The #SecTorCa security conference finds me surrounded by more booze than I confronted at the RSA conference back in March. But I think I’m learning how to be sober at these events.
A little history: A little over two years ago I gave up flower and sugar and started weighing almost all of my food as part of my 12-Step program of recovery from a binge-eating addiction. But I clung to the alcohol for awhile after that. I used booze as a crutch to keep away from the food, and by late last year I decided it was getting out of control.
Most of the time I’m comfortable with it. But once in awhile I find myself getting thirsty for something hard. Especially when I go to security conferences.
The booze flows freely at these events, and at the RSA show in March I really struggled with that. I drank club soda and Red Bull as everyone around me enjoyed their alcoholic beverage of choice. I found myself unsure of how to act around people.
Fortunately, I have a lot of great friends in the security industry. Many of them read this blog, and they watch out for me. That was the case in San Francisco, and it’s the case here in Toronto. Friends like Dave Lewis, Zach Lanier and Rob Westervelt put me at ease.
The flowing booze tonight tested me more than at any time since the San Fransisco trip. There were moments where I couldn’t help but think of how sobriety can really suck. Part of the problem was that we were in a small and very crowded bar space. Walking from point A to B without human contact was almost impossible. When I get claustrophobic I want comfort. It could be food or alcohol — or cigar smoke.
But in a happy turn of events, I felt a lot more comfortable around my friends than before.
As far as I’m concerned, that’s real progress.
I’m getting better at just enjoying the company of people. I don’t need the glass in my hand.
My kid sister-in-law told me a friend of hers has admitted to some hefty demons. I won’t mention the person’s name (I don’t know her, actually), but I know where she’s been.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:5F6rwEF15hN1jnhNk2YQHn]
This is a little message for her friend, in the event she someday stumbles upon this blog:
Outing yourself is a hard thing to do. When I did it, I was terrified at first because I thought my mental struggles would be used to define who I was. It gave me an appreciation for what it must be like when a gay person comes out of the closet.
I felt weird around my family at first. Ill at ease might be the best way to describe the feeling. I’m sure they felt the same. That I had OCD and related addictive behavior didn’t surprise them much. As my sister-in-law will tell you, I’ve always had an abundance of strange behaviors.
The people I work with were most surprised. I guess I did a good job of fooling them back in the day. But they have never defined me or treated me differently over what I’ve opened up about. I get the same fair shake as everyone else.
Since people keep their demons hidden for fear of bad treatment at work, it was an eye opener for me when I got nothing but support for coming out with it.
After awhile, it’ll be like that with your friends. They’ll appreciate you more, and they’ll be grateful that you came clean. Some of them will learn from your example, even though they may not know they need it yet.
I understand one of your problems is compulsive lying. There’s no need to feel like a freak over this, because everyone with mental health struggles and addictions lies. I certainly have. Hell, I’ve never met a so-called normal person that hasn’t lied. It’s not something to be proud of or accept. Lies imprison us and make our troubles deeper. But when we can stop living the lie, there’s a new peace and freedom that’s very powerful and hard to describe.
When I decided to stop living lies, I felt 100 pounds lighter. Physical pains went away.
I understand you are looking at taking medication. I take Prozac and it works. But I’m convinced it works as well as it does because I went through years of hard therapy as well. That’s the most important thing you can do: Find the right therapist to talk to. Therapy will provide you with mental coping tools that will make you stronger. By that point, medication becomes the mop that wipes away the remaining baggage.
Things may get worse before they get better. When you start dealing with this stuff, you find yourself learning how to behave all over again. You will still go through periods of depression.
This is when any addictions you may have will tempt you. Fight it at all costs. I didn’t at first. I completely gave in to my addictive behavior and I paid dearly for it. Even if you don’t think you have an addiction, it might be worth considering a 12-Step Program. The tools you learn from that will help you cope with the mental struggles at the heart of your troubles.
Coming clean doesn’t mean you get to live happily ever after. But happily ever after has always been a bullshit myth. But you will have an easier time dealing with the tough times. That may not make sense right now. But it will.
Here’s the thing about one’s demons: When they hide in the dark, out of view, they own you. They’re too powerful to beat.
Opening the door and forcing the sunlight on them is hard as hell. But once you take that step — as you just did — the demons start to shrink. The light always kills demons. They turn to ash and you become a lot bigger than they ever were.
