy. That can’t possibly be good.

And since I’m on the road all week, the danger level is high for me.

So I was tested big-time today, and I expect to be tested some more as I work two security conferences on a schedule that is more ragged than my normal schedule.

One thing occurred to me as we sat in traffic somewhere on the Atlantic City Expressway: With my Prozac dosage up by 20 milligrams since Aug. 1 in an attempt to head off the depressions I usually experience in December, I’ve been waiting for the wild mood swings that hit me as the chemicals balance themselves out. The emotional zigzag I experienced last time the dosage was upped was epic.

Today, lost in New Jersey, I think the mood swings I’ve been waiting for hit me hard. In fact, with my brain cells scrambled, I’m pretty sure I missed that turn because my head was in too many other strange places to comprehend the road before me.

If this is what happened, the rest of this trip will be much better, because I will have turned the corner.

We’ll see tomorrow.

I’m happy to say the day ended well. We arrived at the home of our cousins, the Deans, and they did everything they could to make the tired Brenner clan feel better. The Deans are quite a family, the kind of family everyone should try to be like.

When you have such beautiful friends and family around you, the effects of a bad day can never last.

Now I’m going to crash and hope for a better Monday.

Good night.

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Saturday Morning Sanity Check

Didn’t get up until 6 a.m., which for me is sleeping in. Kids came in the room, dragged me out of bed and down the stairs to the living room.

Poured myself into the chair and used the kids as a blanket. It got cold overnight. They make good blankets.

Got out of the chair after an hour and grabbed a Red Bull. Now I’m listening to this while blogging:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irskrVvKR1E&hl=en_US&fs=1]

Gotta pack for the drive to DC tomorrow. Gotta go feed the in-laws’ cats.

All in all, life is just as it should be.