Something interesting happened yesterday. The OCD was running hot all afternoon and kicking my ass. Then, when I wasn’t expecting it, it gave me a second wind that worked out for everyone.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:4AAwBktkUB8LXGy5xNW3Rc]
I was running around trying to get things done before going to a National Information Security Group (NAISG) meeting and the kids were in their usual state of after-school chaos. Duncan was sitting over his homework, not really getting anything done, and he kept messing up the table cloth.
That table cloth, wrinkled and out of place, drove me absolutely insane.
In a classic moment of OCD run ragged, I repeatedly walked up to the table and fixed the cloth. Duncan would immediately get it rumpled up again (not on purpose — the thing just doesn’t fit the shape of the table and is easily knocked out of place) and I just kept coming back and trying to fix it.
I was fully aware that I was having an OCD episode, which is progress in itself, because once upon a time, an OCD attack would overtake me without my knowing what hit me. Erin came into the kitchen and, before she could point out what I was doing, I looked up and acknowledged that the table cloth was freaking me out.
Then Duncan finally got his homework done and the tablecloth was back in place.
As I wallowed in the tired moment, the phone rang. It was my sister-in-law. She needed a babysitter in a pinch. She was upset about it, too. Grandma was already coming to watch the boys, and I told her to bring the niece over.
When something like this happens, my first instinct is to make things as easy as possible on the babysitter. So the OCD kicked in again and before I knew it, I was getting everyone’s dinner on the table and shifting around the bedtime routine to make Grandma’s life easier.
By the time everyone got here, the food was on the table and I was ready to head to my NAISG meeting.
I’m glad I could do that.
It just goes to show what a two-faced bitch OCD is.
And that is my curse. I have to keep the OCD at bay because it would destroy me if left to run hot around the clock. I went through all kinds of hell to bring it under control.
But every once in awhile, I’m glad I have it, because it can come in handy.
I don’t want it most of the time.
But sometimes, I’m afraid of what life would be like without it.
One of my security friends thinks she needs to delete her social network accounts because she lacks social skills. She tends to offend people sometimes, you see, and she wants to go away until she can learn to behave. Though admirable, it’s a bad idea for lots of reasons.
At the height of my mental illness and addictive behavior, social skills were alien to me. Isolating myself from the rest of the world was the better thing to do, so that’s what I did. There was no Facebook or Twitter back then, mind you. I sometimes wonder how I would have behaved on those sites if they were around at the time. My behavior probably would have been a hundred times worse than anything my security friend is worried about.
A few notes about this friend: Her posts are laced with sarcasm. She uses the word “fuck” a lot in the adjective form and she makes it plain that she is an atheist.
Of course, as I’ve discovered, sarcasm is a tricky skill that can get you into trouble. When you make comments about someone’s faith or the way they look, it’s almost always going to be negative. So you have to use it sparingly.
–A ton of people on Facebook and Twitter use it as a political soapbox. If they’re Republican, almost every post is a tirade against “elitist socialistic liberals.” If they’re a Democrat, it’s the reverse. That stuff has offended me before. Not because they are expressing their beliefs. That’s something I respect. What annoys me is that they never have anything else to talk about, which makes them too one dimensional for my tastes.
–Too many people for my tastes pour their frustrations out on Facebook. If someone’s having a bad week, they complain about everything. Maybe their cat looked at them the wrong way. Maybe their job sucks. One of my friends constantly complains about her job on Facebook.
–Though I don’t set out to insult anyone, I know I do. I push out a lot of links that are relevant to my work in the information security community. If it’s something I wrote, be it a security article or something from this blog, up it goes. I know I’ve been “un-friended” for that. People don’t like their feeds dominated by one person. That person comes off as egotistical and full of himself. I’ve already confessed to that sin. I also write openly about my Faith. That friend at the focus of this post? She’s an atheist and I’m surprised she hasn’t un-friended me by now. And I’ll confess I was a little pissed off last Saturday — the anniversary of 9-11 — when she made a crack about how science flies us to the moon and faith flies us into buildings.
And yet I don’t think she should leave the social networking realm. Why? Because we all have our stuff to work on, and I’ve learned from experience that it’s better to do it out in the open than in isolation.
Hell, I’ve done far worse than being sarcastic on Facebook. I’ve lied to people in the past about my addictive behavior. I’ve hurt people along the way and have spent a lot of time lately trying to make amends to them. There are worse things in the world than being an ass on Facebook. Besides, as I’ve said, we are all asses on Facebook from time to time.
In the end, we all have the choice to disconnect from a connection we find offensive. I’ve un-friended people on Facebook or un-followed them on Twitter for annoying me. It’s like the old saying about how if you don’t like the music, turn to another station.
To this friend of mine who thinks she needs to drop from the world: Don’t be silly. People are connected to you because they want to be. We already knew of your sarcasm when we decided to connect to you on these sites. Some of us enjoy your posts for the sharp, edgy humor you provide.
You need more social skills? OK. But you can’t build those skills in isolation.
And if your friends aren’t willing to hang around as you work through that stuff, then they’re not really friends, are they?
Neither case is one of evil. It’s about good intentions gone wrong. I think of the old saying, “The path to hell is paved with good intentions.”
In the case of overbearing parents, this was only partly true for me. My father was all about pushing me out into the world to learn how to survive. My mother was a different story. In her defense, she had already lost a child, so wanting to protect the kids she had left was understandable. While me and my sister still took a lot of abuse, I was also smothered to the point of wanting to explode. And that’s what I did.
I rebelled. I grew my hair long and started staying out all night. I learned to escape not just in food, but in alcohol and weed. Think of the trouble that fish Nemo got into in “Finding Nemo” when his father got too overprotective. Nemo rebelled by going out to that boat and got himself caught in the dentist-diver’s net. Later in the movie, when Marlin, the dad, says he promised never to let anything happen to Nemo, his friend Dory piped up, “If you never let anything happen to him, then nothing will ever happen to him.”
It all worked out for Nemo in the end and it has for me. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Before I experienced all the ups and downs that ultimately led to recovery and salvation, I chafed against my mother’s smothering by shoving aside my studies.
The school district knew I was an emotional, troubled kid. I started getting extra help in elementary school because of the toll Crohn’s Disease had taken on my young body. It worked at first, but when I went to the Paul Revere School for seventh and eighth grade, it all went to hell for me.
There, kids were divided into three groups: The A group, the B group and the C group. The first was for the kids who consistently got As on their report cards. To the lower groups, they were sort of an elite class. The B group is where most kids were. Then there was my group, the C group, where the kids with bad grades were sent to rot. That may be a harsh description. I do believe the school was trying to do what was best for students. But the stigma of being on the low end of the student body was damaging all the same.
The C kids were never really encouraged to study their way to the B or A groups. We just got teachers that gave us the bear minimum for work and treated us like troublemakers to be kept in line.
Indeed, the C group was where all the troublemakers were. I was a quieter version of trouble. I mostly hurt myself by dabbling in addictive substances and ignoring the academics. Other kids in my class were always getting into fights and some were already getting arrested. There were some so-called normal kids in the mix who did study their way into the higher groups.
Some of the C kids got picked on a lot, including me, though I also met a lot of great kids along the way.
I remained a slacker in high school and it took a couple years of community college before I found my ability to study hard and advance.
I feel like I found my way despite a smothering parent and the mistakes of the Revere Public School system.
I should also note that this isn’t about bashing the Revere schools. That was all 25-plus years ago. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and hope the A-B-C system of labeling kids is a relic of the past.
But in the final analysis, looking back, it’s easy for me to see how the mistakes of parents and educators fed into my struggles later in life. I fault no one. It’s not like God dropped us here with an instruction book for parenting and educating. The Ten Commandments aren’t clear about such specifics.
As a 40-year-old dad who takes an active interest in my children’s education, I still feel like I’m winging it for much of the time.
Before I managed to bring the OCD to heel, I was a basket case about making sure the kids were shielded from danger. It just led to me becoming more of a basket case and, because being that way is exhausting, it made me too tired to do other things with them that I should have been doing.
All I can say is thank God for abstinence and sobriety — as much as staying clean can suck from time to time — and thank God for Erin, who has been especially relentless about teaching those boys right from wrong and making them study hard. Together, I’d like to think we’re pretty good parents and that we give Sean and Duncan the right mix of love and discipline.
But because of where I’ve been, I ALWAYS worry about how my actions will impact them.
One of the big things I’ve struggled with over the years is when it’s OK to be alone and when it’s not. I spent a lot of years in isolation. I’m slowly realizing isolation and alone aren’t necessarily the same thing. Isolation never amounts to anything positive for me. Alone does — when I let it.
I seem to always be around people these days. There are the folks in my 12-Step program, including my sponsor and the three people I sponsor. There are the one-to-three meetings a week, and the daily phone calls. For someone who hates the telephone, I spend a lot of time on it these days.
I spend a lot of time around parents of the boys’ classmates. I spend a lot of time around business associates. When there’s downtime, I increasingly seek out friends. Fortunately, they seek me out, too.
But while it’s never good for me to be isolated, I’m finding that I DO need to be alone sometimes.
Not alone in a brooding, depressed state. That better fits the isolation category for me. It’s more like being alone in a state of prayer or creativity.
I’ve come to treasure the alone time I get first thing in the morning, when I can listen to music, write or just flop my head back. My relationship with the car has changed. Instead of using it as a place to isolate and feed my addiction, it’s now a place for reflection, music and sightseeing.
It used to be on business trips that I would isolate in my hotel room whenever I didn’t have to be out in public. There’s a lot of trouble you can get into with yourself when you’re holed up in a hotel room.
Now, I make some alone time for myself so I can walk around the city I’m in and take it all in. Yesterday I roamed the streets of NYC and spent a lot of time at Ground Zero in contemplation and prayer. I continued praying as I walked back across the Brooklyn Bridge to my hotel.
It was excellent.
Later in the evening, it was time to mix with people again and I did — having a long overdue reunion with my cousin Andrew and meeting his beautiful bride-to-be, Violet. We inadvertently wound up in a gay bar, but it’s not like there’s anything wrong with that. And the other patrons were friendly and polite. It’s been years since I saw Andrew. Shit, I remember when he was small enough to fit in a beer mug.
Afterwards, it was time to be alone again. I went back to the hotel and read myself asleep, which didn’t take much.
If the whole concept of isolation vs. being alone is confusing to you, it should be.
It’s certainly something I’m still trying to figure out.
I’m getting there. Slowly but surely.
Of course, it’s time to go mix it up with people again, so off I go to listen and then write about day 1 of the CSO Security standard.
As a kid living on Revere Beach, long walks were my lifeline to sanity. At least once a day, I walked the entire length of the crescent-shaped coastline, from the edge of Revere Beach Boulevard to the city’s border with Winthrop. In more recent years, I haven’t walked much. But recent events are rekindling my love for it.
I spent a lot of time walking around New York City this morning. I’m staying in Brooklyn for the CSO Security Standard event, but my hotel room wasn’t ready when I arrived, so I looked outside at the Brooklyn Bridge and decided to walk across it, just for the hell of it.
I walked into Chinatown for coffee with a couple friends, then I walked to Ground Zero. Being the day after the 9-11 anniversary, it seemed like the right thing to do.
Last time I was at Ground Zero I left in a pretty depressed mood, but this time, strangely enough, I felt inspired. A lot is happening on that site, including construction of two memorial pools in the footprints of the twin towers, surrounded by trees, with a new Freedom Tower rising up at the edge.
Also inspiring is that nine years later, the people of NYC are keeping the memories of the victims alive. One example is this shrine to the firefighters who lost their lives:
By the time I walked back over the Brooklyn Bridge to check into my room, five hours had passed and I was exhausted. But I felt like I did exactly what I was supposed to do before settling in to work.
Long walks like this have always restored my sanity.
During all those walks on Revere Beach, I’d be trying to think through all the childhood chaos and find a way forward. I always did.
When the kids were still small enough for the double stroller, I’d take them on a 3.5-mile walk in our Haverhill neighborhood.
I stopped walking in recent years because life just got to busy. Or at least that’s how I’ve rationalized it. The truth is, I think I’ve been making excuses.
Yesterday morning Sean wanted to do that 3.5-mile walk with me because it brought back special memories for him. So that’s what we did.
Between that walk and todays stroll around NYC, I’m starting to realize walking was an important tool for me.
It’s time I dusted that tool off and started using it again.
Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing on Sept. 11, 2001. Here’s my own account.
Mood music:
I was assistant New Hampshire editor at The Eagle-Tribune and I arrived in the newsroom at 4:30 a.m. as usual. I was already in a depressed mood. It wasn’t a sense of dread over something bad about to happen. It was simply my state of mind at the time. I wasn’t liking myself and was playing a role that wasn’t me.
I was already headed toward one of my emotional breakdowns and the job was a catalyst at that point. By day’s end, I would be seriously reconsidering what I was doing with my life. But then everyone was doing that by day’s end.
I was absorbed in all my usual bullshit when the NH managing editor came in and, with a half-smile on his face, told me a plane hit the World Trade Center. At that point, like everyone else, I figured it was a small plane and that it was an accident. Then the second plane hit and we watched it as it happened on the newsroom TV.
I remember being scared to death. Not so much at the scene unfolding on the newsroom TV, but at the scene in the newsroom itself. Chaos was not unusual at The Eagle-Tribune, but this was a whole new level of madness. I can’t remember if my fear was that terrorists might fly a plane into the building we were in as their next act or if it was a fear of not being able to function amidst the chaos. It was probably some of each.
This was a huge story everywhere, but The Eagle-Tribune had a bigger stake in the coverage than most local dailies around the country because many of the victims on the planes that hit the towers were from the Merrimack Valley. There was someone from Methuen, Plaistow, N.H., Haverhill, Amesbury, Andover — all over our coverage area.
When the first World Trade Center tower collapsed on the TV screen mounted above Editor Steve Lambert’s office, he came out, stood on a desk and told everyone to collect themselves a minute, because this would be the most important story we ever covered.
Up to that point, it was. But I was so full of fear and anxiety that my ability to function was gone. I spent most of the next few days in the newsroom, but did nothing of importance. I was a shell. I stayed that way until I left the paper in early 2004. In fact, I stayed that way for some time after that. I should note that the rest of the newsroom staff at the time did a hell of a job under very tough pressure that day. My friend Gretchen Putnam was still editor of features back then, but she and her staff helped gather the news with the same grit she would display later as metro editor.
I remember being touched by a column she wrote the next day. She described picking her son Jack up from school and telling him something bad happened in the world that day. His young response was something like this: “Something bad happens in the world every day.”
Sometimes, kids have a better perspective of the big picture than grown-ups do.
I got home very late that day and hugged Erin and Sean, who was about five months old at that point. I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of world he would grow up in.
In the days that followed, I walked around in a state of fear like everyone else. That fear made me do things I was ashamed of.
A week after the attacks, Erin and I were scheduled to fly to Arizona to attend a cousin’s wedding. The night before were were supposed to leave, I gave in to my terror at the prospect of getting on a plane and we didn’t go. It’s one of the biggest regrets of my life.
There are two types of head cases headed for a breakdown: There’s the type that tries hard to get him or herself killed through reckless behavior, and then there are those who cower in their room, terrified of what’s on the other side of that door. I fell into the latter category. I guess I tried to get myself killed along the way, but I did so in a much slower fashion. I started drinking copious amounts of wine to feel OK in my skin, and I went on a food binge that lasted about three months and resulted in a 30-pound weight gain.
A few months ago I found myself in lower Manhattan for a security event and I went to Ground Zero.
Gone were the rows of lit candles and personal notes that used to line the sidewalks around this place. To the naked eye it’s just another construction site people pass by in a hurry on their way to wherever.
I was pissed off at first. It wasn’t the thought of what happened here. My emotion there is one of sadness. No, this was anger. I was pissed that people seemed to be walking by without any thought of all the people who met their death here at the hands of terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001. It was almost as if the pictures of twisted metal, smoke and crushed bodies never existed.
As I started to process that fact, my mood shifted again.
I realized these people were doing something special. No matter where they were going or what they were thinking, they were moving — living — horrific memories be damned.
They were doing what we all should be doing, living each day to the full instead of cowering in fear in the corner.
Doing so honors the dead and says F-U to those who destroyed those towers and wish we would stay scared.
It reminded me of who I am and what I’ve been through. I didn’t run from the falling towers or get shot at in the mountains of Afghanistan or the streets of Baghdad. But the struggles with OCD and addiction burned scars into my insides all the same.
I was terrified when I was living my lowest lows. But somewhere along the way, I got better, healed and walked away. I exchanged my self hatred and fear for love of life I never thought possible.
It’s similar to what the survivors of Sept. 11 have gone through.
They reminded me of something important, and while some sadness lingers, I am grateful.
So here’s what I’ll be doing this weekend, the ninth anniversary of the attacks:
The Esquire Magazine Style Blog has a fascinating read on pant sizes that brings back a lot of fat guy memories. And though I’m not nearly as heavy as I was at the height of my binge-eating disorder, this tale of fat man’s pants still resonates.
The author, Abram Sauer, recounts a painful moment when he tried on a size 36 pants and found them too tight. He did some digging and found that not all pants’ sizes are as advertised, and how it opens a can of worms in terms of a person’s perception of their own body and how they might act going forward.
He writes:
I’ve never been slim — I played offensive line in high school — but I’m no cow either. (I’m happily a “Russell Crowe” body type.) So I immediately went across the street, bought a tailor’s measuring tape, and trudged from shop to shop, trying on various brands’ casual dress pants. It took just two hours to tear my self-esteem to smithereens and raise some serious questions about what I later learned is called “vanity sizing.”
The pants manufacturers are trying to flatter us. And this flattery works: Alfani’s 36-inch “Garrett” pant was 38.5 inches, just like the Calvin Klein “Dylan” pants — which I loved and purchased. A 39-inch pair from Haggar (a brand name that out-testosterones even “Garrett”) was incredibly comfortable. Dockers, meanwhile, teased “Leave yourself some wiggle room” with its “Individual Fit Waistline,” and they weren’t kidding: despite having a clear size listed, the 36-inchers were 39.5 inches. And part of the reason they were so comfy is that I felt good about myself, no matter whether I deserved it.
He concluded:
The mind-screw of broken pride aside — like Humpty Dumpty, it cannot be put back together, now that you know the truth — down-waisting is genuine cause for concern. A recent report published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that men with larger waists were twice at risk of death compared with their smaller-waist peers. Men whose waists measured 47 inches or larger were twice as likely to die. Yet, most men only know their waist size by their pants — so if those pants are up to five inches smaller than the reality, some men may be wrongly dismissing health dangers.
–I’ve always hated clothes shopping because of the blow the experience would inevitably land on my ego. My hips are always wider than my waist, no matter how thin I am. So the right waist size is still too tight in the hips and legs. Buying pants isn’t as traumatic now that I’m some 80 pounds lighter than I once was, but I’d still rather wear pants full of holes than buy a new pair.
–Finding a pair of pants that were looser than advertised did indeed leave me with the false perception that I’d cheated the odds with my eating behavior. The result was more bad behavior because, well, I had cheated the odds.
–I don’t blame clothing manufacturers for taking liberty with the sizes. For one thing, their job is to sell pants and keep the customer happy. I doubt these guys ever met someone who was happy after peeling themselves from a too-tight pair of pants. If they are making so-called vanity sizes, it’s because the customer demands it.
–The measuring tape never lies. Pants may lie, but when you put the tape around the waist or hips, what you see is the truth.
In my case, I’ve learned not to let the fit of new pants get in the way of reality. The only thing I care about is what the food on my plate weighs. I use a small scale to determine that. If I keep weighing the portions, the smaller pants are going to fit. It’s stupidly simple.
Clothing manufacturers can play all the games they want with sizes.
If you have a binge-eating problem like I did, there’s no limit to the lies your brain will spin about your own body perception. I’ve looked in the mirror many times as a fat man and saw a thin man because that’s what I wanted to see. I’ve looked in the mirror as a much thinner man and saw a fat guy staring back at me because that’s how I felt that day.
Clothing companies may play games. Fast food restaurants may play games with the amount of fat and chemicles they stuff into their food.
But in the end, the real enemy is ourselves. We see what we want to see and believe what we want to believe.
For reasons not immediately clear to me, I’m in the midst of a mood swing. The day started off well enough, so as a little exercise I’m going to bang on this keyboard and see if I can figure out what’s what.
I woke up at 4 a.m. tired but happy. I was out late last night at one of the planning meetings for a weekend Catholic retreat I’m on team for next month and I was assigned a cool talk to give during that weekend. The coffee was good and strong and I got to work ahead of the traffic and thunderstorms.
I talked to my OA sponsor and talked to one of the guys I sponsor (another sponsee was late calling and I never got a chance to call him back). I wrote a blog entry and plunged into work. Good day so far. I was especially glad to be writing something, since I’ve been doing a lot more editing and planning than writing these last two weeks. I’m always happier when writing articles.
I think the spark for the mood swing happened during the writing of that article. It’s for a three-part series and while I have a crystal-clear idea of where I’m going with parts 2 and 3, I hit a wall writing the first one. I didn’t have as clear a sense of where I was going and it slowed me down. So instead of writing all three articles, I only got through one.
Ridiculous, you say? True, three write-ups in one day is a lot to expect and most people are happy to finish one. But writing multiple items in a day is something I do all the time. I wouldn’t care as much if not for a burning desire to get the series off my plate before heading to New York for a conference Sunday.
The second spark, I think, is that my editor hadn’t gotten to reading my story by the time I left and I had high hopes of posting it this afternoon. This is also me being ridiculous, because it is not time-sensitive stuff. But I am a control freak and when my work is in someone else’s queue I have no control. That stuff I wrote this morning about learning to surrender? Sometimes I suck at following my own wisdom.
So I guess I know what my problem is now. I don’t feel like I was productive in my work today, and I thrive on being productive.
That’s a sucky feeling.
But it’s too bad. I know I just have to get over it and move on.
Tomorrow is the chance to do better. Tonight I’ll just move on.
I also could have gone on a binge like I used to when feeling unfulfilled at the end of a day. But I didn’t.
In my journey through Faith and recovery, I hear the word “surrender” over and over again. I used to hate the word for the same reason you might hate it. To surrender means to give up, toss in the towel and go home defeated, right? Not exactly.
1. a: to yield to the power, control, or possession of another upon compulsion or demand (surrendered the fort)
b: to give up completely or agree to forgo especially in favor of another
2. a: to give (oneself) up into the power of another especially as a prisoner
b: to give (oneself) over to something (as an influence)
2 b comes closest, but it’s not enough.
They are accurate descriptions, mind you. They just don’t do justice to what the word means in faith and recovery.
Here’s what I’ve learned about the word so far: It DOES NOT mean to quit life and stop trying to be better and stronger. In the context of Faith and the 12 Steps of Recovery, it DOES NOT mean that you stop thinking for yourself.
It IS about admitting you can’t control everything and that you need the aid of a higher power. For many of us (for me, anyway), that higher power is God. It IS also about putting your trust in others.
As addicts in the grip of the demon, we trust nobody. We picture everyone with a knife in their hand, ready to stab us in the back. We see someone trying to tell us to clean up our act even though they could not possibly understand what it’s like to be truly out of control. We also watch over our shoulders because we expect someone to swoop in and steal our junk at any moment.
When we start to realize we have a problem, we labor unsuccessfully under the delusion that we can clean up on our own, without any help. In that regard, we refuse to surrender. We think our will is enough to get the job done, even though the art of will power has eluded us repeatedly. That’s the insanity of being a control freak.
I tried all kinds of things to clean up from a binge eating addiction. I thought I could tame the beast by chain smoking and drinking 14 cups of black coffee per morning. I thought I could do it by fasting twice a week. I even thought I could do it by drinking wine instead of eating.
Since I grew up with a chip on my shoulder, I looked at the word surrender with pure hatred. To surrender meant to do whatever my mother told me to do. Since her desire was for me to always play it safe and never take risks, it would have been the wrong thing to surrender to.
To surrender also meant to do what my father told me to do, which as a teenager simply didn’t fit into the joys of staying up all night getting high. He had a lot of good things to teach me, but no fucking way was I going to heed his advice. That would mean surrendering.
Surrendering to God seemed like the worst idea of all. That meant giving up my free will and following some unseen being over the cliff.
Motley Crue bassist and lyricist Nikki Sixx once described a similar reaction when he was asked to get on his knees and pray for help to break his heroin addiction. His reaction went something like this: “Fuck God!”
Let go and let God? Screw you.
As I got older and my addictive behavior was about to destroy all my hopes and dreams, I reached a point where I was willing to do anything to stop the pain.
Some would call that giving up, and I guess that’s what it was.
One time I was at a party listening to a group of moms talking about the pain of childbirth. Someone noted that in that moment of agony you lose all modesty. You just want that baby out of there. After a while, you stop caring if the doctor is male or female.
I wouldn’t know, but it is a pretty decent description of an addict who has maxed out their tolerance for pain.
Suddenly, the word surrender doesn’t sound so bad.
–Effecting a spiritual awakening in which God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves, as we humbly submit our self-will and our heart to his will (Steps 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, and 11).
–Overcoming pride and resistance to change through rigorously honest self-examination (Steps 1, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 10)
–Making amends and repairing the harmful consequences of our self-destructive behaviors – especially the harm we’ve done to others (Steps 5, 8, 9, 10 and 12).
There it is, all laid bare. To surrender isn’t to give up and stop thinking for yourself. It’s exactly the opposite. It means doing a gut check, finally being honest and realizing you need help. When you surrender to God, you’re letting in the people who can help you.
It’s about honesty, trust and taking a leap of faith.
I stopped being afraid to leave my room, getting on airplanes, taking on challenging work assignments that previously would have made me sick to my stomach, and I stopped being afraid to get up and talk in front of a room full of people. I also stopped being afraid to speak up when I disagreed about something, particularly in work.
In other words, I finally started becoming the man I wanted to be.
I still have a long, long way to go. But this beats the hell out of what life was like when I was clinging to that old, stupid will of mine.
Yeah, I surrendered. I gave up the idea that I could go it alone, without people who know better and without God.
This blog is chock full of my own experiences with depression and addiction. I even hint here and there about how the addictive behavior runs in the family. But I’ve avoided the story of depression among siblings until now. This post is about my older sister, who had it much harder than me, and whose progress over the years has inspired me.
I haven’t mentioned it up to this point because it’s her story and her business. I didn’t want to violate her privacy. But recently I’ve realized her story is an important part of my own. So I sought and received her permission to tackle it head on. Hopefully, this post validates the trust she’s putting in me.
Wendi’s is a success story, whether she realizes it or not.
Sometime around 1991, things started coming to a head. She started plunging into deep depressions. Between 1991 and 1998, I can remember three occasions where this led to her hospitalization. She talked openly about wanting to kill herself. One such occasion, in 1998, was a couple months before my wedding. Since it was only two years after Sean Marley’s suicide, this made me more angry than anything. My anger was a selfish one. How dare she get suicidal and hospitalized and put me through this all over again. And how dare she do this while I was getting ready for my wedding.
I realize something now that I didn’t realize back then: Depression and the collateral damage it causes to others is never really in the sufferer’s control to stop. And it can care less about timetables. Mental illness doesn’t take breaks for holidays and weddings, for the convenience of others. Given my own battle with depression in subsequent years, I get it now.
I’m sorry for getting angry with her back then.
There’s something else I feel sorry about: Because of my own mental turmoil, I chose to avoid situations that made me uncomfortable. Wendi’s depression made me very uncomfortable. The result is that I wasn’t the helpful younger brother I should have been.
In 2003, Wendi caught a bizarre infection the doctors couldn’t make sense of. She spent a couple weeks in ICU and pumping her full of antibiotics didn’t seem to help her much. A couple times we were certain she wouldn’t make it. But since then, things have gotten better for Wendi. Not easier. Maybe not even happier. But better.
A couple years earlier, she had announced to the family that she was gay. It took some family members by shock, but not me. When I thought about a couple of the more “normal” relationships she had tried to nurture in past years and the depression she went into when things didn’t work out, it all made perfect sense to me. She was trying to live a life that didn’t gibe with her true nature.
When she came clean about that, her life didn’t get easier. But I suspect, because she found a way to be truthful with herself, that some things got easier to deal with. She’s been through her ups and downs since then. A marriage didn’t work out. She suffered some nasty complications from gastric bypass surgery. But she has moved on from those difficulties much more quickly than in past difficulties. It’s been heartening to see.
This post is my long overdue hat tip to you, Wendi. I love you.
He writes: