My initial reaction to that was irritation. Too fucking bad, I thought. So sorry I allowed Mr. Sunshine to take a sabbatical. How inconvenient for everyone.
After a few minutes of that, I realized I was being a prick.
People simply care about me and they are worried.
Thank you for caring. Sorry for being a prick.
I guess it has been a long, rough road. I’ve been back and forth to the rehab center each week, and it’s an hour from my home and my office. Seeing Dad in the wheelchair, plainly depressed, has had a rub-off depressive effect. I know how hellish the inactivity is for him, because he passed that trait down to me.
Meantime, I’m keeping it full steam ahead with my own work. And it’s taking all I have to keep from sliding back into binging.
Naturally, trying not to binge means I’ve picked up another destructive crutch. I put that crutch down on Friday, and while it’s the right thing to do, I’m resentful as Hell about it. More on that tomorrow.
The bottom line is that I am not a sunny guy right now. But don’t worry. I’ll be fine. This is life, and despite all the toil and trauma, I am a lot better at this shit than I used to be.
In the meantime, thanks for being patient and caring. I do appreciate it.
Former Warrant singer Jani Lane was found dead last night in a Comfort Inn in L.A. at age 47. It’s unclear at this point what the cause is, but his death is making me re-think a few things about my attitude.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/cSdvxocgbAg
I remember when Warrant came out in the late 1980s. I couldn’t stand them. Sure, they sounded good. Crunchy guitar sound. Good vocals. But it all sounded so fake. I thought “Cherry Pie” was the dumbest song I’d ever heard. Again, the sound was good. But the lyrics were stupid and the feel wasn’t real to me. Admittedly, though, I liked “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and hated the fact that I liked it.
The band also came out at a point in the late 80s when every band was starting to sound and look alike. I decided I was too cool for it all.
I did what a lot of other metal heads did in the early 90s when the metal scene imploded under the weight of all the copycats: I started listening to so-called grunge: Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains. My own band, Skeptic Slang, sounded a lot like the grunge we were listening to, with hints of old-school metal here and there.
I still listen to all those bands, but in recent years I’ve returned to my 80s hard rock roots. Warrant has not been part of my playlist.
I’ve seen interviews with Jani Lane over the years where he lamented writing “Cherry Pie” and took a crack at reality TV. He looked and sounded like a troubled man in those clips, and he did indeed wrestle some demons. He was recently sentenced to serve 120 days in jail after pleading no contest to a 2010 DUI charge — his second in two years.
As for his death, no one really knows what happened. We can speculate, but I won’t. I’ll just wait for the follow-up news reports.
Instead, I’m examining my own reaction to his death and what it says about me and human nature in general.
When I first saw the news an hour ago, I felt bad. I went on Youtube and started playing Warrant songs. I was thinking that they sounded much better with age, then I had a “what the fuck?” moment.
Here I am, thinking these songs sound pretty good. And I’m sneering at all the nasty comments people make about being glad he’s dead. Then I catch myself, because in my self-righteous anger I quickly remember that I used to say things about how bands like this sucked and needed to be destroyed. I’m pretty sure I’ve joked from time to time about how it would be nice for bands like this to go down in a flaming plane wreck.
That’s not nice. It’s certainly not a good fit with my Christian beliefs. But there it is.
It’s funny how we get when musicians and celebrities we don’t think much of die. I found it amusing that people were tearing Michael Jackson down in the last decade of his life because of his alleged pedophilia, yet, when he died, everyone magically forgot that stuff and acted as if Jesus Himself had been crucified again.
When Motley Crue bassist Nikki Sixx opined about Jackson being a “child rapist” and I wrote about it, the comments section of this blog descended into all kinds of name calling. Most of it came from people who love Michael Jackson’s music.
More then one person noted that Jackson was never found guilty of such things. When he was still alive, people were not defending him so ardently.
We do this stuff a lot when famous, tarnished figures die. We play up the good stuff they did and conveniently forget the bad stuff. Or, at least, we minimize the latter as some unfortunate little interlude between the acts of greatness. Richard Nixon comes to mind.