That’s what I’ve learned from my experiences, anyway.
Congratulations on taking that first step. I wish you the very best.
My old friend Clarence liked the post I wrote about him awhile back and jokingly asked me to write another one. OK, buddy, but you’re not gonna like this one.
Note: I’m keeping your true identity out of this, so your anonymity is preserved.
I meant everything I said in that post. In fact, I cherish your friendship a lot more than I did even then. But you have a special challenge I have a little experience with (a lot of experience, actually). I’ve tried to explain it to you in person and on the phone, but I’m not doing a very good job at it. So I’ll do what I always do in situations like that and put it in the written word.
You carry a lot of rage inside of you. An old priest I used to know described it as Irish Alzheimer’s Disease — you forget everything but the grudges.
You talk a lot about how this friend has betrayed you or that friend is driving you to the point where you want to “rip his f-ing head off.” You describe these verbal rages as “taking moral inventory.”
It’s good to take moral inventory. The problem is that your taking inventory of other people’s morals instead of your own.
Taking inventory is probably not the best way to describe it. I used to have to take inventory of shoes in my father’s warehouse and all it did was bore me and make me do stupid things like chainsmoke and talk trash about others.
I used to spend every waking hour stewing over everyone I felt had wronged me that day, week or year. I call it my angry years. Stewing is an exhausting activity, and nothing good comes of it. Build up enough resentment over time and it’ll eat you alive before you have time to feel the teeth going in.
I had one hell of a temper when I was younger. To call it a byproduct of OCD, depression and addiction would be a stretch, because I think the temper would have been there even without the mental illness.
Some of the more colorful examples of my temper:
– Hurling a fork or steak knife at my brother in a restaurant on New Years Eve 1979 because he made a joke I didn’t like. The more dramatic among my family members say it was a steak knife, though I’m pretty sure it was a fork.
– Lighting things on fire out of anger, including a collection of Star Wars action figures that would probably be worth a fortune today. I would pretend they were kids in school who were bullying me. Never mind that I bullied as much as I got bullied.
–Throwing rocks through windows, especially the condominium building that was built behind my house in the late 1980s.
–Yelling “mood swing!” before throwing things around the room at parties in my basement. It came off as comical, as I intended, and nobody got hurt. But there was definitely an underlying anger to it. I was acting out.
– Road rage. Tons of it. I was a very angry driver. I would tailgate. I would speed. In the winters I would intentionally spin out my putrid-green 1983 Ford LTD station wagon in parking lots during snowstorms. While in college, I nearly hit another car and flipped off the other driver while my future in-laws sat in the back. Traffic jams would infuriate me. Getting lost would fill me with fear and, in turn, more anger.
I could go on, but you get the picture, Clarence.
You gotta drop the rage because it’ll never make you feel better. It certainly won’t help you deal with the relationships that give you the rage.
Focus on your own betterment instead. You ARE doing that and you’ve made a ton of progress.
But that rage will hold you back from your full potential as a human being, so cut the bullshit and move on.
I can’t get into the stuff that has brought these friends to the brink, but I can say there’s been a lot of crying. Given my own trouble with tears, it’s rather funny that I’d be in this position. But I’ll do anything for my friends, so it’s all good.
The reason I bring this up is because it reminds me of the emotional breakdowns I’ve suffered over the years. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve hit bottom several times, but the emotional breakdown is a slightly different beast in my eyes. Hitting bottom meant reaching a point of stinging clarity that I couldn’t go on as I was. The emotional breakdown takes it a step further.
I experience powerful anxiety attacks to the point where breathing is a struggle. My chest takes on the feeling of burning rubber, and I’m ready to bawl my eyes out. But as I’ve mentioned before, the bawling doesn’t really happen. I feel it in every way except the tears running down my face.
One of the worst breakdowns was around 2005, the week of Erin’s birthday. I was about six months into some hard-core therapy for OCD (though I was still about a year away from the official diagnosis).
It got so bad I had to call my boss. I know Anne Saita is a special woman because here she was, supervising me at work, and despite all my efforts at being the golden boy with ice-cold blood in the eyes of my bosses, I fell apart on the phone while she was on the other end. I did it calmly. But I did something I had never done before: I had confided in a boss that maybe — just maybe — my issues were going to fuck with my work performance.
