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You Can Learn a Lot from a Dummy

Sometimes, addicts look and talk like dummies. But they can teach you some surprising things about yourself.

Mood music for this post: “Dumb” by Nirvana:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CYC8w-qstc&hl=en_US&fs=1]

When you first walk into a 12-Step meeting, everyone in the room seems strange. People may be off the food, drugs and alcohol, but their speech may still be slurred. You dismiss them as dummies, failing to see you’re the same as them. They can teach you more than you can teach them.

Or so I’m discovering.

As I mentioned last week, I’m up to sponsoring three people in OA. It’s been a classic case of me feeling inconvenienced about helping someone else. The selfish side of me kicks in and I start getting pissed if someone has to call me five times a day to be talked off the ledge.

I may have found God and recovery, but I discover on a daily basis how much work I still have to do to become the kind of person I should be. Working toward redemption can be a bitch.

And yet, in a lot of little ways, I can see how I’m being pushed in the right direction despite myself.

The sponsoring is one piece of the puzzle. Being the jerk I’m capable of being, I found myself looking down on my sponsees at first. I had a stronger recovery than them, I felt. I was the teacher and they were the ones who couldn’t talk or walk straight. That’s a bullshit notion, of course. And I’m learning the lesson quickly.

The more I get to know my sponsees, the more I see what THEY have to teach ME. Two of them have been in and out of 12-Step programs for the better part of two decades. Hell, two decades ago all I cared about was getting wrecked in my basement in Revere.

They’ve been to the brink of death more than once at the hands of their multiple addictions. As the reader knows by now, binge eating is the main addiction I had to do something about, and I’ve enjoyed too much wine in the past, along with the pain pills prescribed to me for the constant back pain I used to have. But I have nothing on these folks. My other sponsee is somewhat new to the program, but he’s much more in tune with his Faith than I am at this point, so I’m learning from him, too.

I”m driving two of my sponsees to the Saturday-morning OA meeting these days, and one of them, a life-long resident of Haverhill, is teaching me a lot about the city. As we drive by all kinds of obscure buildings, he’ll tell me about how one used to be a shoe factory and another place used to be a bar he’d hang out in after 10-hour work days for two bucks an hour. He’s a big bear of a man with a heart of gold. Yesterday he left me the following voice mail:

“I just want to say two things to you: THANK YOU. I love you, buddy.”

This, from a guy who has only known me for a few weeks.

Just in case I needed any more convincing that sponsorship has become a necessary tool for me, the Gospel in Mass yesterday was The Parable of the Good Samaritan:

Luke 10:30-37: Jesus answered, “A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who both stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. By chance a certain priest was going down that way. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side.  In the same way a Levite also, when he came to the place, and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he traveled, came where he was. When he saw him, he was moved with compassion, came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. He set him on his own animal, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii, and gave them to the host, and said to him, ‘Take care of him. Whatever you spend beyond that, I will repay you when I return.’ Now which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbor to him who fell among the robbers?” He said, “He who showed mercy on him.” Then Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

Father Michael Harvey expanded on what the Gospel means in his Homily. This was the children’s Mass, so he broke it down in terms that the dumbest among us adults could understand. His last line seemed to be pointed straight at me:

“Giving help was not convenient for the Samaritan. One might say it was a pain and that this is what it’s like when someone proves to be very needy. God puts these people in our lives because we need them as much as they need us.”

So I’m learning.

Yesterday afternoon, a couple close cousins — Sharon and Martha — came to visit us and we were sitting out back, talking about this blog. Sharon apparently keeps up on it more than Martha does, and Sharon said something like, “I tell Martha all the time — you can learn a lot from Bill.”

To which I chuckled, remembering the old commercials with the crash test dummies, and said, “Yeah, you can learn a lot from a dummy.”

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America’s Confusion Over OCD

A new friend from East Africa offers a new perspective on obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Mood music for this post: “Three Days” by Jane’s Addiction:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmvG2GZ3S7o&hl=en_US&fs=1]

A reader of this blog recently friended me on Facebook and, Thursday, pinged me using the FB chat feature. He’s from Uganda in East Africa. He has OCD.

The conversation was mostly him asking me questions about my own treatment for the disorder, how understood it is in American culture and so on.

In Uganda, he said, not many people are aware of the disorder. This makes it difficult to get the proper treatment and carry on in public.

The media and healthcare system there is still very rudimentary, he told me. It’d be hard to explain to an herbal doctor or “traditional healer” what OCD is. So those who have severe OVD suffer in silence.

He was very curious to know what the perception is in this country.

In the course of the conversation, something occurred to me — something I’ve always known but never really thought about.

In America, OCD is so well-known that just about everyone with a Type-A personality will tell you they have it. People will say they’re having an OCD moment at the drop of a hat. Usually if they’ve dropped their own hat and pick it up without counting to four or some of the other things real OCD cases are famous for.

Americans in particular are more hyper-aware of OCD because American culture by its very nature is obsessive and compulsive. We see things on TV that we MUST have, and don’t stop thinking about it until we have it. Maybe it’s a new pair of boots or a handbag. You see it and must have it, then you catch yourself, giggle and say your having an OCD moment.

Or, you get caught up in a period of heavy work activity. A project is due and you have the blinders on so you can tune out the rest of the world and get the work done. You shrug and say it’s an OCD moment.

In both cases, it’s not an OCD moment. It’s just you doing what you’ve been taught to do in a capitalist society.

Don’t mistake this for an anti-American rant. I love my country. It’s just that when compared to poorer, third-world nations, we have so much that we often take our understanding of things for granted. That includes understanding the difference between having a mental disorder and just getting caught up in the hyperactive nature of society.

I do the same things, and — even though I am a clinical OCD case — I often have trouble telling the difference between one of my genuine OCD moments and when I’m just getting caught up in material things.

Americans are complex beings. That’s our Blessing and our curse.

It’s a small lesson. But I’m thankful that this blog connects me with people from other parts of the world who see things differently.

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The Downward Spiral

The author searches for a way out of his latest bout of depression.

Mood music for this post: “The Downward Spiral” by NIN:

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

I was going to start this with some amusing anecdote about how I’m suffering so others might be saved. Jesus already did that sort of thing, of course. Dopes like me think it’s good to suffer to benefit others, but it’s just delusional thinking we engage in to feel better about ourselves when the chips are down.

That aside, I have been in an emotional downward spiral these last few days.

Financial woes kicked off this latest bout of depression. You can read more about that in “Emotions Come from a Strange Place” and “Turning the Tables on Those Who Whine.”

Yesterday started with a gloomy mood, then my spirits lifted as I started to tackle some work projects. Then my mood sunk deep after something I thought would help the family finances fell through.

All things considered, it wasn’t a bad day from there.

I had a pretty productive work day, getting a podcast done and launching a new crop of articles, though it took everything I had not to let my mood interfere with the tasks at hand. I also didn’t go on a fast-food binge on the way home like I used to do. I just went home — sitting through two traffic jams on the way — and collapsed into my bed for an hour. That was better than throwing away my sobriety and abstinence.

Seeing that I was in a fragile state, Erin insisted I go to an OA meeting, which I did. It helped a lot. It was nice to get out of my head for an hour and hear people talk about their recovery and how they’ve hung on to it despite difficult times like these.

From there my mood started to lift. I came home to find that Sean and Duncan had done all my chores for me, and Sean hugged me and called me the “best Dad ever.” Those kids can tell when their Dad isn’t himself. After putting them to bed Erin and I collapsed into bed and talked about the day’s events.

We didn’t figure out the solution to our troubles, but the conversation knocked my perspective back into line.

We talked about other people we know who are going through their own financial troubles, and by comparison our situation isn’t as bad. Our marriage is still rock-solid. We have beautiful children and a vast support network of family and friends. God is never far from us, and if we keep our cool it’ll all work out.

One thing’s clear: I have to keep my recovery whole.

I have to because when I’m in the vice-grip of my addictions, I’m useless as a husband and father.

I also sponsor people in OA, and if I blow it I can’t help them.

There are also family members with troubles of their own, and I have to keep it together for them.

There are some bright spots to this story.

For one thing, my family is getting better at knowing what to do when I’m in a funk, which is basically to let me be withdrawn for a while.

Most importantly, looking at the last couple years, I’m much happier today, even though money is tight.

A few years ago money was no problem, but I was seriously fucked up. I was 280 pounds of self-destructive mayhem under the control of his addictions and riddled with fear and anxiety.

Today I’m sober, abstinent from binge eating and the fear and anxiety went away a long time ago.

I’ll take today’s state of affairs over the old way any day.

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Emotions That Come from a Strange Place

The author finds himself walking between depression and hope. A strange place to be. (Written during a depressive episode in 2010.)

Mood music for this post: Henry Rollins’ “I Think I Know You” performed over “A Warm Place,” from Nine Inch Nails’ “Downward Spiral” album:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CPIT4nsT24&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Yesterday was a perfect example of the strange place I’m in emotionally these days.

It started well enough. A good Mass at church in the morning, a phone conversation with an old friend, the laughter of my wife and kids filling the house. I found myself looking forward to the coming week’s work projects and was especially looking forward to my 2-year-old niece’s birthday party in the afternoon. I even made it through several pages of Slash’s autobiography.

Then, somewhere between 1 and 2 p.m., I had a brutal mood swing. It came on as suddenly as the flame that ignites when you drag a match across sandpaper.

The match in this case was more worry about the financial difficulties I wrote about over the weekend. The allergies assaulting my senses didn’t help matters.

I’m usually pretty talkative at family events, but once we got to my sister-in-law’s house I found myself feeling socially awkward. I looked around at family members who I usually love to be with and decided I really just didn’t want to put on a happy face and socialize. My head started to throb.

So I did what I’ve always done in situations like this. I found a room nobody else was in and dozed off. I’ve always had a kill switch inside me that goes off in times of heavy emotional stress. I go right to sleep. Then I wake up later feeling fine.

It’s a gift, I suppose. It keeps me from doing other things, like getting smashed or being mean to people whose only crime was to me in my presence when I wanted to be alone. I used to binge eat during moments like this, too. But as the reader knows by now, that’s not an option these days.

So I’m pissed with myself now for letting my emotional weaknesses get in the way of what should have been a nice afternoon with family. Fortunately, my sister-in-law Amanda took a lot of great photos so I can at least see what I was missing.

This is one of the few pictures with me. The fuse in my head was burning at this point and within minutes I'd be hiding.

As a result, I missed precious moments like…

Sean showing off his latest Lego creation:

Duncan running around with the remains of his snack all over his face, along with a little blood from some rough playing:

The birthday girl blowing out her candles:

Why toss my dirty laundry on here, when the better thing to do is just let it go and move on? Because it’s a relevant example of how one’s demons can still surface at the worst moments, even when you’ve reached a solid level of recovery as I have.

No matter how strong a person in recovery is, he/she is still ALWAYS seconds away from failure.

That’s not a complaint. Just a simple fact. I’m not a special case.

As is usually the case in this blog, I have a positive ending for you:

Because I have God, an amazing family and recovery on my side, the troubled emotions will surely pass. They’ll pass because instead of sitting on my problems, I’m going to do something I’ve learned to do in recent years.

I’m going to tackle the source of the bad emotions head on and do what I must to set things right.

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Others Who Fight the Stigma

This isn’t the only blog trying to poke the stigma of mental illness and addiction in the eye. Check these out:

Mood music for this post: “Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise” by The Avett Brothers:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E22HprMQN8M&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

I’ve been lucky to run across a couple other blogs this week where others are doing their part to break the stigma of OCD and binge eating. These finds make me happy because I’d hate to be the only one out here trying to fight the good fight. This is a stigma that’s hard to kill, after all.

So let me show you three blogs. Two are stigma-fighting blogs and the third actually glorifies all the stuff food addicts can’t touch.

I include the latter because the gals who write it always give me a chuckle, and laughter is an important tool of recovery, too.

EXPOSING OCD

What’s great about this blog is the level of detail the author gets into about every aspect of her OCD. While my blog casts a wide net on OCD, addiction and all the things that go with it, the author of “Exposing OCD” focuses like a laser beam on the compulsive behavior itself. it’s also chock full of information about the coping tools and organizations that have been a valuable resource for people like us.

The author says the following about herself:

I am a 40 something woman living in the Northeastern US, who took the average 17 years to find out I have OCD and even longer to actually find someone who knows how to treat it. I am sharing what has worked for me, as well as my current challenges with Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy. I hope you find this blog helpful!

I do find it helpful, and I thank you.

PEBBLES IN THE ROAD

This one focuses specifically on the challenges of compulsive overeating. The author takes a real diary approach in this one, while my blog — though the word “diary” is in the title — usually strays from the format.

Her writing is really about taking things one day at a time, focusing on each OA meeting, each day of abstinence from compulsive overeating and how she gets through things like traveling without losing her head. She stumbles, of course, and she doesn’t shy away from that. Here’s what she says about herself:

The is the journal of my road to recovery through Overeaters Anonymous. I have been an obsessive-compulsive personality for most of my 40 years. I had lived most of that time working to cure my disease. Through the years, I have practiced and changed almost all of my OCD behaviors to a livable standard, except compulsive binging. Food was my most powerful compulsion and when I hit bottom on May 13th, 2010, I finally I decided to join Overeaters Anonymous. Little did I know then that this was the answer I had been looking for all along. I have been abstinent from my compulsions since May 15th, 2010 and I have never felt so free.

KTEBCDOG’S BLOG

The ladies who write this one are friends of mine from the IT security industry: Christen Rice Gentile and Katie Boucher. Both work for Kaspersky Lab and Threat Post. Theirs is an unlikely blog to be included here.

I can’t eat a thing that they write about. They write about wanting to eat entire rooms full of kettle corn. They have more to say about beer than I ever thought possible.

But I’m at a stage of recovery where I can read about stuff I can’t have, be OK with it and even enjoy it. Besides, I’m a sucker for this comic direction they take.

Their colleague and my former boss, Dennis Fisher — an avid runner who can eat all this shit and stay thin — is quoted in the tagline as saying “serious food blogs suck out loud.”

Funny… I always felt that way about serious runner blogs. Except for this one. 😉

Go figure.

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An OCD Incident

As good as the author has gotten at managing OCD, some days it still comes crashing down.

Mood music for this post: “You’re Crazy” by Guns ‘N Roses:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1wmwud1DXQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Today was not one of my better days, folks. I had an OCD moment at work. My boss was pretty forgiving about the whole thing, but I’m still pissed with myself.

Before I go any further, this is not a bitch-about-work post. For starters, I have nothing to complain about. I have a great job and work with some of the best people I’ve ever worked with. Every morning I wake up excited about getting to work. Call me crazy, but it’s the truth. And if I did have a problem with someone in the office, it would be between me and them.

No, this is a post about me being an idiot. Pure and simple.

I came into work itching to post two articles I wrote yesterday and did so even though my editor hadn’t had a chance to read them yet. In my head, it was safe to post them because I hadn’t heard back about any changes being necessary. Which meant I had the green light to push them live.

So I did. Now, the editor was very cool-headed about it. He’s one of the nicest guys on the planet and doesn’t yell. But I could tell he wasn’t happy. Not realizing what I had done, he had started doing his own edits.

I went back to my desk, feeling like a first-class asshole. I immediately sent him an e-mail apologizing profusely. He told me not to worry about it. But I worried about it anyway.

Because from the moment I saw the frustration in his face, I knew I had just allowed the OCD to run wild.

These weren’t time-sensitive articles. It really didn’t matter if they ran today or next week. But somewhere in the dark corners of my brain, the urge to control overruled my better judgement.

So here I am, making a much bigger deal of it than it probably deserves.

I’m doing so because there’s a lesson to share.

No matter how good a person with OCD gets at managing the disorder, once in awhile things still go haywire.

For me, this was a minor incident. But it was a sobering reminder that I must take care.

The good news is that I handle these things much better than I did a decade ago, when the very same incident would have caused me to do the following:

— Blame everyone but myself

— Brood for days, possibly weeks

— Let the brooding paralyze everything else, which meant all real productivity ceased and I’d spend time complaining to co-workers instead.

— Allow the stress of the situation to drive me into another episode of binge eating.

This time, the aftermath was happily different. I made my apology, accepted the forgiveness that came my way, and I moved on. I had a pretty productive afternoon of editing to boot.

I had the abstinent lunch I had packed for myself instead of running to the nearest junk-food joint for a binge.

After work was done for the day, I came home, did some chores and enjoyed a nice evening with Sean and Duncan.

And I still find myself looking forward to the work that awaits me tomorrow. And it’ll be a busy one crammed with editing, interviews, more writing and an evening meeting of the National Information Security Group, of which I am a board member.

These things may seem small, but for someone who used to come unhinged over his mistakes — especially the work mistakes — the progress is huge.

So instead of brooding, I’m making a simple course correction: From now on, I don’t publish anything until someone above me signs off on it.

Lesson learned. On with life. And grateful for th ability to put things in the proper perspective.

Some crazy stuff, eh?

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Parental Estrangement

The story of a relationship ruptured by mental illness.

I told myself never to write this one. Too many people would feel burned. Then I remembered those who won’t like this are already angry with me. This is a critical piece of my journey through mental illness, addiction and recovery. So in I go.

Those who know me well know I haven’t gotten along with my mother and step-father for a long time. It’s been more than six years since our relationship imploded. There really is no blame to be assigned. No one person is completely innocent or at fault. Depression, addictive behavior and anger run deep in the family line, and ruptured relationships are often the tragic result.

I take full responsibility for my wrongs along the way. I also hold out hope for a reconciliation, despite several failed attempts in the past three years.

My mom yelled a lot when we were kids. She was capable of serious rage. She could speak in a threatening and cutting way. As a kid, I was completely incapable of understanding the pain she was going through. A failed marriage that was as much my father’s fault as hers. The death of a child and life-threatening illness of another child.

I remember her worrying about me endlessly and sitting beside my hospital bed for weeks on end as the Crohn’s Disease raged inside me, and dragging herself to her wit’s end taking care of my grandparents and great-grandmother, all of whom could be difficult.

We often look at abusive relationships in black and white. There’s the abuser and the victim. But it’s never that simple.

I forgave my mother a long time ago for the darker events of my childhood. I doubt I would have done much better in her shoes. Her marriage to my father was probably doomed from the start, and the break-up was full of rancor. Me and my brother were sick a lot, and one of us didn’t make it.

I didn’t fully appreciate what a body blow that was until I became a parent. After Michael died, she became a suffocating force in my life. I did the same to my own kids until I started dealing with the OCD.

I think she did the best she could under the circumstances.

So why aren’t we talking today?

There are many reasons. Some her fault, some mine, and a lot of other relationships have been bruised and broken in the process.

There’s a lot I can get into about this, but the simplest answer is that this relationship is a casualty of mental illness and addiction. This one can’t be repaired so easily, because much of my OCD and addictive behavior comes directly from her. She is my biggest trigger.

This is an old story. Mental illness and addiction are almost always a family affair. I was destined to have a binge-eating addiction because both my parents have one. They were never drinkers, though my stepfather was. Food was their narcotic. And so it became for me.

The fatal rupture in this relationship came in the summer of 2006. I was two years into my treatment for OCD and the binge eating was still in full swing. I was an emotional mess that summer. Late that July I had surgery for a deviated septum and was lying around drugged up all week. The kids were home and Erin was trying to do her job and take on all the stuff I couldn’t do around the house. So I asked my mother to come over for a few hours and play with the kids.

That morning, the phone rang.

“So tell me again what you need me to do when I get there,” my mother asked, after going on a tirade about what an inconvenience this was for her.

“I just want you to play with the kids for a few hours while Erin works,” I said. It seemed a reasonable request, since she was always on me about seeing more of her grandchildren.

“I’m coming up there so YOUR WIFE can work?” she asked.

That was the breaking point. I got angry and hung up. I figured it would blow over. What followed was a brutal e-mail exchange where she ripped my wife to shreds and blamed her for everything. There were also a lot of swipes in my direction about how I was the laughing stock of the family and that my wife had me whipped.

Since then, we’ve tried a few times but failed to repair the relationship. Our differences are simply too deep.

As far as she’s concerned, I’m a heartless, selfish bastard who does everything my wife tells me to do and that I’ve denied her the right to see her grandchildren. As far as I’m concerned, I need to keep my distance from my OCD triggers, and she is the biggest trigger I have.

I’ve wrestled with this mightily. My Faith tells me I need to honor my mother and father. Every time I go into the confession booth at church it’s the first thing I bring up. One priest put it this way: “Honor thy mother and father doesn’t mean you roll over and allow abuse to continue.” Still, I wrestle with it.

More than one person has asked me why I can’t just accept the disagreements and love my mother despite it.

That’s complicated.

I do love her. That’s never changed. But we both see things in each other that we can’t tolerate. That’s the best explanation I’m capable of giving right now.

77882-xs

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What the hell? My Manson Obsession Resurfaces

Over the years, people have viewed my obsession over the Manson Murders as an oddity. How could I blame them?

The murders took the concept of gore and evil to new heights and dealt the hippie counterculture a body blow it never fully recovered from. Some will fight me on that point, but really — the 60s counterculture’s vision was never the same after Aug. 9, 1969.

So why am I bringing this up now and what does it have to do with the mission of this blog?

I made a new friend on Facebook yesterday: Scott Michaels, founder of Findadeath.com and one of the best experts on the Manson case around today.

He gives special “Helter Skelter” tours around L.A. of not just the murder sites themselves, but every location tied to the case, even those tied by a tiny thread, like one of the buildings Sharon Tate lived in years before her murder.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uizmSLifc7M&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

My interest in this case is an extension of my interest in history, because this WAS an important piece of American history. But I also remain fascinated as someone in recovery for OCD and addiction.

Manson fed the addictions of his followers and twisted wiring in their heads that was already mangled. Susan Atkins is a perfect example: She had a troubled past and was already mentally unhinged before Manson got his hands on her. He exploited his followers’ various levels of mental illness and addiction and turned some of them into killers.

Not all the Manson followers were mentally ill or addicted from a technical standpoint, but there were plenty of head cases to play around with.

Looking at my own past, when mental illness began to take hold in my early 20s and I was looking for SOMETHING bigger than me, I was a pretty good target for corrupting influences like this. Fortunately, the Manson-like influence never materialized and, even if he or she had, my moral compass was such that I would only take things so far.

I was lucky on many levels and eventually found God and my program of recovery. But in the back of my mind I know how weak I was in those days. Hell, I thought it was cool to wear a Manson shirt, which of course it wasn’t. Fortunately, I had more positive influences in my life than bad.

I’ve also been interested because Susan Atkins and Charles “Tex” Watson — the chief killer at the Tate and LaBianca residences — eventually turned on Manson and became Born-Again Christians. As a devout Catholic myself, I’ve always wondered about where the wall is between forgivable sin and the kind you never recover from. Would God truly let these people into His Kingdom after what they did, even if they repented? Everything I learned during my Catholic conversion says yes, and yet it’s still hard to swallow. I’ll find out the real truth someday.

Some of the Manson followers came from backgrounds most would consider normal. The last sort of folk you would ever consider capable of murder.

And yet they did what they did.

So yes, the combination of historical significance and the multitude of mental illness case studies have kept me fascinated over the years.

I’m glad I’m now in touch with Michaels and who knows — maybe someday I’ll get to go on one of his tours.

It may take me time to get down there, but getting a tour of the West Wing of the White House took some doing, yet it happened eventually.

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Hiding in Movies

The author used to pretend he was a character from movies and TV shows. Then he realized his own life was much more interesting.

I used to channel my OCD on movies and TV shows with larger-than-life heroes and villains. Star Wars. Superman. Star Trek. It beat the hell out of real life.

I guess it started when I was around 8 and first starting to get really sick from Crohn’s Disease. I had just gotten out of the hospital in December 1978 when “Superman: The Movie” first came out. It was the best possible escape from reality I could have found at the time.

I saw it repeatedly — first in the theaters and then whenever it was on TV. One afternoon, when it was set to premier on HBO, a coastal storm knocked out the power and deprived me of the movie. I went absolutely nuts.

It was the same thing with the Star Wars movies. Pretending I was a Jedi or crackerjack X-wing pilot was much more satisfying than being the fat, sick child whose home life was high tension as my parents’ marriage disintegrated in violent fashion.

Even as a young adult it was better to live in the world of make-believe than to accept life as it truly was. A lightsaber really would have come in handy. So would the power to choke people and control their actions just by telling The Force it’s what you wanted.

Then there was Star Trek. This was the obsession of my 20s, particularly the Next Generation. As a young pup working my way up the newsroom ladder under intense deadlines that in hindsight really weren’t all that intense, I would act like a young lieutenant on the bridge of the Enterprise, saving the day while the Romulans were firing away at the ship.

Remember the Star Trek juror, the woman who insisted on appearing for jury duty in a Starfleet uniform? When a colleague jokingly called me the Star Trek juror, I was genuinely insulted. True story.

At some point in my recovery, I stopped wanting to be people inside the movie screen. I’m not sure when.

I think to some extent we all tend to fantasize that we’re some larger-than-life movie or TV character. That’s why we get hooked on shows like Lost and Battlestar Gallactica. We’re suckers for the notion that you can be part of some huge destiny, just as Starbuck from Gallactica was destined to lead her people to Earth after the Cylons wiped out the 12 Colonies.

If you don’t follow the plot I just described, it doesn’t matter. It’s just a TV show plot, anyway.

