Posted on

40: The New 20

A lot of people get depressed on their birthday. Not me. The fact that I turn 40 today is almost a freak of nature.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVXIK1xCRpY&fs=1&hl=en_US]

When I was sick with the Crohn’s Disease as a kid, I lost a lot of blood and developed several side ailments. I’m told by my parents that the doctor’s were going to remove the colon more than once. It didn’t happen. They tell me I was closing in on death more than once. I doubt it was ever that serious. But nevertheless, I’m still here.

When the OCD was burning out of control, I often felt I’d die young. I was never suicidal, but I had a fatalistic view of things. I just assumed I wasn’t long for this world and I didn’t care. I certainly did a lot to slowly help the dying process along. That’s what addicts do. We feed the addiction compulsively knowing full well what the consequences will be.

When I was a prisoner to fear and anxiety, I really didn’t want to live long. I isolated myself. Fortunately, I never had the guts to do anything about it. And like I said, suicide was never an option.

I spent much of my 30s on the couch with a shattered back, and escaped with the TV. I was breathing, but I was also as good as dead some of the time.

I’ve watched others go before me at a young age. Michael. Sean. Even Peter. Lose the young people in your life often enough and you’ll start assuming you’re next.

When you live for yourself and don’t put faith in God, you’re not really living. When it’s all about you, there no room to let all the other life in. So the soul shrivels and implodes. I’ve been there.

I also had a strange fear of current events and was convinced at one point that the world would burn in a nuclear holocaust before I hit 30. That hasn’t happened yet.

So here I am at 40, and it’s almost comical that I’m still here.

I’m more grateful than you could imagine for the turn of events my life has taken in the last five years.

I’ve learned to stop over-thinking and manage the OCD. When you learn to stop over-thinking, a lot of things that used to be daunting become a lot easier. You also find yourself in a lot of precious moments that were always there. But you didn’t notice them because you were sick with worry.

I notice them now, and I am Blessed far beyond what I probably deserve.

I have a career that I love.

I have the best wife on Earth and two boys that teach me something new every day.

I have many, many friends who have helped me along in more ways than they’ll ever know.

I have my 12-Step program and I’m not giving in to the worst of my addictions. There’s still the coffee and cigars, but the stuff that made my life unmanageable has been brought to heel.

Most importantly, I have God in my life. When you put your faith in Him, there’s a lot less to be afraid of. Aging is one of the first things you stop worrying about.

So here I am at 40. I feel much younger than I did at 30.

I don’t know what comes next, but I have much less fear about the unknown.

And so I think WILL have a happy birthday.

Posted on

You Think Too Much

I have friends who spend a lot of time raking the same problems over the coals in their heads over and over again. The worry consumes them. I always tell them, “Don’t over think these things. That’s how you get the tumors and shit.” I know, because I used to let worry incapacitate me.

Mood music:

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

This shouldn’t surprise readers of this blog. I’ve described it before. OCD is very much about worry spinning out of control. If it’s something routine, like sending an editor a flawless story, it’ll eat away at a lot of precious time. I used to write a story, read it back aloud, polish it, read it aloud again, then I’d still be afraid to file it for fear that it wasn’t absolutely perfect. I got home late many nights and lost a lot of sleep because of it.

When it was about health, I’d make myself sick for real by fixating too hard on what MIGHT happen. That’s when the anxiety attacks would come. In 1991, after a colonoscopy to monitor the Crohn’s Disease, I was informed that my colon was covered with hundreds of polyps — more scar tissue than polyps, but something that had to be kept an eye on. I was advised to get a colonoscopy every year to ensure it didn’t morph into colon cancer unnoticed. Good advice. So I let more than eight years pass before a bout of bleeding forced me to get one. Until then, I wasted a lot of time in fear that every stomach cramp, however small, was colon cancer. I’d spin it in my head repeatedly, rationalizing why I shouldn’t get the test. Just following doctor’s orders in the first place would have saved me a lot of over-thinking. That was clear when I had the test and found out everything was fine.

I’ve spent too much time thinking about plenty of other things. It ages you.

But I’ve learned something in my recovery from OCD and the related binge eating addiction: When you learn to stop over-thinking, a lot of things that used to be daunting become a lot easier. You also find yourself in a lot of precious moments that were always there. But you didn’t notice them because you were sick with worry.

I’m a lot happier now that I quickly file an article right after writing it. I move on to the next item on the agenda more quickly and am a lot more productive at work as a result. Does that mean my stories need more editing? Not that I’ve noticed. But hell, that’s what editors are for anyway.

By making doctor appointments and just getting the next blood test or colonoscopy, I do away with a lot of physical pain that worrying used to cause me.

That doesn’t mean I never worry or think about anything. What’s the use of having a brain if you never think about things? There are also a lot of people out there who don’t do nearly as much thinking about their lives as they should.

But there’s a fine line between useful thought and white noise, and my challenge has been to keep myself on the right side of that line. I’ve learned to pick my mental battles more carefully.

It’s easier said than done. If you’re a chronic worrier and someone tells you not to worry you want to punch that person in the face, right? I sure did. When the worry is rushing out of every corner, you can’t even begin to figure out how to shut the valves.

I eventually did it by getting years of intense psychotherapy. I had to peel back each layer of worry and figure out how it all got there. It sucked. A lot. Every painful memory of childhood came to the surface and I had to deal with it head on. Prozac definitely helped. Without getting all the therapy first I don’t think the medicine would have worked as well as it has. In the end, all the Prozac did was fix the flow of my brain chemistry, which was hopelessly out of whack from years of self-abuse.

Delving into the 12 steps through OA was huge, too. Eliminating flour and sugar from my diet cleared out my head in ways I never thought possible. Sugar and flour consumed in massive quantities gummed up my mental gears as bad as any bottle of whiskey would have done.

Letting God into my life was the most important move of all. [See “The Better Angels of My Nature“]

Yeah, I still worry about things. But not like I used to.

It feels better that way.

Posted on

The Anxiety Attack

Overcoming fear and anxiety is a major theme of this blog, and people who think they’ve experienced it often ask me to describe what it’s like for me.

Mood music:

It’s been about four years since experiencing a real anxiety attack, but I remember the feeling well.

It starts with a worry. Maybe it’s concern that Sean and Duncan are sick. Kids below the age of 10 spike fevers all the time, especially in the winter. But when it would happen, I’d start to ponder all the worst-case scenarios.

That worry would simmer into full-blown fear that something awful might happen. Because of the loss I’ve had in my life, the anxiety attacks would always come back to that fear of loss.

If I had an argument with my wife, my brain would spin on that, and it would escalate into full-blown fear that she might leave me. That was never a real danger, mind you. But escalating fear is part of the process.

If I had a sore toe or a pain in the shoulder, it would escalate into fear that I might be having a heart attack. A history of particularly vicious Crohn’s Disease left me prone to the constant fear of impending death.

Then the anxiety attack would move from the worry stage to the point of physical discomfort. I’d start having trouble breathing. My chest would throb and hurt. I’d get the pin-and-needle feeling in the feet that one would get if those body parts fell asleep.

By the end of the anxiety attack, the imagined pain would be replaced by genuine physical pain.

The overall experience would last anywhere from 10 minutes to a few hours.

As the attack eased, I would go looking for comfort. I always found it in the food or the wine.

In one particularly inspired moment, I took two Vioxx pills with a few swigs of wine. I was on Vioxx for back pain, and was pissed when the drug was taken off the market for causing real heart attacks.

Two minutes after swallowing the pills and alcohol, full-on wooziness kicked in. It felt good for a few more minutes, until the thought sparked into my head that maybe I was woozy because I was about to overdose. It’s also worth mentioning that I was doing house work during all this.

I called Erin, who was at her friend Sherri’s house, and told her what I did. Sherri, a nurse, said I’d live, and I started to calm down. But for a few minutes I was in full anxiety attack mode.

Though I spent years doing intense therapy to get the OCD under control, the fear and anxiety didn’t start to recede until I started taking Prozac.

When the fear and anxiety went away, it was one of the best feelings you could imagine.

I started to be hungry for all the experiences that used to generate the anxiety.

Life has been SO MUCH BETTER since then.

Posted on

The Exploding Toilet

Back when my OCD was running out of control, one of my many fixations was cleanliness. If a toilet or sink backed up and spilled all over the place or one of the kids threw up, my brain would spin until it detached from its stem. With that in mind, this was a weekend of real progress.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HkjrSc51BA&fs=1&hl=en_US]

Saturday, the kitchen sink backed up with dirty, putrid-green water and an entire bottle of drain opener failed to work. It sat there for 24 hours until I finally managed to plunge it open. Sunday, the bliss of a peaceful morning was shattered when an upstairs toilet spilled over, causing a flood that leaked out of the kitchen and living room ceilings below.

Had this stuff happened five years ago, I would have been a basket case. Every OCD quirk in the book would have come out: the windmill hands, the compulsive checking of door locks and light switches, and a near-panic over a living room floor littered with toys.

One Christmas Eve about five years ago, Duncan threw up in a basket of clean, folded laundry. The house was already in chaos because we were getting ready for company that evening. Let’s just say that wasn’t one of my better Christmases. By that evening, after all the guests had gone and we were getting the Christmas-morning presents ready, I was having a full-blown anxiety attack.

As sucky as it is to have a kid throw up on clean laundry, in the big picture it’s a small thing. You clean up and move on. But at that point early in my attempt to deal with the OCD, there was no moving on. Exaggerated responses are normal for someone with out-of-control mental illness.

With all that in mind, this past weekend was rather special in the progress department.

Despite the mess in the bathroom and the damage on the floor below (we lost a fair amount of paint and plaster), I was the cool-headed one. Erin was understandably rattled, as were the children, who were convinced their home was splintering around them.

I calmly cleaned the water from the bathroom floor and set about helping Erin contain the leak downstairs. During the chaos, I got the sink unclogged and we rejoiced over not having to call in a plumber we wouldn’t be able to afford. The ceiling damage will cost us, but once dry, it didn’t look as bad as it did at first. It’s still pretty bad, but I can live with it until it’s fixed.

Despite it all, I’d say yesterday was a pretty good day. It was a good weekend full of friends and family.

In the old days, I would have let the curve balls destroy a perfectly good weekend. I’d walk around in a stupor, totally closed off from the rest of the planet. My brain would throb with all kinds of worry about bad things that COULD happen.

Not this time.

This was a weekend where I told my OCD to fuck off. Then I moved on. It’s quite a feeling.

I turn 40 in three days, and I know life will essentially hum along the same way it has. There will be ups and downs. But it’s nice knowing that I’m more prepared for that than I was at the start of my 30s.

Posted on

One of My Biggest Regrets

Yesterday I saw many old friends from my Eagle-Tribune days at the retirement send-off for legendary editor Cheryl Rock. It was a great afternoon. But one of the people I saw there brought back the powerful memory of one of the worst things I ever did.

I didn’t talk to Sally Gilman. I guess I felt too awkward and nervous. She didn’t say anything to me, either. She probably doesn’t remember me. But what I did to her was awful.

It was sometime in late 2000 or early 2001. I was the assistant editor of the paper’s New Hampshire edition and I reported to a manging editor who made my brand of control-freakism look like a minor, passing cold. I’ll keep his name out because I’m about to say some not-so-nice things about him.

I was warned about him when I was about to take the N.H. job. One editor said I would have to play good cop to this guy’s bad-cop style. That was very good advice that I didn’t take.

Instead, I gave in to my instinct to please my masters — this particular master, anyway. His attitude was that all the reporters were children who needed their ears slapped back on a regular basis, and he expected me to carry out his will. It was against my instincts, because I wanted to be known as a nice guy. But I pushed on. When he told me to take a reporter to the woodshed because that person wasn’t performing as he felt they should be, I did.

Sally was one of those reporters who was always in his sights. It was ridiculous, because she was older and wiser than we were. She had been covering New Hampshire for many years. She lived there. We should have just let her do her thing, because it was good enough.

But he wanted more. If an idea wasn’t something you could turn into a multi-story enterprise package with seven sources per story, then it was crap. Community journalism was a mark of laziness, apparently.

He was always on Sally to come into the North Andover, Mass. office to work more often. She resisted, because New Hampshire was where the action was. She lived there. She once noted that the New Hampshire plates on her car increased her credibility with sources, and she was right.

Still, it became my job to push her to come to the office. It seems absurd in this day and age, where you can easily work from anyplace that has a wi-fi connection. But even back then, e-mailing in a story was simple enough.

But we wanted the stories inputed directly into the newsroom’s Lotus Notes-based system. We felt we shouldn’t have to reformat copy on deadline. Perhaps we were the lazy ones.

One morning, Sally filed an incomplete story. I can’t remember exactly what the problem was. But the boss was pissed off about it, and he told me to give her a kick in the ass. Her husband was having some serious surgery that day and we both knew it. But he ordered and I got on the phone and gave her a talking to.

An hour or so later, Steve Lambert, the top editor, called me to his office. I went in there to find him, my direct boss, and editor Al White. Considering what I had done, they went pretty easy on me. There was no yelling. Steve just asked me what happened and I told him. The N.H. managing editor sat there with a very red face. It was always red, mind you. But it was particularly glaring in Steve’s windowless office.

It turns out that Sally had called to complain. She was really upset. How dare an editor call her early in the morning to give her a hard time about something trivial on a day when her husband’s life was hanging in the balance.

Steve agreed with her, as well he should have. But he was still calm about it. He told me I needed to ease up. He didn’t want reporters to see me as the newsroom ass-clown. I said I’d keep that in mind and left his office, feeling like I had just been simultaneously stabbed in the side of the head and slammed in the gut with a brick.

Ten-plus years later, the way I treated her is one of my biggest regrets.

Some could try to absolve me of fault because I was carrying out orders. But the truth is that I could have stood up to this managing editor and told him that was not the day to push this poor woman.

I could have been the good cop, smoothing out the rough feelings reporters were having over his management style. It would have been insubordination on my part, but it would have been the right thing to do. Instead, I was just another bad cop, no better than he was.

I badly wanted to tell Sally I was sorry yesterday. But I couldn’t get up the courage to approach her.

I’m going to find her phone number and let her know how sorry I am.

One more note about that managing editor: I eventually reached my breaking point with him and asked for a transfer. Al sent me back to the night editor’s chair. Al was always a hard guy to read, but I think he knew I was a pile of rubble at that point, so I thank him for giving me that second chance.

One night after I returned to that position, I was asked to help the New Hampshire desk process election results from the various towns we covered. Around 4 a.m., the managing editor started to go into a diabetic shock. Another reporter called his wife and I hit the streets in search of a store that was open so I could get him some orange juice.

He later recovered enough to drive home. I stuck around and finished his work. It wasn’t hard, because I’d been left to finish his work many times.

I’m not proud of this, but there were moments after that where I would think about that orange juice I got him and regretted doing so. Maybe, I thought in my delusional mind, I could have saved reporters a lot of future suffering. Fortunately, I’m not the kind of guy who would do such a thing. If someone’s life is in danger, you help them. Pure and simple. That I had those thoughts still fills me with shame.

He’s still in the business, but I have no interest in connecting with him. The feeling is mutual, I’m sure.

In hindsight, that incident with Sally was a classic case of OCD run wild. Back then the condition hadn’t yet been diagnosed, but it was there, eating away at my brain, making me do bad things.

I don’t think I can ever apologize enough for some of the things I did in that job.

I was really coming undone at that point, but I hadn’t yet hit the series of bottoms I had to reach before I realized I needed help.

Today, the lessons are clear to me:

–Treat everyone as you wish to be treated yourself because that’s what God wants and it’s right.

–People who report to you will always do more for you if you skip the hard-ass bit and be more caring and nurturing.

–Finally, being a people-pleaser is just plain stupid, whether it’s a family member, a friend or a boss. People-Pleasing never works. You can never make everyone happy.

When you try, you do really stupid things.

Posted on

Things that DON’T Suck

Since life has it’s ups, downs and constant drama, I always try to look at the everyday things to be grateful for. Sure, I struggle with OCD and addiction. Some of my relationships are strained. Life is hard. But when I step back and think it over, there’s a lot of awesomesauce oozing around me.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUha_Vj1BWA&fs=1&hl=en_US]

–Started the morning with coffee and an OA meeting. I led this one and told my story. I enjoyed myself in the process. That doesn’t suck.

–Duncan gave me a big hug when I came home. That never, ever sucks.

–Later I’ll go to a send-off party for an old Eagle-Tribune colleague who is leaving. Many long-time friends will be there. That doesn’t suck.

–I’ve reconnected with another old friend from high school, and I didn’t need Facebook to do it. That doesn’t suck.

–I’ve got an iPod crammed with all my favorite rock and metal: Thin Lizzy, Motley Crue, NIN. With metal, things don’t suck as bad as they otherwise might.

–I made it another day without giving in to my addictive impulses. That doesn’t suck.

–I controlled my OCD yesterday more than it controlled me. That didn’t suck so much.

–Tomorrow’s Sunday, which means Mass in the morning. When you let the man upstairs into your life, big, sucky things become smaller, not-so-sucky things.

–The sun is shining. Since too much cloudiness and darkness screws with my mental balance, sunshine doesn’t suck.

–Thursday I turn 40. Some people would be depressed about turning 40, but truth be told, after some of what I’ve been through, I never really expected to reach 40. So with that perspective, aging doesn’t suck.

I have to go do the grocery shopping. That does suck a little bit. But then it’ll be done, and that doesn’t suck.

Posted on

An Exaggerated Response

A reader asked me for my thoughts on “rollercoastering,” that exaggerated response to life’s normal challenges that creates high drama and the feeling of being on a rollercoaster. Hell yes, I’ve been on that ride.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_I6y5-GuLPM&fs=1&hl=en_US]

Here’s what my new friend had to say by e-mail (name kept anonymous to protect privacy):

“Part of my addiction(s) is experiencing an exaggerated response to normal life events. Granted, I have a history of creating drama and placing myself in bizarre situations, but my program of recovery has helped that tremendously over the years.”

Here are three examples of how I’ve been down that road:

—Obsessing about girls I liked (long before I met Erin). I always had the fear of not being loved, and my dating life in high school was pretty much non-existent. In a couple of cases, I would fixate on a girl (two, actually, though not at the same time) because she was nice to me. Being friendly signaled an interest in romance in my mind. So I would call them too much and think about them all the time, which, naturally, got in the way of everything else I should have been focusing on. If translating human kindness into a mating call isn’t an exaggerated response to something more normal, I don’t know what is.

—Obsessing about an impending job performance review: Job reviews are a normal part of a job. Sure, they can be stress-inducing, especially right before it happens. But my anxiety attacks would begin weeks — sometimes months — beforehand. During that time, I would go on vicious food binges. It would always be a waste of emotion, because the reviews would go fine, especially when Anne Saita was my boss.

—Obsessing about travel: I used to have a massively exaggerated response to business trips. Mostly, I would worry about the plane blowing up in flight. That’s because I always had a fear of loss. I’m also a control freak, and when you’re in a plane you have no control. It’s funny to think back on, because now I love travel.

Exaggerated responses are a trademark of OCD cases.

How did I get beyond it? Well, I haven’t completely. There are still days — a lot of them — where I’ll have an exaggerated response to the basics. Messy rooms are an example. I just can’t leave a messy room messy. When you have two children below the age of 10, that’s asking a lot.

But my exaggerated reactions are are a lot less than they used to be.

It’s taken years to minimize the drama. It took extensive, emotionally draining therapy, a spiritual awakening and a 12-Step program. Medication has helped, too.

But make no mistake about it: Keeping the exaggerated responses at bay is a life-long challenge.

This much I can tell you: I’m a lot happier now that I’ve learned to limit those rollercoaster rides.

File:The Scream.jpg

Posted on

The Ballad of Joe Zippo

Back at Salem State College there was a friend I would smoke cigarettes with outside the commuter cafeteria. We’d talk about everything from politics to Nirvana, his favorite band at the time. This was back when Kurt Cobain was still alive.

He eventually picked up a guitar and teamed up with my friend and fellow journalist Greg Walsh, forming the band Zippo Raid.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/nnyVCQrFN7Q

I lost touch with him after college, but I’m thinking of him lately. Joe Kelly, affectionately known as Joe Zippo, died in his sleep earlier this month.

I feel awful for his friends and family. One of my close friends, Mike Trans, told me he was planning to go hunting with him soon.

As I read up on what Joe was doing in all the years since Salem State, it’s clear that he lived his life full throttle and touched many, many people.

I’m breaking from my usual tales of mental illness and addiction to honor his memory and shine a spotlight on some folks who are doing the same.

Another Salem State classmate, Stu Ginsburg, is planning some benefit shows along with other folks. Here’s the Facebook page for one such event.

When life gets me down, I think of folks like Joe, who plow through life’s challenges and show others how to live. That’s one way I find the strength to forge ahead.

The full obituary is below. Thanks, Joe, for being my friend in college, and for spreading rays of sunshine across a lot of other lives.

Joseph S. Kelley, Jr. (he was known around Boston as Joe Zippo / played in bands like Black Barbie; Zippo Raid; The Jonee Earthquake Band; Joe Zippo & the Raiders; etc)

January 10, 1970 – August 8, 2010

STEWARTSTOWN, NH – Mr. Joseph S. Kelley, Jr., 40, of Stewartstown, NH, passed away unexpectedly on Sunday, August 8, 2010, at his home.

Born on January 10, 1970, in Malden, Mass., Joe was the son of Joseph Kelley, Sr. and Marie (Valley) Kelley. Joe was a graduate of Malden High School, and he attended college at Salem State in Massachusetts. He was a sponge for knowledge and loved being in school.

Joe was a person who loved to help people and that drove him into the field of healthcare. For many years, he served as an EMT in Salem, Mass., and he was in the process of becoming licensed as an EMT in New Hampshire. For a time he also worked as a dialysis technician for the Fresenius company in Mass.

He also loved nature and to be outdoors, and he enjoyed hunting and just walking in the woods whenever he could. He also adored his two nieces who will miss him dearly. Joe also was a man of deep faith, and loved his church.

Joe is survived by his parents, Joseph, Sr. and Marie Kelly of Stewartstown, NH; his sister, Jennifer Doucet and husband David of Barton, Vt.; his godfather and uncle, William Kelley of Woburn, Mass.; his godmother, Patricia Piazza of Florida; his two special nieces, Rebecca and Annabelle Doucet; as well as numerous aunts and uncles and cousins, all of whom he loved.

There are no calling hours. A memorial Mass will be held on Friday, August 13, 2010, at 11 a.m. at St. Brendan’s Catholic Church in Colebrook with The Rev. Craig Cheney as celebrant.

Expressions of sympathy in Joe’s memory may be made to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, 501 St. Jude Place, Memphis, TN 38105.

Condolences may be offered to the family on-line by going to www.jenkinsnewman.com.

Posted on

Bully’s Remorse

There was a kid in high school everyone used to pick on. He had a monotone voice and was frail. Kids were terrible to him, including me.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:5Qy0zLjQy3czoj0yZ7DFkk]

For you to understand what I’m about to get into, a review of the 12 Steps of Recovery are in order, with special emphasis on 8 and 9:

1. We admitted we were powerless over [insert addiction. Here’s mine]—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. [Here’s what I’ve come to believe]

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

So I’ve been thinking about my former classmate a lot these days. I haven’t seen or heard from him since the day we graduated 23 years ago. I often wonder where he is, what he’s doing and if he’s ok.

He was the kid everyone made fun of — brutally. And I was probably one of the biggest offenders for the first two and a half years of high school. On the surface he took our taunts with an expressionless face. How he reacted out of view I can only imagine.

There were a lot of bullies at Northeast Metro Tech (it used to be “Vocational School” and we all called it the Voke) and I was made fun of a lot. I was picked on for being fat, for my lack of skill in sports and other things real or imagined.

So what did I do after being picked on? I turned around, found the kids who were weaker than me and attacked them verbally and physically. Mostly verbal, but I remember throwing punches on occasion. Some of it was the reaction to getting picked on. Most of it was from the growing chip on my shoulder over my brother’s death and other unpleasantness at 22 Lynnway in Revere.

By junior year, I had lost a lot of weight and grown my hair long. I was deeply into metal music by then and I started to make friends among some of the so-called metalheads. He had also latched onto metal as a refuge from his pain (he was also pretty religious), and we started to relate over music.

Junior and senior year I made a big effort to be nicer to him, and in the mornings before classes began I would hang out with him. Or, I should say, I let him follow me around. I was still a jerk but was trying to be nice because I was under the influence of another brother, Sean Marley.

So why have I been thinking about him? Because I don’t feel like I did enough back then to set things right. It’s one of my big regrets.

At our 20-year high school reunion in 2009, someone mentioned seeing him at a bus stop going to work.

Sometime soon I’m going to track him down. I have a couple leads on his current whereabouts.

I simply want to say I’m sorry. Someone once suggested I want to make amends to make myself feel better; that I want everyone to see how cool I am doing things like this and writing about it. Maybe there’s some truth to that — the first part anyway. But it’s about more than that. I want to get to know the dude again, if he’s up for it.

If I get to make my amends, you won’t be reading about it here. Righting a wrong will be good enough for me.

bullies

 

Posted on

Sometimes, You Gotta Cut Ties

A friend of mine asked Facebook friends if it’s right to cut ties with someone you care about when the relationship is too laden with dysfunction. I’ll keep the person’s name out to protect privacy, but it’s something I’ve had to confront in my long, messy road to recovery from mental illness and addiction. So here are a few thoughts.

Mood music:

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

I come from a family full of addictive behavior and mental illness. Since high drama is a constant guest in this type of family, it can be hard to be around family and just feel comfortable. On the one hand you want to smack a few people around — and they want to smack you around as well. On the other hand, you love them and badly want to please them.

In my recovery, I’ve found it a lot easier to peacefully co-exist with family dysfunction. Truth be told, I enjoy some of it. Most of all, I’ve gained a new appreciation for some of them in recent years, because I’ve been able to see their side if the situations we quarreled through [For more on this, see my compilation post on my Revere attitude.].

But some relationships bent and broke along the way as well. The most glaring example is the fractured relationship between me, my mother and some step-siblings, aunts and uncles when, inevitably, sides were taken.

I’ve wrestled mightily over this one.

We often look at abusive relationships in black and white. There’s the abuser and the victim. But it’s never that simple. I forgave my mother a long time ago for the darker events of my childhood. I doubt I would have done much better in her shoes. Her marriage to my father was probably doomed from the start, and the break-up was full of rancor. Me and my brother were sick a lot, and one of us didn’t make it.

I didn’t fully appreciate what a body blow that was until I became a parent. After Michael died, she became a suffocating force in my life. I did the same to my own kids until I started dealing with the OCD.

I think she did the best she could under the circumstances. So why has the relationship been cold for four years? There are many reasons. Some her fault, some mine, and a lot of other relationships have been bruised and broken in the process.

There’s a lot I can get into about this, but the simplest answer is that this relationship is a casualty of mental illness and addiction. This one can’t be repaired so easily, because much of my OCD and addictive behavior comes directly from her. She is my biggest trigger.

This is an old story. Mental illness and addiction are almost always a family affair. I was destined to have a binge-eating addiction because both my parents have one. They were never drinkers, though my step-father was. Food was their narcotic. And so it became for me.

My friend on Facebook is in a much different situation from mine, of course. I have no idea if addictions and mental illness are factors in that relationship. And those things don’t have to be a factor, either.

All I know is that you try hard to love your family and everyone else around you. But when the relationship makes life unmanageable, it can’t go on. That’s my own uncomfortable reality.  It’s always worth trying to make things work, but when abuse continues despite all your efforts, it’s time to make a break.

That doesn’t mean you toss that person in the trash heap forever.

I still have my hopes that one of these days I can repair the relationship with my mother. But for now, for the sake of my recovery and for my wife and kids, I have to stand my ground. I don’t have to like it, nor should I. But it’s an unfortunate, sucky necessity.

That’s going to be the case for some relationships whether addiction and depression are part of the problem or not.

My Faith tells me to honor my mother and father. Every time I go into the confession booth at church it’s the first thing I bring up.

One priest put it this way: “Honor thy mother and father doesn’t mean you roll over and allow abuse to continue.”

Yet still I wrestle with it.

But for the sake of my immediate family, recovery has to come first. Without it, I fail EVERYONE.

I hope that’s somewhat helpful to my friend.