I exposed the weakest part of me, and I felt it for days. If you read this, Anne, I just want to thank you again. I will never, ever forget what you did for me.
Going back 20 years, there was another emotional breakdown, and this time I exposed my most raw emotions to Sean Marley. He helped bring me out of it. It’s a painful irony, because six years later I utterly failed to do the same for him.
Last December, when I started this blog, I kind of felt the same rawness. I was starting to spill my guts publicly. And I felt a bit unstable and wobbly.
But in all of these cases, the rawness, the wobbly knees and the shame passed, and each time I came back stronger than before. Not perfect. Not healed for life, but better.
I just felt the need to mention that to my friends who are hurting. You might feel a little ashamed and embarrassed right now, but it’s good. This stuff happens because you were in need of a good humbling, as I was back then.
Whatever happens with your individual struggles, you will get past what you feel now. And you will be much stronger for whatever happens next.
Let me tell you a bit about these folks. To preserve their anonymity, no names are mentioned.
The first guy I sponsor never calls. Once in awhile he e-mails me his food plan for the day. He’s never really listened to me, but having me on standby makes him feel better.
The second sponsee has become a dear friend. He can be a real pain in my ass, but he’s worth it. He was 400 pounds when we met and, because of diabetes, goo oozed from his legs like tree sap. He’s down 20 pounds and just reached 90 days of back-to-back abstinence from binge eating. He works the program hard and I’m proud of him.
He’s also taught me a lot about some of the people in AA. Every 12-Step group has it’s fair share of dysfunction. We wouldn’t need a program in the first place if we weren’t fuck-ups. But when someone who has been sober for a few years turns to OA because they’ve developed a binge-eating addiction, it can be a bitch.
We have the big things in common. We developed addictions that made our lives unmanageable. Having found recovery, we latch onto each other pretty tight.
But something’s different.
In OA, there’s a tight fellowship in meetings and on the telephone. But the AA crowd really sticks together. It’s more like a gang. Recovering addicts often live together, several in a house. Not a halfway house. They just live together, watching out for each other.
It’s cool to see. But I’ve also found that there are some real animosities among the AA crowd. This brings me to the next sponsee:
She’s an OA drop-out for now. She spent a lot of time telling me about how I shouldn’t trust this person or that person because one likes to tell lies and the other likes to steal money. The lying part didn’t shock me. All addicts lie. She is a battle-scarred AA veteran who has had a tough life. She would call me throughout the day, each call a crisis. She finally decided she couldn’t handle OA.
The next sponsee dropped out of OA for the same reasons. He couldn’t handle the honesty and discipline required. I don’t knock him for that. Clean living is very hard. He also has some severe mental illness going on. Our phone calls would consist of me listening as he spilled out all his pain. Controlling the addiction had little to do with it.
So now there are two, and it’s a much more manageable load for me to handle.
I didn’t want to cut anyone loose because I felt like I’d be doing something cruel. But the truth is that when you sponsor people who don’t want to put their full faith in the program, it can put your own recovery in danger.
If you let them slide a little, you start thinking it’s OK to loosen up your own program.
I can see how it’s hard for someone to go from AA to OA. In AA you have your sponsor and go to meetings, but once you’re sober you can use those tools on a more as-needed basis. In OA, because food is the problem, you have to talk to your sponsor every day and tell that person what you plan to eat for the day. We have to do it that way because food is everywhere and we need it to survive. It’s not like drugs and alcohol, which you don’t need for daily existence.
The extra discipline of OA can be a shocker. It certainly was for me, and I didn’t come to the program from AA.
The OA crowd looks freaky to those who go to that first meeting. I thought everyone in the room was crazy and that they had a little cult going on.
Now I know better.
This stuff is hard. But God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.
I guess He was helping me out by sending two sponsees away.
Two years ago yesterday, I went on my last binge. Actually, it was more like reaching the end of a final, two-month long binge. The abstinent and sober life hasn’t been perfect by any stretch. But it beats the hell out of where I was at the start.
Appropriately, I’m leading an OA meeting tonight, which means telling my story in 15-20 minutes without notes. Here’s some of what I’ll have to say:
Compulsive overeating was my biggest, most destructive addiction. It led to health problems that only got worse with time. I became a waste of space and fell short as a husband, dad and friend. I used to think about food all the time — where to get it, when to binge it and how to hide the aftermath.
People think of drugs and alcohol as addictive things, followed by gambling, pornography and the Internet. Food, on the other hand, that’s something we need to survive. If you’re a binge eater, it’s not an addiction, the thinking goes. You’re just a glutton who eats too much. The truth is we are ALL addicts. Some of us need chocolate, others need to watch every episode of their favorite TV show.
The other day, my sister Shira asked me what the difference was between someone with a binge-eating addiction and someone who just eats too much without thinking.
It’s a fair question, and a wise one. Here’s how I see it:
Though we all have our addictions, there’s a line someone with an overpowering habit crosses. On the other side of that line, life becomes unmanageable. The fix becomes more important than anything else. You spend ALL your time thinking about how to get it. You burn through money you don’t have and become crafty at lying about it to everyone around you, including the people you love most.
In short, the need for a fix takes your entire brain hostage.
I guess that if I were just a casual overeater, I’d be overweight but life would hum along pretty much as it’s supposed to.
I’m not sure if that makes sense, but that’s what it means to me.
When you realize you need to deal with it, the 12 Steps of Recovery is the map to take you there. It’s very simple. The first steps are the admission that you have a problem that has made life unmanageable, and that you can’t bring it under control without help from a higher power.
There are the basic tools: Having a food plan (mine is devoid of flour and sugar and I put almost everything I eat on a scale). There’s the sponsor, writing, meetings, etc. But along the way, you learn things about yourself and grow in ways well beyond what you expected.
It isn’t all roses. The first few months of abstinence were not sober days. I used a lot of wine as a crutch to keep from eating. How fucked up is that? Eventually I put that down too, because I saw where it was taking me and it scared me. And I’ll be honest: I don’t really miss the food anymore, but I DO miss the wine. Sobriety can be an awkward thing.
Dennis Nason, pastor of All Saints Parish, steps down Oct. 1. He’s struggling with cancer and decided to step aside so the parish can move on. He’s earned a tribute here. He made a believer out of me by coming clean about his own sins.
We have it in our heads that priests are supposed to be perfect and sinless. That’s why the sex scandal hit people so hard. We were taught to trust priests at all costs, and some of them betrayed that trust in evil ways.
When you’re a screw up like I once was — and still am in some ways — and you find someone you hope will help you out of the abyss, it’s a crushing blow when the mentor fails.
But as I’ve settled deeper into my Faith, I’ve realized those mistakes are part of the long journey out of Hell.
But for that theory to work, all parties involved have to have the capacity for honesty. That’s a big theme in the 12 Steps, too. Honesty is a bitch when you wrestle with addictions. I’ve said it before, addicts are the best liars on Earth. The depth of my own deceit was like a bottomless pit by the time I hit bottom.
That’s where Father Nason took me to school. He was an alcoholic who could have covered his tracks and carried on. Instead, he revealed everything to everyone. What follows is an older post I wrote about that very incident and what it has meant to me:
I’ve met many priests, some good and some not-so-good. People criticize priests because they’re athiests or they’re angry about the sex abuse scandal. Father Dennis Nason made a believer out of me by coming clean about his own sins.
When a priest is able to lay his own flaws bare for all to see, I think it takes an extra level of courage, since there has to be a lot of pressure around the lofty standards they are held to.
Father Nason rose to the occasion.
I met Father Nason about 11 years ago. He took over our parish, All Saints, when several other churches were closed down and consolidated into the All Saints Community.
He had a lot of angry people on his hands. One’s church becomes home, and when you close it and force them to go someplace else, trouble is inevitable.
Then the priest sex abuse scandal burst open like an infected sore, shaking the Faith of a lot of people like never before.
At one point over the summer, Father Nason vanished. Few knew why.
Then at one Mass, the deacon read an open letter from him.
In the letter, Father Nason revealed that he was in rehab for alcoholism. It would be several months before he emerged from rehab, and while he was there the sex abuse scandal really began to explode. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks also happened around that time, and people’s souls were tested like never before.
Once he did emerge from rehab to rejoin his parish, there was a new sparkle in his eyes. It was like a weight had been lifted. Then another weight dropped on him. It turns out one of the priests in our parish was one of those sexual predators we had read about in the papers.
Something like that would test the sobriety of anyone forced to come in and deal with the mess. Father Nason met it head on.
He was angry with his archdiocese over the fact that pedophile priests had been enabled for all those years; cases swept under the rug like dust. You could hear the anger in his voice and see it in his eyes. He would rage about it in more than one Homily.
His reaction is a big reason I stuck with the church instead of bolting.
Around that time we also had trouble hanging onto the other priests. One left after less than two months, apparently freaked out by the amount of work this parish demanded of him.
Through it all, Father Nason kept it together and brought his parish through the storm.
I don’t always see eye to eye with him. Sometimes I think his administration is disorganized and that his Homilies are all over the place; though when he nails it, he really nails it.
But those are trivial things. When he came clean about his addiction, it hit me deep in the core. At the time, my own addictions were bubbling in my skull and preparing to wipe out what was left of my soul. I just didn’t know it at the time.
Often, when depression slaps me upside the head, it’s on the heels of a prolonged period of good feelings and positive energy. Especially this time of year, when the daylight recedes early and returns late. These setbacks can be discouraging, but you can survive them with the right perspective.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/NqTuN-35580
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.
I’m sorry to tell you this, folks: That line of thinking is bullshit.
There’s no such thing as happily ever after. If you want it that badly, go watch a Disney film.
The slide back into depression this past weekend was an example.
I like to think of these setbacks as growing pains. We’re supposed to have bad days to test the better angels of our nature. We’re supposed to learn how to move forward despite the obstacles that used to make us hide and get junked up. When you can stay sober and keep your mental disorders in check despite a bad day, that’s REAL recovery.
This is where I consider myself lucky for having had Crohn’s Disease. That’s a chronic condition. It comes and goes. But you can reach a point where the flare ups are minimal.
It’s the same with mental illness and addiction. You can’t rid yourself of it completely. But you can reach a point — through a lot of hard work and leaps of Faith — where the episodes are minimal.
The depression flared up this weekend, just like the Crohn’s Disease used to. But I’m better now. And I didn’t have to take a drug like Prednisone to get there. I just needed a little extra sleep.
Prozac, therapy and the 12 Steps have helped me immensely. But they don’t take the deeper pain at your core away. These things just help you deal with the rough days without getting sucked back into the abyss.
The depression I experienced this weekend felt more like a flare up of arthritis than that desperate, mournful feeling I used to get. It was a nag, but it didn’t break me. It used to break me all the time.
That’s progress.
Maybe I’m not happy forever after, but that’s OK. My ability to separate the blessings from the bullshit has improved considerably in the last five years.
This hangover has nothing to do with binging or drinking. I did neither, though I did think seriously about it. I lingered in the wine section of the grocery store for a few minutes, wondering if I should buy a couple of those little bottles that are easy to hide. Maybe, I thought, I’ll have some tonight. No one will ever know.
Of course, there’s always a deeper emotion triggering the impulses. I think I’m feeling sorry for myself this afternoon because it’s a day off and I’ve been running around all day when all I really want to do is pull a blanket over my head and go to sleep. I got the kids up and off to school. I dropped off my niece, who spent the night with us. I checked on a guy I sponsor in OA to see if he was OK because he’s had some diabetic trouble. Then it was time to pay some bills and run to the grocery store. Now I have to run back out to get a coolant light in the car checked before the kids get home, at which point we’ll have to run to my chiropractor appointment. I can’t break it because I’ve been having twinges of pain in my back this week. Tonight I have to start writing a talk I’m going to give at an upcoming Catholic retreat.
If I sound like a whiny punk, that’s because I am a whiny punk. At the moment I am, anyway. This is especially unsettling because I have little patience for other people who do the same thing. Go figure.
So what am I going to do about all this?
I’m going to get the stupid coolant light checked and keep my chiropractor appointment. Once the kids are settled after dinner, I’ll write that talk. That’s actually something I’m looking forward to.
Life can be exhausting, but you know what? I sought the relentless activity in my life. It’s a blessing to do these things every day. And if the payment is that I have to keep moving when I want to collapse, so be it.
The answer for me is the same answer I give my kids when they grouse about having responsibilities:
Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing on Sept. 11, 2001. Here’s my own account.
Mood music:
I was assistant New Hampshire editor at The Eagle-Tribune and I arrived in the newsroom at 4:30 a.m. as usual. I was already in a depressed mood. It wasn’t a sense of dread over something bad about to happen. It was simply my state of mind at the time. I wasn’t liking myself and was playing a role that wasn’t me.
I was already headed toward one of my emotional breakdowns and the job was a catalyst at that point. By day’s end, I would be seriously reconsidering what I was doing with my life. But then everyone was doing that by day’s end.
I was absorbed in all my usual bullshit when the NH managing editor came in and, with a half-smile on his face, told me a plane hit the World Trade Center. At that point, like everyone else, I figured it was a small plane and that it was an accident. Then the second plane hit and we watched it as it happened on the newsroom TV.
I remember being scared to death. Not so much at the scene unfolding on the newsroom TV, but at the scene in the newsroom itself. Chaos was not unusual at The Eagle-Tribune, but this was a whole new level of madness. I can’t remember if my fear was that terrorists might fly a plane into the building we were in as their next act or if it was a fear of not being able to function amidst the chaos. It was probably some of each.
This was a huge story everywhere, but The Eagle-Tribune had a bigger stake in the coverage than most local dailies around the country because many of the victims on the planes that hit the towers were from the Merrimack Valley. There was someone from Methuen, Plaistow, N.H., Haverhill, Amesbury, Andover — all over our coverage area.
When the first World Trade Center tower collapsed on the TV screen mounted above Editor Steve Lambert’s office, he came out, stood on a desk and told everyone to collect themselves a minute, because this would be the most important story we ever covered.
Up to that point, it was. But I was so full of fear and anxiety that my ability to function was gone. I spent most of the next few days in the newsroom, but did nothing of importance. I was a shell. I stayed that way until I left the paper in early 2004. In fact, I stayed that way for some time after that. I should note that the rest of the newsroom staff at the time did a hell of a job under very tough pressure that day. My friend Gretchen Putnam was still editor of features back then, but she and her staff helped gather the news with the same grit she would display later as metro editor.
I remember being touched by a column she wrote the next day. She described picking her son Jack up from school and telling him something bad happened in the world that day. His young response was something like this: “Something bad happens in the world every day.”
Sometimes, kids have a better perspective of the big picture than grown-ups do.
I got home very late that day and hugged Erin and Sean, who was about five months old at that point. I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of world he would grow up in.
In the days that followed, I walked around in a state of fear like everyone else. That fear made me do things I was ashamed of.
A week after the attacks, Erin and I were scheduled to fly to Arizona to attend a cousin’s wedding. The night before were were supposed to leave, I gave in to my terror at the prospect of getting on a plane and we didn’t go. It’s one of the biggest regrets of my life.
There are two types of head cases headed for a breakdown: There’s the type that tries hard to get him or herself killed through reckless behavior, and then there are those who cower in their room, terrified of what’s on the other side of that door. I fell into the latter category. I guess I tried to get myself killed along the way, but I did so in a much slower fashion. I started drinking copious amounts of wine to feel OK in my skin, and I went on a food binge that lasted about three months and resulted in a 30-pound weight gain.
A few months ago I found myself in lower Manhattan for a security event and I went to Ground Zero.
Gone were the rows of lit candles and personal notes that used to line the sidewalks around this place. To the naked eye it’s just another construction site people pass by in a hurry on their way to wherever.
I was pissed off at first. It wasn’t the thought of what happened here. My emotion there is one of sadness. No, this was anger. I was pissed that people seemed to be walking by without any thought of all the people who met their death here at the hands of terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001. It was almost as if the pictures of twisted metal, smoke and crushed bodies never existed.
As I started to process that fact, my mood shifted again.
I realized these people were doing something special. No matter where they were going or what they were thinking, they were moving — living — horrific memories be damned.
They were doing what we all should be doing, living each day to the full instead of cowering in fear in the corner.
Doing so honors the dead and says F-U to those who destroyed those towers and wish we would stay scared.
It reminded me of who I am and what I’ve been through. I didn’t run from the falling towers or get shot at in the mountains of Afghanistan or the streets of Baghdad. But the struggles with OCD and addiction burned scars into my insides all the same.
I was terrified when I was living my lowest lows. But somewhere along the way, I got better, healed and walked away. I exchanged my self hatred and fear for love of life I never thought possible.
It’s similar to what the survivors of Sept. 11 have gone through.
They reminded me of something important, and while some sadness lingers, I am grateful.
So here’s what I’ll be doing this weekend, the ninth anniversary of the attacks:
