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Anatomy of a Binge

If you do these things, you might have a binge eating problem.

Mood Music: 

6 a.m.: Wake up, pour coffee. Resolve to live on nothing but coffee and cigarettes for the day.

8 a.m.: Fuck it. You’re hungry. Eat something healthy for breakfast. A bagel and cream cheese will do. Serving size, one 12-ounce container of cream cheese. Add swiss cheese.

8:15 a.m.: Smoke another cigarette and decide that’s all the food you’re going to eat for the day. Resolve to eat one giant breakfast and nothing else for the day for the next several days.

9 a.m.-10:15: As you work, start having a back-and-forth in your head as to whether you really should be having lunch.

10:45 a.m.: Walk to the vending machine for a healthy snack of animal crackers. Choose the Pop Tarts instead. Continue to ponder lunch.

11 a.m.: Take a break from work and drive around to clear your head. Resolve to have a smoke or two but no lunch.

11:02 a.m.: Proceed to the nearest fast-food drive-through or buffet place.

11:15-noonish: You chose the buffet place. Good. Stay there until you’ve had your fill. This will require going back for seconds, thirds and fourths.

Noonish-3ish: Resume working while pondering why you’re such a shameful idiot.

3ish: Get in the car. Plan to drive straight home.

3:05 p.m.: Stuff yourself with the $25 bag of McDonald’s you don’t quite remember buying a couple minutes ago.

3:30 p.m.: The three cheeseburgers, two large fries and two orders of chicken strips is consumed, and you’re sitting there wondering what you’re doing in the Dunk ‘N Donuts drive-through.

3:32 p.m.: Stare at the empty box of donuts and wonder what’s wrong with you.

3:35-4 p.m.: Keep your eyes on the road as you try to put the shame you’re feeling in the proper perspective.

4 p.m.: Get in the house and try to act like nothing’s wrong. When the kids ask you to play with them, explain that your back hurts and lie on the couch.

5:30 p.m.: Dinner time. Try as hard as you can to eat some of what’s on your plate, even though it looks healthy and your gut is throbbing from what you did earlier.

6:30 p.m.: Get the kids ready for bed.

7:30 p.m.: Fall asleep on the couch and forget the day you’ve just had.

Repeat process the next morning.

That’s how I used to do it, anyway.

Sometimes it would just last a day or two. Usually, it would be weeks and months. In 1997, I probably carried on like this for all but a few weeks of the year.

 

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Summers of Love and Hate

One would think Revere Beach was the perfect place to spend summers growing up. The ocean was right across the street from our house, after all. But the truth is that summer has always been a time of dangerously fluctuating moods for me, and a lot of it played out in that setting.

Mood music for this post: Summertime Rolls, by Jane’s Addiction:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU1fK7uViBg&hl=en_US&fs=1]

Let’s start with the beach itself. Today Revere Beach is a beautiful place. The water is clean and the pavilions are all in one piece. The sidewalks have been redone and expanded. But in the 1970s and 80s, before the Deer Island sewage treatment plant was built (it was the site of a prison back then), the water was always a murky reddish-brown. Some of the pavilions were roofless, thanks to The Blizzard of 1978.

Jellyfish were always washing up on the shoreline, further discouraging the urge to swim. On days when we were really bored, we’d put M-80s in them and blow them up. We’d do the same with the dead horseshoe crabs that washed ashore.

Thirty years ago, in the summer of 1980, my parents finalized very bitter divorce proceedings. My mother, understandably undone by the failure of her marriage, was more abusive than usual. I was sick with Crohn’s Disease a lot, and I had few friends. To keep us away from the rancor of the divorce, our parents sent my sister and I to Camp Menorah. My sister loved it, but I hated the place. I couldn’t get along with the other kids and I felt like my freedom was being taken from me. I felt like beating the crap out of some of the kids who taunted me, but I never did.

I remember getting stuck with a lot of needles at Children’s Hospital and suffering vomit-inducing migraines because of the prednisone I was taking.

