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From youngest child to oldest son: Anatomy of an identity crisis

When a sibling’s death turns the baby of the family into the oldest son, you get an identity crisis filled with anger and confusion.

As part of my treatment for OCD I’ve had to dig deep into my Revere past for clues on how I got this way. Recently, this huge piece of the puzzle presented itself.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:5QJ7GsolBcJP0tQnEZIU6i]

I’ve written at length about my brother Michael, who died of an asthma attack when I was 13. That experience will test any average kid, and I was no exception. The loss infused a deep reservoir of fear and anxiety in me that would bubble over many times over the years.

But something else happened that would make me feel strange and alone for a long time.

I started my life as the youngest of three kids, the proverbial baby of the family. Michael was the oldest, and in the Brenner family much has always been expected of the oldest son.

My father was the middle child of his generation, but he was the only son. My grandfather, who came off a boat from the former Soviet Union with all the typical old-school values, expected the world of my father. As my grandfather descended deep into old age and illness in the mid-1960s, my father became increasingly responsible for the family business.

Growing up, my older brother became the one my father leaned on the most. Michael was encouraged to chart his own course and was studying to be a plumber. But he was expected to help out with the family business and do a lot of the grunt work at home.

I was the baby, and a sick and spoiled one at that. I came along almost three years after my sister Wendi, and by age eight I was in and out of the hospital with dangerous flare ups of Crohn’s Disease. I got a lot of attention but nothing hard was expected of me. I was coddled and I got any toy I wanted.

The result was a lower-than-average maturity level for my age. At age 10 I acted like I was 5 sometimes. I would crawl into bed with my father for snuggles, just like a toddler might do.

During Christmas 1980 — the first after my parents’ divorce — I wanted it to look like Santa had come, even though I knew by that point that he didn’t really exist. I clung hard to the delusion, because my parents played Santa all the way up to their last Christmas as a couple, when I was nine. So on Christmas Eve 1980, I took all the gifts I had already opened and arranged them as if Santa had dropped them in my living room. I even wrote a “To Billy from Santa” note. Christmas morning I got up, went in the living room and expressed all the excitement of a kid who discovers that the jolly fat guy had come overnight.

My maturity level hadn’t changed much by the time I hit 13. I probably regressed even further right after my brother died. But as 1984 dragged on, I was slowly pulled into the role of oldest son.

All the stuff that was expected of my brother became expected of me, and I wasn’t mentally equipped to deal with it. My brother had a lot of street smarts that I lacked.

As I descended into my confusing and angry teen years, I would be sent on deliveries for the family business. I’d get flustered and lose my sense of direction. One time my father sent me to Chelsea for a package. It was 4:30 and the place I was going to was closing at 5. I got there at 5:10 and had to drive back to Saugus without a package. I felt humiliated and ashamed.

As I reached my 20s all that immaturity and feeling of inadequacy hardened into an angry rebellious streak. I started getting drunk and stoned a lot and would hide behind boxes in my father’s warehouse, chain-smoking cigarettes and binge eating while everyone else did the dirty work.

I spent three years hiding in a community college so I wouldn’t have to work. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, though I saw myself a poet and musician.

I try hard to remember the point where I started to finally act like the oldest son and accept responsibility for my life. There’s no single moment I can think of, though I trace the turning point to when Erin and I started dating in 1993.

I stayed selfish for many years after that, but I had at least found my career choice and work ethic. My work ethic would become excessive like a lot of other things in my life, but the feelings of inadequacy would linger.

Every time I got a raise or promotion, I’d call my father, eager to show him how I was moving up in the world and becoming the oldest son he always wanted.

He would ask how much the raise was and I’d tell him.

“That’s it?” he would ask.

Never, ever good enough, I thought bitterly.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come around to see and respect his point of view. Becoming a parent probably pushed me hard in that direction. I realized along the way that Dad was doing his best to teach me how to be a man and fly on my own.

He wanted me to understand the value of a dollar and a hard day’s work. He wanted me to understand what it was like to care about things other than myself.

Slowly but surely, I figured it out. Thanks, Dad.

