The OCD Diaries

July 5, 2011May 15, 2015

Social Anxiety, Alcohol And Whatever Else Numbed Me

Addicts often become the way they are because they suffer from severe social anxiety. To carry on in a large group setting is as painful as having a leg sawed off while wide awake.

I know the feeling very well.

Item: It’s December 2001 and I’m at the home of the big boss for the annual Christmas party. I skipped out on this celebration a year earlier because talking to co-workers about anything other than the work at hand terrified me. I came up with a good excuse, though I can’t remember what it was. I couldn’t get out of two in a row, so off I went with Erin to the party. For the first hour I stood there like a stone, not knowing what the hell to say to these people, many of whom I was butting heads with at the office.

I’m offered a glass of wine. I suck it down in two gulps and start to loosen up. So I have another. And another. And another. Conversation becomes easier, so I have another.

I walk away realizing that enough alcohol will numb that itchy, edgy feeling I get around people. So getting drunk becomes standard operating procedure.

After awhile, the social settings are no longer enough. I need to numb myself every moment of every weekend, then every night after work. When I’m back on the newsroom night desk I stay up late on Sunday nights watching TV. Wine is a necessity, followed by a nice food binge.

Item: I leave that job and go to a company full of young, just-out-of college party hounds. The company likes to have long offsites where the free booze flows like tap water. Being an addict, I make sure to get my fill, followed by my fill of food. There’s nothing quite like a food binge when you’re drunk. For someone like me, it’s heaven for the first hour, followed by shame and terror over my utter loss of control. I gain up to 50 pounds in this job as I binge my way through the social discomfort I feel in a setting like that.

Item: It’s 2009 and I’m several months into my abstinence from binge eating. I’ve dropped 65 pounds on the spot and my head is clearer, but the defect in my head is still there, so I go looking for other things: Wine — lots of it. It becomes a necessity every night with dinner. I get itchy when the supply is cut off. By Christmas I realize wine is no longer compatible with a clean life — the kind I have to live, anyway. So I take my last sip on New Year’s Eve and put it down.

Two things are worth noting here:

1. I was never a fall-down drunk. There was always a line I refused to cross, to that zone where you become stupid and incoherent. But I needed to have some. Not having some led to that feeling like your skin is either two sizes too loose or too tight. The OCD behavior worsens, and I’m twitching, pacing and bouncing off walls and furniture until I have some. THAT is addiction. You don’t have to be smashed and stoned 24 hours a day to qualify. All you need is that unquenchable thirst; the kind that drives you mad until it’s fed.

2. My need to fill the hole in my soul with food and drink has almost always been connected to social anxiety. It’s not just the big work party settings. It’s the small family settings, where I feel the pressure to say something useful every two minutes. I stopped drinking and binge eating, but other crutches have emerged to take their place. I stare at my Android phone or flip through a book. I break off and take walks to be alone for a few minutes. I don’t think it’s awful behavior. It’s certainly better than what I used to do. But it goes to show that you never heal 100 percent.

I’m much better with people settings than I used to be. One reason is that in recovery I’ve come to enjoy people more. I even enjoy watching a little dysfunction.

I can speak in front of a room full of people and often do for work. That’s better than when I would be terrified to do so. I can certainly express myself in writing in ways I could never have done a few years ago. But when I’m at a family gathering or with friends I haven’t seen in awhile, the social anxiety still sets in.

I know a lot of people with social anxiety. Some think they are freaks. Others think they’re either too intellectually inferior or superior to those they are with. Others don’t beat themselves over it. It simply is what it is.

The key is wanting to get better, then doing whatever it takes to get there.

I’m better, but I still have a lot of work to do.

It’s like they say in the halls of AA and OA: I’m not yet the person God wants me to be, but I’m not the person I was, either.

Progress is progress.

June 28, 2011

A Relationship That Changed for the Better

Since my father’s stroke last month, I’ve had some long talks with Dianne, my step-mom. Those conversations illustrate how much we’ve both changed over the years. Or is it just me who has changed?

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/S4v-_p5dU34

Let me be honest: Ours has never been an easy relationship. I spent the better part of my teens and 20s resenting her to the core. Our quarrels had all the drama of a TNT series. The two of us in the same room was like throwing a match on gunpowder.

I’ve often wondered who was more at fault along the way. Knowing myself as I do now, I tend to think the trouble was more my fault than hers, because she had the misfortune of joining the family right as I was hitting my malcontented, conflicted and rebellious teenage years. I had a chip on my shoulder the size of an ashtray and I was full of hatred for a lot of reasons real and imagined.

A look at the broader picture shows how she was really at a disadvantage.

My brother died only a few months after she appeared on the scene, and she was home the night he had that final asthma attack. She plunged the adrenaline needle in him while waiting for the ambulance because that’s what you were supposed to do in the event of these attacks. But his number was up, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

She was also there a couple months before, in October 1983, when Michael had a similar attack that almost killed him that night. The doctors didn’t think he was going to make it that night, but he bounced back from the brink just in time, just like I bounced back from the brink more than once when the Croh’s Disease was attacking me so bad that the doctors were ready to pull out the colon and throw it in the trash.

I guess I was just a little luckier than he was.

Anyway, me and Dianne were always in conflict. I thought she was in the marriage with my Dad for his business success. I fought constantly with the step-sister she gave me. I was jealous of the step-brother she gave me because he was suddenly the cute youngest kid. Before my parents divorced it was Michael, Wendi and me, the youngest. Being sick, I was also spoiled rotten. Then the step-siblings came along and Michael died, making me the oldest son, a title that carried a lot of pressure.

I blamed it all on Dianne.

Of course, she also gave me a beautiful half sister in late 1985 who came along at just the right time, bringing joy to the family I never thought we’d see again. I was always grateful for that.

But still we fought. By the late 1990s we were barely speaking to each other. The resentment and hurt ran too deep on both sides. Then, sometime in 2000, things started to change. We met in a small breakfast place on the Revere-Malden border and talked it out, civil in a way that had been inconceivable just a year earlier.

I don’t remember the contents of the conversation exactly. But somewhere in there, we agreed that something had to change. I think the change really set in after Sean was born a year later. Becoming parents gave her a whole new respect for me and Erin. Actually, I think that for me, becoming a parent was when I finally started to grow up. A decade into parenthood, I get a lot of what she was trying to tell me back when I was a self-seeking kid.

Fast-forward to 2011. I know now that back then I was looking for people to blame for my pain and she was too good a target to pass up.

She has stuck by my father through all kinds of illness and turmoil. She loves him deeply, and worries about him constantly.

Nothing has made that clearer than the past month.

I’ve watched her push past the point of exhaustion and borderline madness to care for him.

She’s lost a lot of sleep and you can see it in her eyes. This month has been vastly more brutal for her than the rest of us, except, of course, for Dad. She’s gone over the cliff for him. That’s what love is all about.

I’m sorry I ever doubted her feelings for him when I was younger.

But that’s in the past. We talk to each other as grown-ups now. The respect is mutual. Things can never go back to the way they were.

Thank God for that.

OCD Diaries

June 17, 2011

Shit Happens When Two OCD Cases Work Together

Let me take you back about 13 years, when two guys with clinical OCD worked together in the same office. I was one of ’em. The other was an old friend named Steve Repsys.

Mood music:

Neither of us knew at the time that we had OCD. It would be many years before we were diagnosed. In the meantime, we worked together for a small weekly newspaper in an office in Chelmsford, Mass. I was the boss and I acted like it.

I was always stressed about just getting the paper done on deadline. Quality didn’t really matter to me. OCD will do that to you: Getting the task done always takes priority over doing it right. Steve was the whipping boy, the sole reporter. I pushed him hard, nearly to the breaking point. He never let me down. But along the way, he would work so hard that his mind would go into loops. One loop involved a worry about finding an apartment. Another was about whether he would get a promotion. All normal things to worry about, except that he was clinically unable to shut up about it.

I carried on the same way about other things. Whenever the going got tough, we would both bitch about everyone who made it possible.

During the small windows of downtime, we would convene in my apartment a few steps away from the office and play Star Wars Trivial Pursuit. Star Wars was very important to us back then.

He eventually went on to another role in the company, and I went to The Eagle-Tribune.

We both got married and had kids. And in recent years, from different states, we’ve come to grips with our mental disease.

Steve and I have been going back and forth sharing our struggles of late, and he recently embarked on a hard-core program to understand his quirks and develop the necessary coping tools. And he was kind enough to write down his experiences to share with you.

So allow me to step back and let Steve take over for the rest of this post:

If you broke your leg, wouldn’t you want to get it treated? Chances are you would get help immediately. Why is it that when it comes to mental illness we let ourselves suffer?

Maybe it’s because in many cases a mental illness isn’t as “obvious” as a broken leg. Maybe it’s embarrassment to admit there might be something not quite right about ourselves. Maybe it’s because the term mental illness conjures up someone in a straightjacket. Whatever the case, mental illness is nothing to fool around with.

I should know. I suffer from OCD.

Most of my life I’ve considered dwelling on things and keeping myself up at night worrying about the future as part of my being. However, after nearly four decades on this earth, I realize I don’t have to live like that anymore. How do I know this? Thanks to strong persuasion from my wife Kara, I recently enrolled in a partial hospitalization program (PHP) to treat mental illness.

All along, the warning signs were there for my OCD. The trouble breathing, difficulty keeping focused, and even chest pains should have alerted me that something was not quite right. When a perceived or a real crisis occurred, I would go into “shut down” mode. Most often I would deal with my problems by trying to sleep hoping they would magically disappear when I woke up.

My obsessive worrying about my family’s finances was gradually driving a wedge between me and my wife. Instead of coming home from work wanting to be a husband to Kara and a dad to my two little girls, I would dwell on the negative. Looking back, I can see why my wife wanted me to get help. At the time, it was hard to see and I thought worrying was something I was supposed to do. I even saw worrying as a badge of honor. The more I worried, the more I thought it proved how much I loved my family.

When my wife first told me about PHP, I thought I didn’t need any help. However, the more I thought about and looked at myself honestly, I realized that maybe I did need help. Worrying was truly running my life.

To no great surprise, an evaluation confirmed that I had OCD. I started PHP immediately. PHP met 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. five days a week for three weeks and covered a wide range of topics including medication, support systems, spirituality, music therapy, and cognitive distortions in a small-group setting.

One of the most important realizations about myself came on my third day at PHP. Looking at the sheet for the day, I remember seeing there was a discussion entitled “Victim/Survivor.” I wasn’t looking forward to it, thinking that it dealt with someone who was sexually or physically abused. The discussion did pertain to victims and survivors, but not in the way I thought.

To my surprise, I felt like this talk was made especially for me. We talked about how survivors are proactive and victims are reactive. Survivors display an “I-can-handle this” mentality while victims cop an “it’s-not-fair-and-this-isn’t-shouldn’t be- happening-to me” attitude. I realized that almost all my life I walked around thinking of myself as a victim. “It’s not fair that we pay more in day care than our mortgage,” and “I can’t handle things” were just some of my more constantly consuming thoughts.

This was probably one of the biggest “a-ha” moments in my life. It dawned on me like a ton of bricks that my way of thinking was not productive for me or my family. I don’t know why it took at that particularly moment to come to the conclusion that instead of being an ostrich that puts his head in the sand, I needed to be a problem solver. I’m just glad it did.

Even while I was at PHP my thinking was put to the test. I noticed that I began thinking more in “survivor” terms. During my stint at PHP, my cell phone was going to be shut off for nonpayment. Instead of getting upset about it and thinking how “unfair” it was, I got into problem solver mode. I called up the cell phone company and told them I got paid in a few days and I would be happy to settle the bill when my check went into the bank. Lo and behold, my carrier agreed and the problem was solved.

While that may seem like a small thing, it’s a big deal to me. Prior to PHP, I would have avoided dealing with the situation or even would have asked my wife to take care of it for me. I can’t guarantee that I won’t fall apart in the future if something doesn’t go as planned, but at least I have new found coping skills at my disposal.

The three-week program greatly helped me in other ways as well. During my time at PHP I learned how important goals are (in fact we started the day off by making daily goals) and that I benefit when I have structure in my life.

In addition, I realize that it’s important to know what triggers my OCD. Now that I know what sets me off (my finances), I can pull out some of the tricks I learned at PHP to extinguish my OCD thinking.

After attending PHP, I realize that I’m not miraculously “cured” from my OCD thinking. I realize that OCD will always be with me, but I don’t need to be a slave to it. I now have a toolbox that’s filled with many instruments to keep my OCD at bay.

PHP showed me that life is always going to be filled with obstacles and problems but I hold the keys to controlling my life.

June 15, 2011

Fear and Duct Tape

I was an anxious, jumpy, panicky little bastard when I was younger. Fear made me do the damnedest things. My sister Stacey loves to repeat the story of one of my more embarrassing moments. It used to piss me off. Now I can sit back and laugh with everyone else.

So fuck it. Let’s review the morning a hurricane was coming and I went bat-shit crazy.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:6KfzBFMXEOs7LgBcG4ZxyT]

First, some history. I’ve explained this before, so no need to stick around if you’ve heard it:

Before I got my OCD under control, I was always full of fear and anxiety. It robbed me of a life that could have been better lived. I hid indoors a lot. I favored the fantasy land of TV over the real, scary world. And when the weather got hairy, I over-reacted in ways that are more amusing in hindsight.

I blame the Blizzard of 1978 for that. When you watch the Atlantic Ocean rip apart a beach wall like it’s melted ice cream and head straight for your house, bad things go through your mind when you’re 8 years old. In later years, when comparisons of that blizzard go hand in hand with every new storm warning, the fear flames over everything else in life until your sanity is reduced to a pile of ashes.

So there we were, in August 1991. The news was already full of reports about a military coup in Russia, which was scary because that meant the overthrow of Mikhail Gorbachev. He would be back in power before the week was out, but take the early hours of that crisis and mix it with reports that a hurricane called Bob is coming straight at us, and here’s what you get:

Me running around the house with duct tape, slathering reams of it on every window I could find.

I ran into Stacey’s basement bedroom and proceeded to tape her window. One of her friends was sleeping over, and got to see me in all my crazy glory.

“Get up, a hurricane is coming!” I bellowed. Stacey and her friend remained in the bed, not a care in the world.

“Come on, you idiots!” I yelled. “This aint no fucking Hurricane Gloria.”

Hurricane Gloria was a storm that hit Massachusetts in 1985. It was supposed to be a devastating event, but it passed over us with more of a whimper than a bang. Hurricane Bob was going to be much worse, the weather people were telling us.

They started comparing the expected storm surge with that of the Blizzard of 1978. Panic.

That storm turned out to be almost as anti-climactic as Gloria.

That Halloween, a much more devastating storm hit, and flooded out the neighborhood almost as badly as in 1978. Ours was one of the only houses not to get flooded.

Go figure.

June 6, 2011

A Boy’s Life on Prednisone: A Class Photo History

I’ve mentioned before that I had to take a lot of this nasty drug called Prednisone as a kid, and how the side effects were almost as bad as the Crohn’s Disease flare-ups the drug was meant to snuff out.

Well, my old elementary school friend Myles Lynch posted some class pics on Facebook that show the physical impact. Looking at them brings back memories good and bad.

Let’s start with first grade, before the disease surfaced. I’m dead-center in the back row, looking like a normal kid:

By the time the second-grade class photo is taken, I’ve been diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease and I’ve spent six weeks in the hospital. The results of the Prednisone on my face are pretty clear. I’m second from left in the back row:

By the time the third-grade pic is taken, I’ve been through my second flare-up and six-week hospital stay. I’m in the back row, two kids to the right of the teacher, Ms. Cole:

I’m not in the fourth-grade class picture, because as the photo is being taken, I’m in the middle of a third six-week hospital stay for another flare-up. The disease usually struck sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving. This time, it waited until spring.

By sixth grade I’ve been off Prednisone for a while. You can see it in my face, front row, far left:

The other kids in these pictures have had their own challenges and joys in life. I’ve kept in touch with some of them. But here’s the important thing: Back then, when we were a small, close-knit community, before the puberty-driven bullying of middle school, these kids did all they could to make me feel better. When I was in the hospital they would send hand-made get-well cards. When I’d get out of the hospital, they would give me a warm, cheerful welcome back.

Those acts of kindness are something I will never forget.

The pictures also remind me a lot of what life was like in the hospital. Those hospital wards were like little communities, where the young patients would try to find ways to pass the time. We shared each other’s toys and watched the same TV shows. I always seemed to be the only Crohn’s patient on a floor full of kids with Cystic Fibrosis. Treatment for that disease was nothing like it is today, and many of the friends I made in the hospital died before they got to adulthood.

I lost a lot of blood back then, because I had a colon full of holes. But compared to my lost friends, I got off lucky.

I owe that to God and all the helpers he put in my path.

Whenever I’m having a bad day and I start to get cranky and impatient with people, I try to think back to those days. Doing so makes me remember how blessed I am, and how I should stop wasting time on hard feelings and earn that blessing by spending my life as one of those helpers.

I’ve been walking past Children’s Hospital these days on the way into the neighboring hospital my father has been in since suffering a stroke last week, and the memories come flooding back of the time when I was a frequent resident there. And seeing my father, with his eye patch and slackened mouth, makes me remember the things he used to do to keep me going.

During one stay, I was obsessed with getting a talking View-Master, where you put in these paper disks and look through a view lens at the scenes that blow up larger than life on a screen inside the gadget. The taking variety was all the rage in 1979, and I bellowed about it like the spoiled brat I was. You get very spoiled and miserable to be around when everyone is tending to your every need.

My father got me the talking View-Master, and bought me a new Star Wars action figure each week, followed by a trip to Friendly’s for ice cream on those occasions where I was allowed to have it.

The more emotional variety of affection was something he always struggled with, though in his way, he was doing all he could to show his love.

Amazing, the things that come back to you after looking at a few childhood pictures.

May 26, 2011

Two Bad Memories

I just got over a fairly typical stomach bug that had me feeling bloated and miserable. It wouldn’t be worth mentioning, except that it brought back a couple bad memories and served as a wake-up call.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/bWsYuW9ULdU

For one thing, I felt just like I used to feel after a brutal junk-eating binge. Not the usual ate-too-much kind of bloat normal eaters feel after Thanksgiving, but the kind I felt after a really messy, days-long bender.

It’s that hung over, junk sick feeling I used to get.

Before I found recovery, my demon would start harassing me long before getting to the scene of the junk. Forget the people who would be there or the weather and surroundings. All I’d think about was getting my fill. Then I’d get to the event and get my fill from the time I’d get there to the time I left. I’d sneak handfuls of junk so what I was doing wouldn’t be too obvious to those around me.

Halfway through, I would have the same kind of buzz you get after downing a case of beer or inhaling a joint deep into your lungs. I know this, because I’ve done those things, too. By nightfall, I’d feel like a pile of shattered bricks waiting to be carted off to the dump. Quality time with my wife and kids? Forget it. All I wanted was the bed or the couch so I could pass out.

The next morning would greet me with a bad headache, violent stomach cramps and blurred vision. Just like having a hangover or being dope sick.

I didn’t have the blurred vision, but last night I felt a lot like those mornings-after.

It also reminded me of how I used to feel during flare ups of the Crohn’s Disease.

I remembered the searing, knifing cramps, the bloated immobility and the blood.

Call me over dramatic, but that’s what I remembered. It is what it is.

It’s kind of funny that last night’s discomfort made me think of the binging first and the Crohn’s Disease second, since the latter kind of led to the former.

In the long run, the disease has been more damaging to my mental health than my physical health. It screwed up my brain and pushed me toward an adulthood of addictions and other hangups.

So here I am on Thursday morning, looking out the window at the sunrise and feeling grateful as hell that the feeling passed.

It’s like when you wake up from a nightmare and realize none of it was real.

But something in my distorted mind leaves me wondering if this was some sort of divine wake-up call; a warning from above that I’ve been too overconfident of my recovery lately.

In OA meetings you always hear people talk about this overconfidence as a precursor to their own relapse.

I don’t want to relapse, so I need to start keeping my confidence in check.

Funny, the things you think about when you’re lying down feeling like crap.

I guess I still have a fair amount of insanity in me.

May 14, 2011

Back Story Of THE OCD DIARIES

Since I’ve been adding new readers along the way, I always get questions about why I started this thing. I recently expanded the “about” section, and that’s a good starting point. But more of a back story is in order.

Mood music:

Before I started THE OCD DIARIES in December 2009 with a post about depression hitting me during the holidays, I had always toyed with the idea of doing this. The reason for wanting to was simple: The general public understands little about mental disorders like mine. People toss the OCD acronym around all the time, but to them it’s just the easy way of saying they have a Type-A personality.

Indeed, many Type-A people do have some form of OCD. But for a smaller segment of the population, myself included, it’s a debilitating disease that traps the sufferer in a web of fear, anxiety, and depression that leads to all kinds of addictive behavior. Which leads me to the next reason I wanted to do this.

My particular demons gave me a craving for anything that might dull the pain. For some it’s heroin or alcohol. I have gone through periods where I drank far too much, and I learned to like the various prescription pain meds a little too much. But the main addiction, the one that made my life completely unmanageable, was binge eating.

Most people refuse to acknowledge that as a legitimate addiction. The simple reason is that we all need food to survive and not the other things. Overeating won’t make you drunk or high, according to the conventional wisdom. In reality, when someone like me goes for a fix, it involves disgusting quantities of junk food that will literally leave you flopping around like any garden-variety junkie. Further evidence that this as an addiction lies in the fact that there’s a 12-Step program for compulsive over-eaters called Overeater’s Anonymous (OA). It’s essentially the same program as AA. I wanted to do my part to make people understand.

Did I worry that I might get fired from my job for outing myself like this? Sure. But something inside me was pushing me in this direction and I had to give in to my instincts. You could say it was a powerful OCD impulse that wasn’t going to quit until I did something about it.

I write a lot about my upbringing, my family and the daily challenges we all face because I still learn something each day about my condition and how I can always be better than I am. We all have things swirling around inside us that drive us to a certain kind of behavior, and covering all these things allows me to share what I’ve learned so others might find a way out of their own brand of Hell.

I’m nothing special.

Every one of us has a Cross to bear in life. Sometimes we learn to stand tall as we carry it. Other times we buckle under the weight and fall on our faces.

I just decided to be the one who talks about it.

Talking about it might help someone realize they’re not a freak and they’re not doomed to a life of pain.

If this helps one person, it’ll be worth it.

When I first started the blog, I laid out a back story so readers could see where I’ve been and how personal history affected my disorders. If you read the history, things I write in the present will probably make more sense.

With that in mind, I direct you to the following links:

The Long History of OCD

An OCD Christmas. The first entry, where I give an overview of how I got to crazy and found my way to sane.

The Bad Pill Kept Me from the Good Pill. How the drug Prednisone brought me to the brink, and how Prozac was part of my salvation.

The Crazy-Ass Guy in the Newsroom. Think you have troubles at work? You should see what people who worked with me went through.

The Freak and the Redhead: A Love Story. About the wife who saved my life in many ways.

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.

The Ego OCD Built. The author admits to having an ego that sometimes swells beyond acceptable levels and that OCD is fuel for the fire. Go ahead. Laugh at him.

Fear Factor. The author describes years of living in a cell built by fear, how he broke free and why there’s no turning back.

Prozac Winter. The author discovers that winter makes his depression worse and that there’s a purely scientific explanation — and solution.

Have Fun with Your Therapist. Mental-illness sufferers often avoid therapists because the stigma around these “shrinks” is as thick as that of the disease. The author is here to explain why you shouldn’t fear them.

The Engine. To really understand how mental illness happens, let’s compare the brain to a machine.

Rest Redefined. The author finds that he gets the most relaxation from the things he once feared the most.

Outing Myself. The author on why he chose to “out” himself despite what other people might think.

Why Being a People Pleaser is Dumb. The author used to try very hard to please everybody and was hurt badly in the process. Here’s how he broke free and kept his soul intact.

The Addiction and the Damage Done

The Most Uncool Addiction. In this installment, the author opens up about the binge-eating disorder he tried to hide for years — and how he managed to bring it under control.

Edge of a Relapse. The author comes dangerously close to a relapse, but lives to fight another day.

The 12 Steps of Christmas. The author reviews the 12 Steps of Recovery and takes a personal inventory.

How to Play Your Addictions Like a Piano. The author admits that when an obsessive-compulsive person puts down the addiction that’s most self-destructive, a few smaller addictions rise up to fill the void. But what happens when the money runs out?

Regulating Addictive Food: A Lesson in Futility. As an obsessive-compulsive binge eater, the author feels it’s only proper that he weigh in on the notion that regulating junk food might help. Here’s why the answer is probably not.

The Liar’s Disease. The author reveals an uncomfortable truth about addicts like himself: We tend to have trouble telling the truth.

Portable Recovery. Though addiction will follow the junkie anywhere in the world, the author has discovered that recovery is just as portable.

Revere (Experiences with Addiction, Depression and Loss During The Younger Years)

Bridge Rats and Schoolyard Bullies. The author reviews the imperfections of childhood relationships in search of all his OCD triggers. Along the way, old bullies become friends and he realizes he was pretty damn stupid back then.

Lost Brothers. How the death of an older brother shaped the Hell that arrived later.

Marley and Me. The author describes the second older brother whose death hit harder than that of the first.

The Third Brother. Remembering Peter Sugarman, another adopted brother who died too early — but not before teaching the author some important lessons about life.

Revere Revisited.

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

The Basement. A photo from the old days in Revere spark some vivid flashbacks.

Addicted to Feeling Good. To kick off Lent, the author reflects on some of his dumber quests to feel good.

The lasting Impact of Crohn’s Disease. The author has lived most of his life with Crohn’s Disease and has developed a few quirks as a result.

The Tire and the Footlocker. The author opens up an old footlocker under the stairs and finds himself back in that old Revere basement.

Child of Metal

How Metal Saved Me. Why Heavy Metal music became a critical OCD coping tool.

Insanity to Recovery in 8 Songs or Less. The author shares some videos that together make a bitchin’ soundtrack for those who wrestle with mental illness and addiction. The first four cover the darkness. The next four cover the light.

Rockit Records Revisited. The author has mentioned Metal music as one of his most important coping tools for OCD and related disorders. Here’s a look at the year he got one of the best therapy sessions ever, simply by working in a cramped little record store.

Metal to Stick in Your Mental Microwave.

Man of God

The Better Angels of My Nature. Why I let Christ in my life.

The Rat in the Church Pew. The author has written much about his Faith as a key to overcoming mental illness. But as this post illustrates, he still has a long way to go in his spiritual development.

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely. The author goes to Church and comes away with a strange feeling.

Running from Sin, Running With Scissors. The author writes an open letter to the RCIA Class of 2010 about Faith as a journey, not a destination. He warns that addiction, rage and other bad behavior won’t disappear the second water is dropped over their heads.

Forgiveness is a Bitch. Seeking and giving forgiveness is essential for someone in recovery. But it’s often seen as a green light for more abuse.

Pain in the Lent. The author gives a progress report on the Lenten sacrifices. It aint pretty.

May 3, 2011

Had He Lived

Today would have been my brother’s 45th birthday. I sometimes wonder what he’d be doing and saying in the crazy world we inhabit today.

Mood music:

Let’s go back to 1984, the year he left us.

He probably would have been amused to find me hanging out with Sean Marley and listening to Motley Crue and Def Leppard. He would have noticed my widening girth and got on me about it. Despite his asthma he was a fanatical weight lifter. He’d be on my ass to join a gym. Just not his gym. Me hanging around his gym would have been gross.

Side item: Right after he died, I did join his gym, Fitness World. It was just down the street from our house, a short walk down a side alley. I wasted no time trying to be him, and lifting weights in Fitness World was as good a place as any to start my charade. I lasted maybe a week. Everyone there expected me to be him. I should have figured out then and there that there could only be one Michael S. Brenner.

Later in my teen years, he might have punched me in the face or broken my other middle finger (he had broken one of them in the back of my father’s van one day when I flipped him off) for wearing his leather jacket. It was a true biker’s jacket, with the zippers on the sleeves and scratch marks from a few falls he had off his motorcycle. He was one cool-looking motherfucker in that jacket. But when I put it on, it was two sizes too small. I wore it anyway.

He might have been jealous of the palace I made out of the basement apartment at 22 Lynnway. At the time of his death the place was being renovated and the plan was for him to move in there. Instead, my father rented it to a guy who was nice enough but always seemed to be fighting with his girlfriend. Since my bedroom was in the basement level at another end of the house, this often pissed me off. Sometimes I heard the make-up sex, and that pissed me off even more. It’s hard to get lost in your quiet, dysfunctional mind when people are making a racket on the other side of the wall. The guy moved out by late 1987 and I moved in.

He might have been annoyed when I decided not to pursue a career in drafting. I wanted to be a writer instead. The poetry I was writing at the time would have sent him into fits of laughter. It would send you into fits of laughter, too.

He was going to be a plumber, and he might have shaken his head back and forth in disgust at my inability to do anything useful with a set of tools.

What he would have thought of me in the 1990s, or of Sean Marley, for that matter, is probably not worth exploring. Had he lived a lot would have been different. I don’t know if Sean and I would have gotten as close as we did, and had that been the case, his death in 1996 wouldn’t have sent me into the self-destructive nosedive I found myself in.

He probably would have been pleased to see me get my demons under control in the last decade. He might even appreciate my decision to be open about it in this blog. But he might not have told me so.

One thing I’m pretty certain of: He would have loved his nephews, and they would have loved him.

I realize this post is a useless exercise. Things happen for a reason, and the past had to unfold as it did so I could be who I am today. You could argue that I would have missed out on a lot of experiences had he lived.

You could also argue — and I would probably agree — that he never really died. He played his part on this world and left, and the part he played is still shaping our lives today.

Whatever.

All I know is that this is May 3rd and he’s enjoying his birthday in a better place. This is my Happy Birthday to him.

May 1, 2011

Crohn’s Disease in Revere, Mass.

An old friend from Revere came over last night, and somewhere in the conversation the subject turned to Crohn’s Disease and why so many of our old friends have it.

I’ve had the disease since the 1970s, and my struggles with it are well documented in this blog. But my friend noted how many of our friends from the Point of Pines, Oak Island and elsewhere have taken bad turns with their health in recent years, and several have developed my disease.

I won’t name names for privacy’s sake, but besides me, we counted three other cases. Could it be something in the water? my friend wondered aloud. After all, a huge General Electric plant sits just across the water in Lynn. There’s also a trash-burning incinerator across the Pines River on Lynn Marsh Road.

Could those industrial sites be responsible?

Who knows? I’ve never seen any studies on the matter, so it would be impossible to trace all the illness to those places.

I do know that when we were kids, before the Deer Island water treatment plan was built, the water of every coastal town in the Boston area was polluted with a putrid mix of bacteria. We all swam in that water as kids, and who knows what the long-term effects of that were.

I have another theory: Doctors simply know a lot more about Crohn’s Disease today than they did back then.

When I was first diagnosed with it in 1978, very little was known or understood about the disease. I endured very long hospital stays and severe dietary restrictions that I don’t really see imposed on people today. People still end up having to take these measures, but it’s not as commonplace. Drugs have improved. The understanding of what makes the disease tick has improved.

Maybe that understanding has simply led to more cases being found and diagnosed.

Of course, it’s all speculation at this point.

I’m just glad my case of the disease is in check, and I hope some of the fellow sufferers are doing better with theirs.

I heard another theory from another friend a couple weeks ago, that Revere had a curse hanging over it that shot down a lot of people from our generation. Besides the Crohn’s Disease, there were multiple suicides and drug addictions that ended in death.

If you asked me that about six years ago, I’d have bought the theory straight away. Today I tend to doubt it.

It was a sad and unfortunate period, but it wasn’t a curse. We all had our share of childhood happiness in Revere in between the bad stuff. And I know now what I didn’t get back then: That we weren’t meant to live soft lives devoid of pain and struggle. These things are tossed in our path to mold us into what we can only hope to be: good people. It doesn’t always work out that way, of course. But let’s face it: Has life ever been fair?

I recently wrote about the time the Brenners nearly left Revere. There’s no question that for a time, I hated that city and would have done anything to get out.

But I think I would have developed the Crohn’s Disease wherever I lived. Bad things and good things would have happened wherever I lived.

Why?

Because that’s life.

April 26, 2011

Who We Were/Who We Are

Last night I fell asleep while leafing through my high school yearbook. I’m connected to a lot of old classmates on Facebook, and it’s funny how different many of us are now.

It’s no surprise, of course. We have to change. In appearance and in mindset. That’s what we do. Yet we still fixate on the old days sometimes.

Mood music:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QP6H4ov7FE&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]

I came across pictures of folks I never talked to in high school. Then there are those I knew but didn’t like. That’s OK, because they didn’t like me either. A few classmates are no longer with us.

It’s odd and cool that I’m friendly today with people I didn’t like back then.

I spend a lot of time getting nostalgic in this blog. I’ve written about Revere a million times. I used to want to go back to those days, as bad as some of those days were, because for awhile there I was skinny and had long hair. We tend to remember how we looked and not necessarily how we felt.

I guess it’s easy to understand why I wanted to go back to the 1980s when I was a perfect mess in my late 20s. When you’re a mess in the present, you tend to forget that things were as bad or worse in the past. You want to be anywhere than where you are.

But I don’t feel that way anymore.

Why the hell would I ever want to go back now?

If I were walking up the street and I encountered the 20-year-old me, I wouldn’t like the kid. I’d marvel at his stupid views of the world and his tendency to talk trash about his dad, even though his dad kept a roof over his head. I’d laugh at the fringe leather jacket and the skull rings. I was a pretentious little bastard.

And for all the pretending and efforts to look cool, it never got me anywhere with the opposite sex. Not in high school, anyway.

I like the 40-year-old me much better. I’m bald and thicker around the middle, but I’m real. And I’m not quite as thick in the middle as I was a few years ago.

I know who I am and I am who I want to be: A husband, a dad, and a writer.

I have a wife and two kids who don’t really care what I look like as long as I’m good to them.

Looking at the other kids in the yearbook, I picture older, wiser people who I see as friends today. I used to pick on one girl for getting pregnant in high school and wasting her future. She married the guy she was with in high school and they had more children. One child died too early. But they’re a loving family.

Another kid was nothing but a punk to me. The message he scrawled in my yearbook was so mean a teacher who saw it took white out to the page. Today, that dude is a close friend.

Looking at who we were in the yearbook and who we are today, I think most of us should be proud.

We didn’t grow up to be perfect and, in many cases, we didn’t grow up to be rich. But through all the aging and all the pain that we all go though between age 20 and 40, we’ve gained something much more precious: a purpose.

We’re parents who get a chance to raise kids who might eclipse us in a variety of ways. Our work, however unimportant it may seem sometimes, could end up helping people we’ll never meet.

We’re still young enough to change a few things we still don’t like about ourselves. Maybe it’s extra unwanted weight. Maybe it’s the career. If 40 is the new 20, we have plenty of time to make changes.

The way I see it, as long as we never lose our ability to change, there’s hope for us all.

Changing. Adapting. Getting stronger and better.

It’s who we are now. And it’s much cooler than who we were.