As I found recovery and truly started to bring my OCD under control, I realized my own life as a husband, father, recovering addict and writer is much more interesting than Jedi battles and stopping a falling helicopter with your bare hands.

I still watch these shows from time to time. But it’s different. I put the films on, get a kick out of the action and appreciate the writing and character development, then when it’s over I move on.

I loved the 2009 Star Trek film. The casting was brilliant and the relentless pace was satisfying. But I didn’t find myself thinking the movie over in my head in an endless loop like I used to.

After all, I had a more interesting and meaningful reality to get back to.

I’m not a hero and I have no special powers. I’m not famous, either.

But I do just fine with what I have.

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Writing to Save My Life

The author on why he became a writer and how it shaped his recovery from mental illness and addiction.

People often ask me how the hell I do so much writing every week, between the three-to-four pieces I do for my employer, CSO Magazine, this blog and a book I’m writing on the side. They also ask how I’m able to write so fast, especially during security conferences.

At the Security B-Sides event in San Francisco in March, one friend marveled that I was able to write and post an article on a talk she had just given within minutes of the presentation ending. My friend Jennifer Jabbusch explained it well when she said, “That’s his job. It’s what he does.”

So, I figured it’s time I wrote something about writing.

When I was a kid, everyone expected me to become an artist because I was constantly drawing. In fact, I went to Northeast Metro Tech for high school to study architecture and was well on my way to settling on that for a career. Then, as my passion for metal music deepened, I became obsessed about poetry and the lyrics people like Nikki Sixx, Phil Lynott and James Hetfield were writing. So I started trying to BE them. I do still use the architectural skills when I write, so it wasn’t a waste of studies. When I write security articles, I usually approach it the way an architect approaches each new blueprint.

In hindsight, I wasn’t very good at it. But I persisted. The more music I listened to — and as an employee of Rockit Records, I had access to an endless supply — the more lyrics I wrote.

A lot of what I wrote became the lyrics for songs I would write with the band Skeptic Slang. The lyrics were mostly negative reactions to life at the time. In fact, if I were at a party with the me of the late 1980s-early 1990s, I probably wouldn’t like the younger me very much. I would dismiss him as a whiny little punk. But I was just a product of my experiences up to that point. Those who have read this blog from the beginning will understand. Those who don’t can get the back story here.

Finding those old notebooks full of Skeptic Slang lyrics has become a mini obsession of mine.

As I was ramping up the music writing, I was pursuing a parallel passion for journalism. In college, I dove into it relentlessly, writing for the Salem State Log and slowly earning myself a degree in English (the major) and Communications (the minor). I also helped edit submissions for Sounding’s East, the college literary magazine edited by a beautiful redhead who I eventually married. If you really want to know how to write effectively, check out her blog here.

I had my first reporter job  before I graduated, covering the Swampscott, Mass. school district. From there I got a full-time reporting gig  in Stoneham, then started editing for papers in Lynn, Billerica, Chelmsford and Westford. I was not a fast writer back then. Thanks to the OCD, I would slowly outline each story and, after writing the first draft, I’d read it back aloud, again and again, polishing one paragraph at a time. I would annoy many a colleague doing that, especially when I became night editor at The Eagle-Tribune.

Things started to go wrong in the latter job, because that’s when the surface cracks of my OCD started to appear and I started falling apart. One of the lessons, in hindsight, was that it was a mistake to go into all editing with no writing. I lost sight of why I got into the business when I became a full-on editor.

My entrance onto the information security scene was a result of my craving to write again. The security beat at TechTarget was my way back in, and I haven’t stopped since.

Some things have changed, though.

My writing is much faster today. I don’t do outlines of each story and I don’t read ’em back to myself aloud. I just do it and send them off to an editor. That’s partly the result of experience and partly the result of bringing the OCD under control, since the over polishing was an obsessive-compulsive action.

The result is that I don’t mind having several projects in play at once. In fact, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I need to write every day for mental exercise. The action of typing is now a soothing action for me. I love the sound and feel of my fingers pounding away on each key. It’s like the music I listen to while I write.

I am a two-fingered typist, by the way. I’m proud of that fact.

When I started this blog it was because I was ready to share my experiences so others might be compelled to come out of the shadows of mental illness and addiction. Hopefully I’ve had some success there. But regardless, this particular writing has become a critical tool of my own recovery.

By writing about the experience, I get them out of my head and can move on.

It’s no embellishment to say I’m literally writing to save my life. Writing HAS saved my life.