And now we’re remembering the good stuff Jani Lane contributed to the world in his 47 years.
You know what? That’s how it should be.
Everyone deserves a shot at redemption, and making music I personally didn’t care for doesn’t mean there was something wrong with Jani Lane. He wrote the music he wanted to write. It spoke to him, and it spoke to others, even if I wasn’t one of them.
The band’s success in the late 80s and early 90s happened because the music made a lot of kids happy, just as Motley Crue’s “Shout At The Devil” and Def Leppard’s “Pyromania” gave me moments of happiness during a troubled youth.
We all have our tastes and opinions. We all tend to think our opinions are better than everyone else’s.
That’s part of the human condition. We don’t just do it to celebrities. We do it to everyone. We are judgmental savages sometimes.
Rest in Peace, Jani Lane. I apologize for any of the bad stuff I said about you over the years.
I’m in my therapist’s office, going over the things he routinely asks about to make sure I’m playing with a full deck. He asks if I’ve talked to mom recently. No, I tell him. But, I expect to see her this weekend — the first time in two years.
Mood music:
He asks if I’m nervous about it. To my surprise as well as his, I tell him I’m not — and I actually mean it.
I won’t repeat all the background of what happened between my mother and me. You can get the back story by reading an earlier post called “The Mommy Problem.”
Let’s just focus on the present…
The last time I saw her was the summer of 2009. I met with her for lunch and told her all about my treatment for OCD and how I was in a 12-Step Program for the binge eating disorder. She seemed to get where I was coming from. I was certain this was the start of the healing.
Then she sent an e-mail a week later asking when she was going to see her grandchildren. I told her Erin needed more time but I was ready to sit down with Bob on my own. I expected he’d sit there and call me every name in the book and tell me how much I had hurt the family, and I was ready to just sit there and take it. He was entitled to that.
But they were having none of that.
My mother sent another e-mail suggesting I was whipped and controlled by my wife, and that I was the laughingstock of the family as a result. Back to square one.
That was in August 2009. We haven’t spoken since.
So why am I calm about the expected Saturday encounter? I guess it’s because I feel comfortable in my own skin and I feel like I’ve done a lot of hard soul searching in the five years since our combined mental illnesses imploded the relationship and took a few people with it.
I’ve taken it to the confession booth at church too many times to count. I tell the priests I wrestle with the whole “Honor thy mother and father” commandment. I’m always told that honor thy mother and father doesn’t mean sit there as you’re repeatedly run over by a tank.
I did make a big effort at reconciliation two years ago. I even connected with her on Facebook, for heaven’s sake. When I realized my efforts were going to fail, I de-friended and then blocked her from my profile.
Looking at the whole sorry affair, I still think she did the best she could with the tools she had. The problem is that she’s really lacking in the tool department, mainly because in her mind she has no problem. She’s a victim. Pure and simple.
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. My brother and I 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 hold nothing against her. There’s a lot I can get into about this, but the reality 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.
For the sake of my immediate family, recovery has to come first.
Without it, I fail EVERYONE.
Right now, I don’t see how saying much to her will be helpful in that regard.
I’ll be nice. I certainly won’t be mean.
And despite what has happened in recent years, I expect her to behave the same way.
After all, the day will not be about us. It’ll be about my cousin and the awesome gal he’s marrying.
Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over (insert addiction) — that our lives had become unmanageable.
Mood music:
I am powerless. Or, you could say, my addictions have absolute power over me. Even when sober and abstinent, they are right behind me, doing push-ups, waiting for my one reckless moment of weakness.
Now that I know this, life is a lot better. I can do what I must to be well and I’m a lot happier and healthier for it.
The problem with addicts is that we’re experts in the art of denial. It takes many years of damage before we are ready to even consider that we have absolutely no control over our lives.
When we really hit bottom and spend some time there, things become so desperate that we become willing to admit how weak we are. How pathetically powerless we are. When that happens, we arrive at the first of the 12 Steps of Recovery. Simply put, admitting there’s a problem is the first step in dealing with the problem.