Still, to this day, I still need to work at it.

All the confusion and anger over going from the baby to the oldest son has settled into gratitude. I have an amazing life and the inner piece that has always escaped me. I wish my brother was still here to corrupt his nephews, but in a sick sort of way, maybe his exit from the stage was required in order for me to have a chance.

That too might be delusional thinking, and make no mistake: I’d still give up a large percentage of my personal growth to have him around today.

But as this whole experience demonstrates, it’s not about me. Today I’m the oldest son and I think I’ve finally gotten the hang of it.

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Debt Ceiling Debate Would’ve Killed Me A Few Years Ago

I’m watching the political brinkmanship over the debt with much interest. But this time I’m more detached. A few years ago, I would have been sick over it.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/t43VgJ4U9_Q

That’s not to say I’m not more than a little concerned. If the U.S. goes into default the depth of economic chaos for us all will be severe. The world won’t end, but a lot of jobs could, which is a bad combination when you consider how the cost of living would skyrocket.

I just don’t see the value in putting life on hold as this thing plays out. The world is going to keep turning, with or without me. I prefer to keep up with the rotation.

It’s a similar situation to what I mentioned recently in a post about learning to shut off the TV news.

When you have an out-of-control case of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), you latch onto all the things you can’t control and worry about them nonstop. Nothing feeds that devil like the cable news networks, especially when a story as grave as the debt is on the screen nonstop.

I’ve written before about the anxiety and fear I used to have over current events. I would think about all the things going on in the world over and over again, until it left me physically ill. I personally wanted to set everything right and control the shape of events, which of course is delusional, dangerous thinking.

Right after 9-11 I realized the obsession had taken a much darker, deeper tone. This time, I had the Internet as well as the TV networks to fill me with horror. Everyone was filled with horror on 9-11, obviously, but while others were able to go about their business in a depressed haze, I froze. Two weeks after the event, I refused to get on a plane to go to a wedding in Arizona. Everyone was afraid to fly at that point, but I let my fear own me. It’s one of my big regrets.

Part of the problem was my inability to take my eyes off the news. To do so for a five-hour plane ride was unthinkable. To not know what was going on for five hours? Holy shit. If I don’t know about it, I can’t control it!

I really used to think like that.

Fear and anxiety were byproducts of my particular brand of OCD, just like my addictions were a byproduct.

The fear meant a lot of things. Working myself into a stupor over the safety of my wife and children. An obsession with cleanliness, which was interesting since depression always meant my personal hygiene took a dive.

It also meant a fear of world events. When that Nostradamus movie “The Man Who Saw Tomorrow” came out on HBO in the early 1980s, I was terrified by the “future” scenes.

I look at the debt crisis and think back to all the economic tales of doom I’ve heard over the years.

Why am I reacting differently now? I guess it’s because of all the therapy I’ve had over the years. I’ve gotten a lot better at detachment over current events. Through raw experience, I’ve found that the only meaningful change is the kind that starts in your own mind and inner circle.

I hope the debt crisis ends without a default. I suspect it will. If you feel strongly about the proper solution, you should absolutely contact your elected officials.

Just don’t forget that your life can’t stop in the meantime.

I wasted a lot of precious life before I learned that lesson.

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I Thought I Was Perfect. I Was Just Stupid

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.

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You Can Change Your Name, But You Can’t Hide Who You Are

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.

Lynn Shore Drive

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I Hung Out In Lynn, Mass. What Can I say?

In this corner of the planet, Lynn, Mass., is the city everyone likes to pick on. One barb I do agree with is the saying, “Lynn, Lynn, city of sin. You never come out the way you came in.”

But I don’t see that line in the spirit in which it was intended.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/1tp4srXRZDI

It is a city of sin, but every city is a place of sin. We all sin, so it’s wherever we go — even in the little towns with the white picket fences and bunny rabbits hopping around freely.

Me? I’m a better person for having spent a lot of time in Lynn.

Lynn is as much a part of me as Revere. The neighborhood I grew up in, the Point of Pines, is the last stop in Revere before you cross the General Edwards Bridge into Lynn. The house I spent my boyhood in is on the Lynnway, which stretches from the edge of Revere Beach Boulevard to the edge of Lynn Shore Drive.

As a boy, my father would take me to the Osco Drug store in Lynn to buy Star Wars action figures and coloring books, followed by a trip to a nearby Friendly’s Ice Cream shop.

Since there was nothing to do in the Point of Pines, me and my friends walked across the bridge into Lynn, where we would hang out in a Building 19 and flea market just over the border.

When I was 11 a huge chunk of downtown Lynn went up in flames. I could see the reddish-orange glow of the fire from my neighborhood. They built a campus for North Shore Community College where the burned out buildings once stood, and that’s where I spent the first three years out of high school before transferring to Salem State. I used to laugh as I watched the campus security officers aim the parking lot surveillance cameras at a gay bar next door called Fran’s Place so they could watch the drag queens going in and out of the place.

At the community college, I met Mike Tranfaglia, a mullet-headed, foul-mouthed kid with Lynn coursing through his blood stream. He smoked and said “fuck” a lot, so we got along famously. We’ve been friends ever since. He was in my wedding. He’s a Freemason now, and Friday night he invited me to the lodge, practically next door to the Osco that supplied the childhood Star Wars toys I eventually burned when I went through my pyro maniac phase.

At the lodge we ate steak and smoked high-end cigars. The smoke brought a lot of memories wafting back at me. Memories painful and comforting at the same time.

When I went into newspaper reporting in the 1990s, I covered Lynn for a year. I worked six days a week for two publications and nearly had a breakdown from the exhaustion. It was also soon after my friend Sean Marley took his life, so my emotions were raw and bloody.

But the job put me in contact with some of the most colorful characters I ever met. The politicians were cartoon characters, some of them corrupt characters, some of them crazy, including a city councilor who patrolled the ward he represented on his bicycle with a gun strapped to his side.

I covered a murder my first day on the job, a kid who was gunned down outside a nightclub. I’d cover plenty more murders after that.

That year I started working closely with Peter Sugarman, who would take Sean Marley’s place as my best friend until his own death in 2004.

Peter ate, drank and breathed Lynn. He introduced me to the people that formed the spine of the city — including a tough little Greek woman who ran a corner fruit stand and fought with the politicians over any number of things for sport, the folks from the art scene, and the aging WW II veterans.

I even have fond memories of the police station visits on Saturdays at 6 in the morning. It was in the old police station that was standing by sheer habit at that point. There were always homeless people sleeping in the entry way and the smell of piss hung in the air like a toxic cloud. But the cops were always nice to me as I stood there reading through the police logs.

When I left that job, Lynn ceased to be a second home and became the place I had to drive through to get to wherever else I needed to be.

But it was nice to spend a couple hours there Friday night, remembering old times. Thanks for the invite, Mike.

I didn’t come out of Lynn the same person I went in as, but that’s fine by me. The people I met and befriended there made me a better person.

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Hitting Bottom and Staying There

I’ve gotten a lot of questions about hitting bottom. Specifically, after I hit bottom, how long did it take for things to start looking up? I got bad news for those craving the quick fix.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/yUSn0u2GIjE

The first point worth making is that I didn’t hit one bottom like you usually see in the movies, where the addict falls so low that the clouds part and they see the light in huge, dramatic fashion. Reality is slower than that — and more boring.

I didn’t just hit one bottom. I hit a series of bottoms. And I stayed down there for a while each time before I even considered pulling myself up.

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 blow up 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.

All these events were bottoms. And I lingered there for weeks and months at a time.

There are reasons the bottoming-out process takes a long time:

1. You usually fall to the bottom slowly, so slowly that you don’t notice the movement.

2. Once you crash to the floor, you become so out of sorts that you don’t realize you’re in hell. It’s just another shitty day, followed by another, and then another, and then another.

3. It’s usually those around you who realize you’ve arrived in a bad place. But you’ve been causing them so much pain for so long that they don’t even realize it immediately.

Once you hit the bottom, the depression and self-destructive behavior intensifies.

http://youtu.be/zBEo5ZGGsO4

Then you wake up one morning and decide you’re so sick of life that something has to change. And you start making changes.

The changes end up taking a long time, too.

That’s probably not what you wanted to hear. But it does get better.

OCD Diaries

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You CAN Revisit Your Past (A Trip to Revere)

Erin had an audio conference to record Thursday morning, so to ensure a quiet house, I put the kids in the car and went to Revere Beach, the scene of my tumultuous, painful, angry yet beautiful upbringing.

I’ve written a lot about Revere in this blog. How could I avoid it? But I’ve been short on photos to show you. I fixed that problem with this latest journey back in time. Sean and Duncan had a field day picking up shells and jumping in the water — things I took for granted at their age.

The most striking thing about visiting my old home is that as a whole, Revere Beach is a far more beautiful place than I remember growing up. Part of it is because there was a massive renovation of the beachfront in the 1990s. Pavilion roofs ripped off in the Blizzard of 1978 were replaced, sidewalks were extended to the entire length of the beach and, most importantly, the Deer island sewage treatment plant has cleaned up the ocean considerably.

Here’s the rocks behind Carey Circle, just footsteps from my front door. I used to hide here during moments of anger and depression, chain smoking Marlboro Reds:

The house on the right is where Sean Marley grew up. My house was two doors down. During my teenage years, I spent more time in the Marley house than I did in my own. The house on the left is where Sean moved in after he and Joy got married. It’s also the house where his life ended:

My house, dead center, as seen from Pines Road, across the street:

A lot of dead jelly fish used to wash up on the beach. Here’s the private part of the beach, where the bored among us would blow up the dead fish with firecrackers and, on the fourth of July, the bigger explosives.

 This is the first house after Carey Circle, where the Lynnway becomes Revere Beach Boulevard. Me and my siblings used to hang out in this house in the 1970s and play with the kids who lived there. Their father allegedly had ties to the mob and, sometime in 1978 or 1979, he was gunned down in the kitchen. It was believed to be haunted after that, but I never really took that seriously. The house did creep me out, though:

The trip ended with lunch at Kelley’s.

A good trip, I’d say.

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The Brady Bunch Offended Me

Sherwood Schwartz, creator of “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Brady Bunch,” has died at age 94. Naturally, I’m remembering how I hated “The Brady Bunch” for giving me a fake picture of family life.

Mood music:

I hated “The Brady Bunch” because it made me so angry that my own family was never like that. But then no one’s family is really like that.

I did like the movie adaptations that came out in the 1990s because the films mocked the feel of the original series. You had the family living in the 1990s but acting like they were in the 1970s. Some elements of the family were modernized, though: Alice the housekeeper and Sam the butcher get it on at one point.

When Mike asks Sam what he’s doing there in his robe in the middle of the night, rummaging through the fridge, Sam says, “Oh, just delivering some meat.”

Obviously, Schwartz’s point was to create the perfect picture of family, not because it reflected reality, but because it would be nice if it were reality.

Now that the chip on my shoulder has been filled in by time, experience and hopefully a little wisdom, I see “The Brady Bunch” as a nice idea, however unrealistic. In fact, the escape from reality was a welcome relief to a lot of people whose families were miserable and ugly. A little relief helps you regroup and carry on.

My problem is that I’ve always had a tendency to overthink these things.

I never took issue with “Gilligan’s Island.” As absurd as the show was, I’ve always liked the theme of people with nothing in common getting thrown together — forced to become a new family of sorts in order to survive.

I admit without shame that my favorite episode is the one with the Japanese sub pilot who didn’t realize the war was over; the one who complained that the Chinese stole the idea for water torture from Japan.

Despite how the younger, angrier version of me felt, the older me believes Schwartz did a lot of good for a society that tends to stew in its own, stinking, cynical juices.

Rest in peace. I hope you find the folks in Heaven to be something like the characters you created.


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And The Sea Will Save You

When I wrote a post called “Summers of Love and Hate” last year, the theme was a childhood mixed with joy and rage against the backdrop of Revere Beach.

The memories are still stained with sorrow. But, truth be told, the location of my upbringing is one of the things that saved me.

Mood music:

The sea could be terrifying, especially in the winter. The Blizzard of 1978 is my clearest memory of that. But when calm, it brought be back from the brink every time.

This quote from JFK captures my own feelings about the sea as healer and helper:

I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it’s because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, it’s because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea — whether it is to sail or to watch it — we are going back from whence we came.

I’m thinking about this after reading some Facebook status updates from an old friend I grew up with in the Point of Pines. She was messaging from Cape Cod, where her family has gone for some rest. It’s a painful time for them, because a friend has been found dead, allegedly murdered at the hands of her ex-boyfriend.

“On the cape awaiting the rest of my children and my honey. We need to regroup, relax and help my girls start to heal. Hug your loved ones, tell them you love them everyday. Life is hard.”

Losing close friends and family is hard. I’ve been there three times. They are doing the right thing, though, going to the ocean for solace.

During the worst moments of my younger years, the ocean was an escape route within feet of my front steps. I would sit on the rocks and think things through. I would walk from the Pines all the way to the other end and back.

The process would usually take about 90 minutes — enough time to process what I was feeling. It didn’t necessarily make me happier, and much of the time thoughts just swirled around uselessly in my head.

But I always came back from the beach a little calmer, a little stronger and ready to deal with whatever I had to face.

You could say the ocean would speak to me, talking me off the ledge.

I live away from the coast now, in a city sliced in half by the Merrimack River.

The river has an equally calming effect on me, and I walk along it every chance I get.

But every once in awhile I go back to Revere or a closer place like Newburyport or Salisbury to get my pep talk from the sea.

I hope my old friend and her family get what they need from the sea this time. I suspect they won’t walk away with any less pain than what they feel right now. But I have no doubt they’ll leave there with the added strength to get through the sadness.

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Not What God Wants Me To Be, But Not The Person I was

The title of this post is a popular saying among those who use the 12 Steps to bring their addictive behavior to heel. It’s a good line to keep in mind when you’re ready to lose patience with yourself and slip into self-loathing.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/jYpydtdlWxA

There’s a lot about myself that still has to change. I still get angry too easily. I still get self absorbed. I still give in to OCD thinking and actions, even when I know better. I still suck at saving money. Little problems still turn into big crises in my head.

But I don’t see a reason to beat myself over it, because I used to be much, much worse.

A temper today involves angry thoughts and self pity. As a young punk a temper meant punching dents into walls (I lacked the muscles to make a hole), flipping off people on the highway for cutting me off or, worse, getting touchy when I cut them off. It also meant unleashing a torrent of verbal vitriol.

Getting self absorbed back then meant spending what I wanted, eating what I wanted and making the decisions I wanted with no regard for anyone else. I still fall into that behavior, but I catch it more quickly than before and correct myself as much as possible. Doing service has been good for me because it gives me fewer opportunities to stray. Being a husband and father has helped, too.

Giving into OCD today means I may go on a cleaning spree at the moment I need to be doing other things. It means I may check and re-check my laptop bag to make sure the machine is inside, dooming myself to a longer, more traffic-laden commute in the process. It means I’ll occasionally run short on patience. But back then, it meant being blinded to everything around me by obsessive worrying about things that in hindsight were a lot of nothing. Which, in turn, led to the selfish behavior.

I bring this stuff up because everyone has a cross or six to carry on a daily basis, and it’s easy to give in to the worst kind of thinking and write yourself off as a failure.

In times like this, it’s also helpful to remember what Clarence the angel scribbled in the book he gave George Bailey at the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life” — “No man is a failure who has friends.” I used to think I had no friends. Then I realized the problem was that I was ignoring my friends in favor of isolation.

We all have something to offer and to live for. We’re all screw-ups — nothing like the people God wants us to be.

But if we’re just a little better than we once were, that’s huge.

I’m going to keep working on being who God wants me to be. It’s an almost impossible task, because how do you ever really know what God wants you to be (until you’re dead and he tells you directly, anyway)?

He always leaves clues, though. So instead of feeling sorry for ourselves we can simply do the best with the clues we’ve got.