As a teenager, I started drinking and smoking pot to escape. The big hang-out spot for all the partying teens was beneath the General Edward’s Bridge connecting Revere to Lynn.

I spent my fair share of time there, but I did my drinking and smoking mostly in private.

Even back then, addictive behavior was something to do alone.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54sEMKGXq5Q&hl=en_US&fs=1]

Things settled down by the late 80s and my addictions were largely in check, though I was still doing stupid things to offset the binge eating: smoking cigarettes in the concrete storage room at the front end of the basement, collecting beer bottles so I could smash them during my moments of rage, and going on two-day fasts where I’d eat a mug of Raisin Bran in the morning, run laps in the living room area for two hours and crash for the rest of the day.

In the summer of 1991, I decided to live a little. Me and Sean Marley went to California and lived in a rental car for 10 days, driving as far north as Eureka and as far south as L.A. It was the trip of a lifetime, and I wasted a lot of it cowering in fear and anxiety. If I were Sean, I’d have left me in a gas station restroom somewhere in Bakersfield and fled for my life. Fortunately, Sean was better than that.

My unease over the summer months continued into my 30s. I spent a lot of time in work-induced anxiety and had no social life to speak of.

But along the way, something changed.

I think becoming a parent gave me a newfound appreciation for summer. We would always get more quality time together than the rest of the year. That’s still true.

Getting treatment for the OCD and binge eating addiction were huge factors as well. Especially when I realized that the longer periods of daylight are something I need. Now it’s the winter I have to work on, when the longer nights affect my brain chemistry and push me into depressions.

I’m grateful that I can now enjoy a season I used to loathe.

I’m spending a lot of time these days writing from my back deck. The heat doesn’t bother me so much, because it’s better than being cold. The sights and sounds inspire me.

Last night my friend Ann and her family came over for dinner. They are visiting from Virginia, where she’s been living since the mid-1990s. We were first friends in the early 90s when we were both at North Shore Community College. That was a rough time for her because her father was dying, and she doesn’t remember a lot from that period. But I do. We lost touch as soon as we moved on from NSCC, but we reconnected on Facebook a couple years ago.

We had a great night talking on the back deck as their kids and ours ran in and out of the house. It was great to meet her husband, Bob. I wish he were on Facebook so we could talk politics some more.

It’s a gift that I can live in the moment with family and friends without my brain spinning out of control with 14 kinds of worry.

It’s a gift to walk around outside while everyone’s still asleep and take in the scenery. We live in a beautiful part of Haverhill, surrounded by farmland and forest.

Summer used to be something to hate. Now it’s something to love.

That’s the kind of mood swing I can appreciate.

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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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Notes on Being a Dad, a Son and Grandson

The author shares some writings on his father, grandfather and kids for Father’s Day.

Mood music for this post: “Holiday in the Sun” by the Sex Pistols. Has nothing to do with the topic, but tomorrow is Father’s Day and I felt like hearing some Sex Pistols.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWF9MMxnekQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Since it’s Father’s Day weekend, I thought the appropriate thing to post would be these items on my father, grandfather and my children…

Snowpocalypse and the Fear of Loss. The author remembers a time when fear of loss would cripple his mental capacities, and explains how he got over it — mostly. This is where the author introduces his kids.

Lessons From Dad. The author has learned some surprising lessons from Dad on how to control one’s mental demons.

Courage in the Crosshairs. The author has been thinking a lot about his grandfather and the meaning of courage lately. Some have told him it takes courage to write about his OCD battles. He thinks it’s more about being tired of running.

Like Father, Like Son. The author finds that OCD behavior runs strong among the men in his family.

Peace at the Scene of the Crime. The author, his dad and children visit the Point of Pines and find something that had been lost.

Too Young for the Truth? Sean learns more about the man he’s named for than the author intended at this young age. All things considered, he took it well.

Parental Overload: No Big Deal. Nothing like a week of screaming kids to realize OCD aint what it used to be.

Happy Birthday, My Sweet Boy. Sean turns 9.

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Too Young for the Truth?

Sean learns more about the man he’s named for than the author intended at this young age. All things considered, he took it well.

Mood music for this post: “Leslie Anne Levine” from The Decemberists:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ml0VI8VZO2U&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Sean and Duncan were fighting in the bathtub. I can’t remember what started it, or what sparked this angry comment from Sean: “I’d rather commit suicide than apologize [for whatever he did].”  I punished him by making him go to bed a half hour early. Then I did something unexpected. I told him why that word makes my skin crawl.

I know Sean didn’t mean the statement literally. He was pissed off and wanted to land a verbal crusher, as kids do.

In that split-second where Sean was melting down over his punishment, I told him statements like the one he made will get him in trouble every time.

“I don’t understand why it’s such a big deal,” he said.

And then I told him that the man we named him for had taken his life. That’s a lot for a 9 year old to hear, and I wasn’t going to tell him until he was much older. It just sort of fell out of my mouth.

Sean gave me an intense stare, and his face went from red to white. His lower lip trembled. I felt 1,000 kinds of awful. I started thinking about how this might scar him for life, and how I always promised God that as a parent I would never do something to scar my kids.

I started to backtrack. I told Sean the man he was named for was a great man, and that he had a mental illness that unhinges the sufferer’s ability to make sane, rational decisions. I told him he should be proud of his name, and that I was proud of him.

He recovered pretty quickly, and seemed to understand. I often forget this boy is smart beyond his years, and I don’t always give him credit for being able to process weighty subjects.

Still, I always figured I’d wait until he was much older to tell him.

After Sean went to bed, I went upstairs to the loft where Erin and I have our desks. She was working late again on a freelance editing project. I told her what happened, thinking she wouldn’t be all that happy with me. But her reaction was pretty reasoned and calm. In all likelihood, she said, he wouldn’t be scarred from the knowledge. Besides, she added, young or not, he needed to feel awful about what he had said so he’ll think twice before saying it again.

Time will tell.

I’ve said before that Sean Brenner shares some of Sean Marley’s traits, particularly that deep intellect, and that I was going to be damn sure to watch for signs of the darker traits.

To that end, perhaps all this was necessary.

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Time to End This Sentimental Journey?

The author realizes it’s time to let some things go.

I’ve been making frequent visits to my father’s warehouse in Saugus, Mass., lately, digging through a bunch of boxes jammed into a crevice behind many pallets piled high with more boxes. The boxes I’ve been rummaging through are 15-20 years old, and some of them break apart at the slightest touch.

I’ve been hunting for my old notebooks from the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ones I filled with poems and lyrics I’d eventually use in the band Skeptic Slang. I figured I’d be lucky to find at least one notebook, and if I was really lucky I’d find one of our old recordings.

This hunt began a couple months ago, the day I rummaged through my grandfather’s old footlocker, which I’ve kept over the years and filled with all kinds of stuff. Among my finds:
A poem my old friend Joy — Sean Marley’s widow — wrote about me. Reading it brought on a feeling of loss, because she dropped out of my life after his death.

That should have been my first clue to stop looking for material things from the past, and yet I persisted.

I recently reconnected with Joy, which probably accelerated my drive to find the notebooks. If she could come back into my life so soon after I found that poem, what other shards of that old life could I reconnect and glue back together?

Two storage dives later, I haven’t found the notebooks. But I found some other, interesting things, including a ton of old pictures of my great-grandmother, who was a major force in my younger life, along with pictures of my late brother, Michael.

During yesterday’s rummage fest, I found an old inhaler of Granny’s that had to be some 30 years old. When I pressed down on it, spray still came out.

Yesterday, as I emerged from the pile covered in dust, frustrated that I had failed to find the notebooks, a feeling came over me. Why, I wondered, was I trying so hard to find these things? The more I thought about it, the more it bothered me.

I realized this was becoming an obsession — a typical OCD-driven pursuit. My life has been pretty damn good in more recent years. I’ve experienced sanity, clarity and joy I never thought possible a decade ago. So what the fuck was I looking for? Clearly, I’m still trying to fill a hole in my soul. But I thought I’d already stitched that hole shut. I suppose the lesson here is that you never fill the hole completely, you just learn to manage it and keep it from sucking in all other life.

This obsession isn’t just about MY notebooks. Sean Marley kept journals, and I’ve been yearning to look through his last couple years of entries. Something in me needs to see what, if anything, he had to say about his deepening depression and whether or not there was anything I could have done to steer him to the light.

I don’t think I’ll ever see the inside of those journals, because I really have no right to see them. They’re in Joy’s possession, and while I thought about asking if I could see them, I’ve decided not to. I have no right to see them. None of my business. Period. Besides, as my friend Mary put it, seeing those journals won’t change a thing about the past or the direction life took. And since that direction has been a good one, why would I want to change it anyway?

I’m also done looking for those notebooks.

What if I found all those lyrics? I’m never going to sing them again. And they won’t fill the hole — whatever that hole is — either.

I mentioned all this to Erin last night, and she pointed out that we humans are the sentimental sort. While finding old things won’t change anything, there’s still the sentimental value.

There’s nothing wrong with that in and of itself. But I’ve decided it’s time to let go.

That doesn’t mean I never want to see the notebooks again, but I’m done looking for them. if they turn up, great. But I don’t need them.

I don’t need to read Sean’s journals, either.

The reasons are simple:

–The brotherhood between me and Sean Marley was a defining thing in my life. As badly as it ended, we each got something important out of the friendship. I probably got more out of it than he did, because he helped me get past the rubble of childhood and come into my own. I’ve been told — and I’m starting to believe — that there was nothing I could have done differently that would have steered Sean down a better path. But I can honor his memory now by being a good Dad to the boy I named for him, and by using this blog to smash the stigma that keeps people with mental illness from getting the help they need.

— I’m chatting with Joy again, and that’s huge. I don’t need to bother her for the sake of my own craving for closure. Just having her back as a friend is good enough.

— I also remain friends with my former band mates, so why keep trying to rehash the creativity behind Skeptic Slang? What we had was good, but the music wasn’t meant to go on. It’s the friendships that were meant to go on.

— In the final analysis, God is going to keep pushing me in the direction I need to be in, and I learned long ago that messing with God’s will is futile, if not stupid altogether.

I’m just going to be myself and see what happens.

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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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It’s a Disease, Not a Choice

An open letter to those who are angry with a loved one whose addictions are off the rails.

Mood music:

This is one of those posts where I’m leaving names out to protect privacy. Still, the person this is meant for will know it’s for them, and he/she will be pissed at me. But that’s OK, because I’m saying something that needs to be said.

Right now, someone close to you has relapsed into alcoholism. This time it’s bad. You’re hurt and mad as hell because you remember a childhood where this sort of thing was a constant.

You might feel like hating this person right now because his relapse feels like a betrayal against you and you alone.

You’re wondering how the hell he could do this when he has so much to live for: grandchildren as far as the eye can see, a lot of the gifts he found a few years back when he got sober. It doesn’t make sense.

Here’s an attempt to explain it from someone who has been there. My problem was binge eating and a growing dependence on wine, further complicated by the variety of pain pills I was prescribed for the aches and pains caused, ultimately, by my bad habits. I was a less-than-ideal husband and dad. I couldn’t be relied upon.

I’d sneak around feeding my addiction and then cover my tracks. Sometimes I would blatantly lie about it. [See “The Liar’s Disease“] I didn’t lie to be evil. I did it because the shame was too much for me to handle.

You might also say I didn’t know any better.

One thing’s for certain: I didn’t wake up one morning and decide it would be a laugh riot to slowly destroy myself and hurt everyone around me in the process.

To you, looking at this loved one who is in relapse, you might feel that way. How the fuck could HE/SHE do this to YOU?

But here’s the ugly truth: Alcoholism — addictive behavior, period — is a disease. Nobody chooses it. They are chosen instead. It controls you like a puppet. You know as you’re doing that addictive action that it’s wrong and you hate every second of it. But your motor skills have taken over and you CAN’T stop.

Sure, we can shake it in time and find recovery, but relapse is a natural part of the disease. In fact, relapse is something I probably worry about the most, because I’ve been relatively lucky up to this point in my 12-Step program.

I know it can creep up on me and regain control at any moment, before I know what hit me.

In one of my favorite TV shows, “The West Wing,” Leo McGarry describes where the mind goes:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma3d-YdLjCs&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

“My brain works differently,” he says, followed by,” I don’t get drunk in front of people. I get drunk alone.”

It’s the same way for a food addict. You can’t have just one slice of pizza. It has to be the whole box. I once joked to a friends that I can’t eat just five. And when I really wanted to numb my frustrations in a bag of junk, I always went peddle to the metal out of sight from others; typically when I was alone in my car.

Yeah, the addicted brain works differently.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is this: Don’t hate the person who has fallen into relapse and disappointed you so badly. The person didn’t choose to be this way. He developed a disease a long, long time ago. And diseases have a habit of reasserting themselves from time to time. Sometimes the victim is not able to shake the relapse this time and it becomes the person’s demise.

It sucks. But it’s how it is.

Be mad. Be frustrated and hurt. But try and remember this person didn’t set out to hurt anyone.

Go easy on him/her, and yourself.

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Hitting Bottom: Songs and Backstory

Hitting bottom is the moment of truth for an addict, whether the shackles are made of heroin, booze or food. I’ve been there. You have a choice: Clean up your act or die a painful death that can be either quick or slow.

People ask me all the time about my big moment. The answer is that there wasn’t that one dramatic moment of hitting bottom.

It was more a series of bottoms. It was a multi-staged crash.

One crash was a couple months after my best friend took his life. I was binge eating with more zeal than ever, and I don’t think I cared at that point if my heart gave out. I was too crushed to care much about anything.

I had just been handed the job of editor for the Lynn Sunday Post, a paper that was already dying. I would be its pallbearer. The job included double duty as a writer for North Shore Sunday. I worked 16-hour days, six days a week.

Work was all I had at that point. Erin and I were engaged (realizing life is too short, I proposed a month after Sean died), but I was still trying to please my masters, so work came first. On Sundays, my only day off, I was sleeping through the entire day.

By the summer of 1997, I realized I had to push back or end up in an institution somewhere. Fortunately, my boss at the time saw that I was physically deteriorating and stepped in.

In December 1998, I was 285 pounds and collapsing under the weight. My father was too, and wound up getting quadruple bypass surgery. That was another slap in the face to warn me that I had to clean up. I lost 100 pounds, though I did it through unhealthy means that would explode in my face several years later.

In late 2001 I realized that I was never going to please the managing editor I worked for at The Eagle-Tribune. He was forcing me to be the type of manager I didn’t want to be — an asshole. So I told him I was going higher up the food chain to get reassigned. And that’s what I did. They put me back in the night editor’s chair, which helped for a short time.

By late 2004 I was out of The Eagle-Tribune and in a job I loved. But I was putting enormous pressure on myself and the physical toll was showing. All my personality ticks were in overdrive: the obsession with cleanliness. The paranoia over my kids’ safety. A growing sense of fear that kept me indoors a lot.

That was probably the deepest bottom to date, the one that made me realize I needed to get help from a therapist; help that led to my OCD diagnosis.

The next bottom was in late 2006, when I had developed many of the mental health tools I use today. But my brain chemistry was such a mess I couldn’t get past the fear and anxiety attacks. That’s when I decided to try medication, which has worked far better than I ever thought possible.

The last bottom was in the summer of 2008. I was finally finding some mental stability, but I surrendered to the binge eating during therapy and was back up to 260 pounds. And it was hurting my health in a big way. I kept waking up in the middle of the night, choking on stomach acid. I couldn’t find clothes that would fit me. I was getting depressed again.

And so I started checking out OA and by October was headlong into my 12-Step Program of Recovery.

I immediately dropped 65 pounds, and have maintained the same healthier weight of 198 pounds for more than a year.

All these events were bottoms.

I hit bottom for different things.

Hopefully, I’m done.

The whole back story is here.

One thing I do to remind myself of why I never want to go back there is listen to songs about hitting bottom, coming clean and getting punched in the face by the truth. Here are four favorites:

“Cold Turkey” by Cheap Trick (covering John Lennon):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e04OBJzbvc&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

“Girl With Golden Eyes” by Sixx A.M.:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKPbi-K6nNQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

“Under The Bridge” By Red Hot Chili Peppers:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsaubMAVHV8&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

“Coma” by Guns N Roses:

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

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Peace With the Past

As bad as the past was, the author is no longer afraid to face it.

Mood music for this post: “Yesterdays” by Guns N Roses:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Fic0XjrSs&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

The Guns N Roses song above is about letting the past go. “Yesterdays got nothing for me,” Axl Rose sings. I used to feel that way. But lately I’m finding it’s OK to go back into the past.

I thought it would be better to leave past relationships in the dust because it would be too painful trying to resurrect them. I also thought it would be too damaging to those from the past who I’ve hurt.

Sure, I’ve been through the meat grinder. A lot of memories are bad. But nestled between those memories are some good stuff I now realize I should treasure and be grateful for.

When I dug through some boxes in storage Saturday, one of my discoveries was a VHS copy of a 1991 performance if “Cabaret” put on by the theater group at North Shore Community College, where I went before Salem State.

A good friend of mine played a lead role in that play. I reconnected with this person on Facebook a couple years ago. She’s happily married with a great job and two beautiful children. But back in the day, she went through a lot of difficult stuff, including the death of a parent.

When we talk about the past she often can’t remember a lot of her time at NSCC because the memories are too painful. And on the surface, given how Blessed her life has been in more recent years, I can see why she’d prefer to leave the past where it is.

But that video tape is a snapshot of some of the fun we all had back then, too. It should be OK to remember the good stuff, as long as we don’t let the memories consume us and keep us out of the precious present.

She may disagree with me on that one, so I’ll keep her identity secret here.

There was a time when I wanted to leave the past sealed away. Then I went into therapy for OCD and had no choice but to open that vault. I had to because that was where I had to start on the path to sanity. I had to re-examine what happened to figure out how I got the way I did and, when I went into a 12-Step recovery program for the compulsive binge-eating addiction, I had to keep digging up the past because that’s an important part of the program. When we share in an OA meeting, we discuss how we used to be, followed by the moment we entered program, followed by what our lives are like today.

At the end of each meeting, we read something called the promises, which has this passage:

If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace.

I didn’t understand that idea at first. Now it’s something I cherish.

By not shutting that door, I’ve been reconnected with people who were important to me back then. And while those relationships can never again be what they were, getting back in touch with them has shown me that I was wrong about some of my past. Specifically, I thought those people hated me now. They don’t.

The biggest example is Sean Marley’s widow, Joy.

She’s remarried with kids and has done a remarkable job of pushing on with her life. She dropped out of my world for nearly 14 years — right after Sean’s death — until recently. I assumed  she hated my guts and wanted nothing more to do with me. I wouldn’t have faulted her for that. I hurt a lot of people back then. But I’ve at least learned that she doesn’t hate me.

I have to be careful with this particular reconnection. I still have a lot of questions about Sean’s final years and the OCD in me wants to know everything now. If I’m lucky, some answers will come in time. But I’m not going to push. I have no right to.

Besides, simply being reconnected is, as Joe Biden might say, “A big fucking deal.”

Finding my brother’s 1984 high school yearbook was a big deal, too. I had worked so hard to keep those memories in the drawer that I had almost forgotten what he looked like. That’s a shame. Now I remember, and it’s all good.

Finding old pictures of me and my great-grandmother reopened a chamber in my brain of memories to be treasured. I’m grateful for that.

The key is to keep the past in perspective and not let the life of today be shackled by whatever came before. You can never really go back.

But you can enjoy the good memories sandwiched between the bad.

That’s what I’m learning, anyway.