My most destructive addiction involves binge eating. That is followed by other addictions: to alcohol, tobacco, caffeine and, to a lesser extent, pills.
I’ve often lamented that mine is the most uncool of addictions. We need food to survive, after all. This is certainly not what most of society would accept as a “normal” addiction.
Still, it makes perfect sense that food would be my problem.
As a kid sick with Chron’s Disease, I was often in the hospital for weeks at a time with a feeding tube that was inserted through the left side of my chest. That’s how I got nourishment. I wasn’t allowed to eat or drink anything. At a very early age, my relationship with food was doomed to dysfunction.
It didn’t help that I was from a family of over-eaters who would stuff themselves for comfort in times of stress and fatigue.
In our society it’s considered perfectly OK to indulge in the food. Time and again, I’ve heard it said that overeating is a lot better than drinking or drugging. But for me, back when I was at my worst, binge eating was a secret, sinister and shameful activity.
Here’s how it works:
You get up in the morning and swear to God that you’re going to eat like a normal person. You pack some healthy food for the office. Then you get in the car and the trouble starts before the car’s out of the driveway. Another personality emerges from the back of the brain, urging you to indulge. It starts as a whisper but builds until it vibrates through the skull like a power saw.
The food calls out to you. And you’ll do whatever it takes to get it, then spend a lot of time trying to cover your tracks.
Before you know it, you’re in the DD drive-thru ordering two boxes of everything. It all gets eaten by the time you reach the office. You get to the desk disgusted, vowing to never do that again. But by mid-morning, the food is calling again. You sneak out before lunchtime and gorge on whatever else you can find, then you do it again on the way home from work.
You pull into McDonald’s and order about $30 of food, enough to feed four people. From the privacy of the car, the bags are emptied. By the time you get home, you wish you were dead.
The cycle repeats for days at a time, sometimes weeks and months.
For many years I hid it well, especially in my early 20s. I would binge for a week, then starve and work out for another week. That mostly kept the weight at a normal-looking level.
Call it athletic Bulimia.
In one inspired episode, I downed $30 of fast food a day for two weeks, then went a week eating nothing but Raisin Bran in the morning, then nothing but black coffee for the rest of the day. After the cereal, I’d work out for two hours straight.
In my mid-20s, once I started working for a living, I kept up the eating but couldn’t do the other things anymore. So my weight rose to 280. In the late 1990s I managed to drop 100 pounds and keep it off through periodic fasting.
Then I started to face down what would eventually be diagnosed as OCD, and I once again gave in to the food. The gloves were off.
The binging continued unabated for three years. The weight went back up to 260. I also started to run out of clever ways to mask over all the money I was spending on my habit. I was slick. I’d take $60 from the checking account and tell my wife it was for an office expense or some other seemingly legitimate thing. But she’s too smart to fall for that for long.
One I admitted I was without power over all this insanity, I was ready to do something about it.
That’s when I discovered Over-eaters Anonymous (OA), a 12-step program just like AA, where the focus is on food instead of booze. I didn’t grasp it immediately. In fact, I thought everyone at these meetings were nuts. They were, of course, but so was I.
Thing is, I had reached a point in my learning to manage OCD where I was ready to face down the addiction. If it had to be through something crazy, so be it.
Through the program, I gave up flour and sugar. The plan is to be done with those ingredients for life. Put them together and they are essentially my cocaine. I dropped 65 pounds on the spot. But more importantly, many of the ailments I had went away. I stopped waking up in the middle of the night choking on stomach acid. The migraines lessened substantially. And I found a mental clarity I never knew before.
I can’t say I’ve slaughtered the demon. Addicts relapse all the time. But I have a program I didn’t have before; a road map unlike any other.
My odds of success are better than ever.
But before I could get there, I had to unravel the wiring in my head, learn to live with a mental disorder and then make a bold change in my way of eating.
It’s not cool at all. If you’re laughing because I let the food drag me to such a state, I don’t blame you. In a way, it is funny. Crazy people do stupid things. And stupid is often funny.
I had coffee with a friend from the security industry yesterday. I thought I was coming to offer feedback on something having to do with the profession. Then he told me about a mental-emotional problem.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:4DA95pyBe6QORPGvTEuMWQ]
He told me he had a bunch of medical tests and they discovered that a small corner of his brain doesn’t work as well as it should. The result is that his short-term memory frequently takes a dive.
There are far worse problems to have. But his main concern is that it’s keeping his career from going where he wants it to.
We went back and forth about whether he should make his condition public or whether he should pursue other medical options.
As I sipped my iced Starbucks it became clear that something else was going on.
His biggest problem, I discovered and told him, is that he’s held back by fear — fear of what might happen if his short-term memory acted up in the midst of a job he really wanted to be doing.
He admitted that his recent career moves have involved a lot of playing it safe, doing things where there’s the least opportunity for failure at the hands of his mental tick.
I’ve been down this road before. And you know what? Playing it safe never helps. In fact, it just makes things worse.
Several years ago, when it became clear to me that my brain didn’t work normally, fear engulfed me until my self esteem was reduced to an ash pile. I held back in my work as night editor of The Eagle-Tribune. I tried playing it safe, never going toe to toe during disagreements with other editors.
Then I decided that the solution was to get out of there and find something less stressful to do. I opted to go back to straight reporting and went to TechTarget. Fortunately, the job turned out to be far more challenging than I expected. I realized this right at the time I decided to tackle my mental illness head on.
Luckily, my boss was a nurturing soul who was willing to let me go for the throat and get better. Miraculously, my work didn’t suffer. In the years to come, in fact, my workmanship would get better.
Now I do a lot of stuff in my job that’s out of my comfort zone. I give talks in front of groups of people. I get on airplanes. I venture an opinion on topics that I know will draw heavy disagreement. I give my boss a hard time when I don’t agree about something.
A few years ago, the very idea of doing those things would have scared me into an emotional breakdown.
I’ve screwed up along the way. But I’m still here.
I do my job well enough, often enough. And the more I succeed, the more confident I get.
Had I played it safe because of the things that might have gone wrong because of my OCD and anxiety, I wouldn’t be doing what I love today.
It’s not worth worrying about the mistakes you might make. You WILL make mistakes. And most of the time, you’ll be the only one to notice.
When my kids worry about making mistakes, I play them some Def Leppard and remind them that a one-armed drummer makes mistakes, but that all you can hear is him driving the heartbeat of the song despite a missing limb.
He could have retired from music and that would have made his life worse.
But he took a chance and designed a drum kit that helped him get past his problem.
Call me overly idealistic. Tell me I’m blowing sunshine up your collective asses.
It’s what I believe. Because I’ve been down this road.
My life today is far from perfect. It can get messy at times.
Given all I’ve written about my recovery from addictive behavior, you’re probably wondering why I’ve dragged you back into this dark room. The simple answer is that my fight is far from over.
Mood music:
This post is the opening salvo of what will be a weekly series on the 12 Steps of Recovery and how they apply to me.
Since the start of the year I’ve been focusing more intently on the AA Big Book and how all the steps work. I’ve mentioned the steps many times here, but I’ve only touched the surface. As part of my own work on recovery, I need to go deeper. Much deeper.
There’s still so much misunderstanding of what addictive behavior is, what defines out-of-control behavior vs. simply enjoying something a little too much. I realized how much work was left on this score when an acquaintance wrote me the following message:
First, he questioned the short “about” blurb you see at the end of each post:
“Welcome to THE OCD DIARIES, the blog that kicks fear, anxiety, depression and addiction in the teeth. It’s written by Bill Brenner, a man who went through hell, saw the light and lived to tell about it.”
To that, he said:
With anxiety and depression I certainly understand, but when I think serious addictions I was thinking some sort of drug abuse – in fact heroin is what popped into my head. Alcohol also a possibility… but binge eating? Come on man. Everyone has a hard time knowing when to say when to junk food, Shit, I gotta throw it in the trash sometimes so I don’t eat it all.
The key line in that statement is that “Everyone has a hard time knowing when to say when.” Very true.
Everyone struggles with something.
Everyone struggles with relationships. Everyone looks for comfort in certain behaviors: Eating, drinking, smoking, sex, spending, Web surfing, music, exercise, mountain climbing, gum-chewing, TV.
Just about everyone struggles with the difference between having enough of the items I just listed and not knowing when it’s enough. People eat too much all the time and casually make note of it. People get drunk and the headache they wake up with the next morning tells them they went too far.
There’s a tight parallel when it comes to mental illness, the main focus of this blog. Everyone struggles with times of depression, anxiety, mental fatigue, personality conflicts. Those very things are what usually drives a person to addictive behavior. The mental struggles eat a hole in your soul and you spend much of your time trying to fill it with stuff.
It’s all part of being human. That’s why the readership of this blog keeps growing. Everyone struggles and relates to the cause and effect.
But when does addictive behavior become the stuff of evil — a cancer that takes you over body and soul until satisfying the itch becomes the priority over all else?
That’s where we try to separate the so-called normal people from the crazies. I say try because one person’s crazy is another person’s normal.
We all think we know the difference between normal and crazy. But most of the time, we don’t know shit.
I can only tell you where my sense of normal crossed over into insanity. I’ve told you in a million different ways in this blog already.
To me, the key to recovery is partly about identifying when a behavior makes life unmanageable. Not the typical idea of unmanageable, where a person might always be scattered, nervous, hyper or lazy, thus becoming difficult to be around.
No, I’m talking unmanageable in the sense that your life is like a car speeding out of control, where one tire is flat, the engine has run out of oil and the back bumper is hanging off and causing sparks as it drags on the ground. The vehicle is ready to fall apart, and yet it keeps going faster and faster.
The addictive behavior that does that to your life is the insidious devil whose head must be ripped off if you’re going to make it.
For me, clinical OCD has always been a driver of my addictive behavior. I had to bring the OCD to heel before I could even begin to deal with the addictions. The 12 Steps of Recovery are key to my ability to manage both.
I’ve broken my addictive behavior into categories that have more to do with what makes me insane than what is simply considered good or bad for you.
I love cigar smoke. Smoking is bad for you.
I love coffee. Some say that’s bad for you, though I don’t really believe it.
I love spending money on things. Who doesn’t? But spending too much can ruin you and those you love.
I love music. Some days I’d rather sit around listening to rock and roll than doing any number of other things I should be doing.
All of that can be considered addictive behavior. But binge eating, followed closely by alcohol and third by the prescription pills I used to take for back pain — those are the things I craved so badly that at one point I was willing to let everything else in life go to hell.
When you start neglecting the people and things you love most so you can scratch the itch, you got a real problem.
People blind themselves to the danger by thinking about addiction as simply drinking too much or shooting heroin. But you can get an out-of-control, soul-eating addiction to just about anything.
That’s the thing people fail to grasp, and I’ve tried using this blog to educate them.
But without a painfully deep dive into the steps, nobody will learn what they need to learn. And so I’m going in.
The posts in this weekly series will focus on one step at a time and how each one has come into play in my long struggle to fight off the demons. Some steps I’ll be able to tackle in single posts. Other steps will take two or three posts. This is a big-ass onion, and I’m not even close to peeling back all the layers.
Some days I don’t know where to begin.
But for this series I know where I’m going now. I started here, and there’s no turning back.
Let me tell you about the time I wanted to be perfect, how the urge nearly ruined me and how I learned to accept — if not embrace — my flaws.
One of the great delusions an OCD sufferer labors under is the notion that he/she can achieve absolute perfection. Maybe the goal is to be the perfect employee. Maybe it’s to be the perfect parent and spouse. In some cases, the goal can even be to be the perfect addict.
The suicide drive for perfection is closely tied into the OCD case’s compulsion to control as much of their environment as possible.
Why yes, everything you’ve heard about OCD and control freakism is true. People like us crave control like a junkie craves a shot of smack to the arm. It grabs us by the nose and drags us down the road until our emotions are raw and bleeding.
That’s why I used to be such an asshole at The Eagle-Tribune. Every story I edited then went through three more editors and then to the page designer. Along the way, everyone after me had to take a whack at it. I’d hover over the poor page designers because it was the closest thing I had to control. Ultimate control would have meant laying out the pages myself. That would have been a stupid thing to do, mind you. I couldn’t lay out a news page to save my life.
When I was the assistant news editor for the paper’s New Hampshire editions, I was out a week when my son Sean was born. I came in one night to catch up on e-mail and saw the message where my boss, Jeff McMenemy, announced my son’s birth. In it, he joked that I probably stood over the doctor and told him how to deliver the baby.
I wanted to punch him.
I saw red.
Because I knew that was something I could easily be pictured doing. It hit too close to the truth.
All along, I just wanted to be perfect. The perfect editor, in the latter case.
I wanted to be the perfect family man and thought the way to be it was to do as many chores as I could. The problem was that I wasn’t there for my family emotionally. That still happens sometimes.
The drive for perfection always takes me to the brink of disaster.
But all the treatment I’ve received for OCD and addiction has cooled down that compulsion. It still surfaces from time to time, but it’s no longer a feeling that stalks me every minute of every day.
Sometimes my work gets sloppy, but most of the time I do a better job than I used to because I don’t try to get it perfect. As a result, I enjoy what I do more, even if it gets messy sometimes.
Erin has noted a few times that I’m more of a slob now that I’m better. I leave books, socks and gadgets lying around the house.
Somewhere along the way, it stopped being about perfection.
Now I just do the best I can and hope it’s enough most of the time.
An epilogue to yesterday’s post about Lynn, Mass.: A reader reminded me yesterday of the time some Lynners tried to get the city’s name changed so the “Lynn, Lynn city of sin” insult could no longer apply.
Mood music:
From my friend Katherine Doot: “Thought they wanted to change the name to Ocean Park some years ago? So it was Ocean Park Ocean Park never go out after dark?!”
I had forgotten about that, but it’s true. That was one of the movements afoot the year I covered the city as a reporter in 1997. I thought it was a stupid idea from the start, and I’m glad most people didn’t take it seriously.
My first concert was a festival headlined by Motley Crue in 1985 at Manning Bowl in Lynn. That was at the start of the band’s “Theater of Pain” tour. I have fond memories of singer Vince Neil badly mispronouncing the city’s name as “Leeeee-innnnn!”
If the city had been named Ocean Park, he might have pronounced it correctly and I wouldn’t have that fun memory of mangled language today. That would suck.
My main point is this, though: You can change your name, but it isn’t going to change who you are or who you should be.
If you don’t like yourself or your city, a name change is a stupid and ineffective way of trying to hide in plain sight.
You want real change for a city, you have to change the politics and clean up the streets. I think Lynn has made good progress on both fronts.
If you want real change for yourself, you have to identify what you don’t like and rebuild yourself.
I drove two hours yesterday to participate in a security event at Dartmouth and drove back this morning. A great experience, but I’ve gotten little done since then. I really hate inactivity.
I like to cram as much as I can into each day, and I like to throw everything I have into my job. But all I can do is sit in this chair, trying to motivate myself to move, pounding head be damned.
But I really can’t move. I think my brain has told the rest of me to drop dead.
Still, I’ve found that there’s a lot I can do in this paralyzed position:
–I can help the kids do their summer workbooks
–I can help Sean with his latest writing project
–I can chat with two old friends on Facebook
So it’s not a total waste. I’d even say that’s time well spent.
I just wish I could bust out a security blog post. But nothing is striking me today.
So I’m doing something I think will give me a second wind. I’m making a music playlist. Let’s see how this works:
