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I Don’t Dislike Mondays

I used to fit the “I hate Monday” stereotype perfectly. In fact, that first day of the work week used to fill me with terror. I’d start to get depressed Saturday night because it meant the weekend was halfway done. I’d get so worked up on Sundays that I’d short circuit and sleep most of the afternoon away.

Now I love Mondays. When someone complains about it, I laugh or roll my eyes, conveniently forgetting that I used to get that way.

Mood music:

So why the turnaround? It wasn’t immediate.

Learning to manage my depression certainly helped.

I used to get overwhelmed by all the work I usually had to do on Mondays and Tuesdays, which were the busiest, longest days of the week when I was a reporter and editor for weekly newspapers. Those were the days when you had all the municipal meetings to cover and all the writing to do. I used to write all five-seven stories a week in one day.

That kind of disorganization made life messy on its own. But my unchecked OCD and depression made it worse, and I wasted many weekends on worry as a result.

Finding the right medication and developing an arsenal of coping tools went far in changing how my brain processes things. Finding my career groove helped, too.

When I saw work as a massive pile of shit to be shoveled every week, the depression was inevitable. In more recent years, particularly the last eight, I’ve been blessed with work I love.

I’m happy to put it down on the weekends. But now I see Mondays as that time when I can dive back into creative mode.

There are things I do so I can start the week right:

  • I make lists of things to do for work and home. Writing a list means I don’t have to keep rehashing the agenda in my head over and over again.
  • I get to bed fairly early on Sunday night.
  • I plan out my breakfast and lunch for the week. Otherwise, I’d starts the week eating from the drive-through and wouldn’t stop.
  • I play a lot of guitar on Sunday. I play guitar daily, mind you, but those Sunday sessions have become critical to my mental equilibrium.

It’s Sunday night as I write this, and I’m feeling just fine.

Calvin and Hobbes making faces; happy Monday

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It’s Not How Far You Have to Go, It’s How Far You’ve Come

No matter how much we’ve grown, no matter how far we’ve come, we insist on beating ourselves over the strides we have yet to achieve.

When it comes to self-loathing over one’s vulnerabilities, I’m about the best there is. But I’ve worked hard to break myself of that, because the truth is that I have come a long way since the days when I was owned by my OCD, anxiety, fears and dark impulses.

Do those things still get the better of me? Absolutely. But I’ve found that the more I dwell on it, the longer it takes me to grow into something better.

Mood music:

I used to let myself plunge into days of depression and self-hating every time I made a mistake at work. I binge-ate my way to 280 pounds, and I would let my brain spin for weeks over every possible worst-case scenario for the same reason.

As a kid, I bullied other kids even as I was getting bullied, because finding kids that were seemingly weaker made me feel better about myself.

Thankfully, I’m in better control of myself and my actions than I used to be, though the darker impulses still get the better of me occasionally. I still beat myself over mistakes, which makes the step forward slower. I still give in to laziness when life seems too hard. I still judge other people when I don’t really know them.

But I keep those impulses in check a lot more often than not. When I’m feeling down, I try to celebrate that fact.

Efforts at personal evolution are a life-long thing. The work doesn’t end until we’re dead.

Best to focus on living the best way we can.

baby elephant climbing a steep hill

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Basil Fawlty Can Suck It

I know many fans of the old BBC show Fawlty Towers. People love to laugh at lead character Basil Fawlty, who’s perpetually unhinged, rude and ridiculous. Viewers can laugh at Basil’s expense and even feel a little grateful for not being that guy. But I have to confess that I despise the show.

Mood music:

When I watch an episode, I actually get stressed out. My anxiety goes through the roof every time Basil puts his foot in his mouth or hapless waiter Manuel drops food on a dining room guest.

If you’re thinking my reaction is absurd, you’re probably right. It is, after all, just a TV show — a comedy at that.

But Basil flips an old switch deep in my brain. It’s the switch that used to trigger my own episodes of bat-shit madness. I probably was never that off the wall outwardly. But I felt that out of control inside all the time. I was like Basil Fawlty, haphazardly running from one calamity to the next. And there was nothing funny about it.

That was the old fear and anxiety at work in my soul, with disaster and sorrow lurking around every corner. Fear of not measuring up at work. Fear of losing more loved ones.

Things were never that bad. It just felt that way to me all the time.

There are a lot of fictional characters out there who entertain me with their insane behavior. Lord Business, the villain in the Lego Movie, is a pretty good example. So is Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz from Phineas and Ferb. I love those characters because I see a bit of myself in them and they comfort me because I know I’m not alone.

We laugh at these characters because we all see some of ourselves in them.

That being the case, my hatred of Fawlty Towers makes no sense. It really doesn’t. And yet I can’t stand it.

Maybe someday I’ll figure it out.

Fawlty Towers

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Death by Regimentation

I lead a pretty regimented life. I’ve gotten good at juggling multiple activities at once and sticking to carefully mapped out schedules. Regimens are good for me. I need specific plans for eating, exercise and career/family management.

But I have to admit, all that regimentation is like a noose around my neck lately.

Mood music:

I recently reined in my eating plan and got back to exercising because my health was beginning to drift. I have a new therapist and a new doctor. And though the going has been tough, we’re adjusting to the boys’ new school.

All in all, good progress.

Yet I’m almost constantly on the road. I drive to and from work. I pick up the kids from school. Then it’s back out for this appointment or that activity. This is the grind multiple days per week usually.

It’s all good. It’s what I signed up for, so to speak. But I’m realizing more than ever that my shoulders aren’t as strong as they should be to carry the weight.

I don’t need or want a change in routine. But I do need to find a better way to manage it all without feeling beaten down.

Better eating and steady exercise is a big step in the right direction. My sleep needs work. I’ve yet to figure out why I keep waking up in the middle of the night and staying up for an hour or more at a time. Better sleep would most definitely make everything else more manageable. I use a CPAP that sometimes feels like more trouble than it’s worth because the mask doesn’t fit right. One more thing to work on, which means more appointments.

I don’t tell you all this to complain. This is more an exercise in self-assessment. I need to make more adjustments to how I live my days, and posts like this usually mark the turning points.

I also share it because a lot of you have the same pressures. There’s no getting around the craziness, but it always helps to know that you’re not alone in the struggle.

You could also say misery loves company.

Or, as Red Green likes to say, “I’m pullin’ for ya. We’re all in this together.”

red green

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Downworthy: The Answer to All Those Stupid Headlines

I loathe the link-bait bullshit that’s taken over my Facebook newsfeed. Upworthy. Opposing Views. Even The Huffington Post. They’re all guilty to varying degrees.

Call me a snob, if you will. I was a journalist for 20 years, and I like my headlines straightforward and to the point. All I see these days is shit that goes something like, “Michael asked his mom for a Pepsi. What came next will blow your mind.”

Mood music:

My friend Alison Gianotto, chief technology officer at Noise, hates it too. Instead of merely rolling her eyes as I do, she built a free, highly amusing browser plug-in called Downworthy that’s currently available for Google Chrome. When you add it to your browser, a little icon of poop makes itself at home in your toolbar.

Turn it on and it’ll take all those hyperbolic headlines and replace them with something snarky that people like me consider more realistic. For example, “Be Overused So Much That You’ll Silently Pray for the Sweet Release of Death to Make it Stop” is translated to “Be Overused So Much That You’ll Silently Pray for the Sweet Release of Death to Make It Stop.”

A couple examples of the end result:

winter phenom

glacier lake

When you’re having a hard day and Upworthy throws all that annoying garbage your way, this plug-in will make you feel better.

Life is hard. Some days the challenges threaten to drown us. You certainly can’t blame the publishers of Upworthy for that. It’s simply how life is sometimes.

But if a toy like this can distract us from the darkness, if only for a few minutes, it will help us live to fight the next battle.

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Don’t Let Social Awkwardness Get You Down

I’m a pretty public guy. I’ve given many public presentations about this blog and the security industry I work in. Blogging by itself means I’m putting myself out there every day. So, you would think I’d be comfortable in public by now.

But sometimes I’m not.

Mood music:

I was reminded of this over the weekend, when I attended the ShmooCon hacker conference in Washington, DC. I got to see many friends and had a great time. But there were several conversations in which I was ridiculously uncomfortable. That’s no fault of the people I was talking to. In this case, it really was me.

Some of this is because of social media. Many of the people I enjoy conversing with on Twitter and Facebook use avatars that are usually not the standard mug shot. Some use symbols, others use cartoons or pictures of animals. So when I see these people in public, seeing the actual face behind the online presence can be jarring.

I also get a little weird in big crowds. I’ll usually insert myself into a group of people and listen to conversations, and when the attention turns to me, I get tongue-tied and sweaty. I’m sure that for every person who notices, there are five more who don’t.

My defense mechanism is usually to go wandering around the hotel aimlessly for several minutes. Then I come back and rejoin the conversations.

I think it goes back to childhood, when I had trouble talking to other kids and making friends. It was often easier to be alone with my Star Wars toys and dark thoughts.

I know I’m not alone when it comes to social awkwardness. Friends have described a similar feeling and reaction in their own travels. These are not introverts or hermits. They give talks, take principled stands on many a controversial issue and mix with people at these events until the wee hours of the morning. They look perfectly at ease, but they’re not always.

The good news is that I’ve learned to stick it out; to keep talking to people in the crowd rather than retreating to my hotel room. The awkwardness usually goes away after a few hours, and it’s all good from there.

If I’m really feeling the social anxiety, I will go to my room, but only for about a half hour so I can breathe and collect my thoughts. Then it’s back downstairs I go.

I used to let the awkwardness get me down. Sometimes I outright hated myself for it. But I’ve come to learn that it’s just part of being human. I used to think it made me a freak. Today I see it as a normal sensation we all experience.

I had a very good weekend. I was productive and made new contacts because I didn’t let the awkward moments get me down.

hiding

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Fear of Déjà Vu

Déjà vu, literally “already seen,” is the strong sensation that a current event has been experienced in the past, whether it has actually happened or not.

When my OCD, anxiety and depression were at their worst, I used to constantly have bad thoughts. It usually involved people close to me dying. I forgot about it until it started happening again recently.

Mood music:

My mind used to spin so fast with worry that I would barely recognize the wonderful things in front of me, including my kids.

In fact, I was often looking at the miracle in front of me and, instead of enjoying it, would work myself into an anxiety attack. Because there was always the chance I could lose it all.

As the dark thoughts whirled around, I’d start to worry about the possibility that something bad would happen and that when it did, it would come at me as a déjà vu. My mind would start flashing images of accidents and disease involving my kids, and I would repeatedly beg God to not let it become a déjà vu.

The absurd thing about fear and anxiety is that you get thoughts that have no basis in reality. Yet when the images come, it feels as real as the ground beneath you. For the victim of OCD, it becomes a living beast of flesh, bone, teeth and overall terror.

Last week, after several nights of poor sleep and a particularly stressful afternoon, I had one of those moments — the first in several years. I saw it for what it was this time, and the fear dissipated pretty quickly.

But it served as an important reminder: You can learn to manage your demons, but you’re never fully free of them. You always have to be on guard.

That’s not a terrible thing. It’s a simple fact of life really, and I’m grateful that today I can put those moments in the proper perspective.

Depression 1

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You Can’t Fight Depression with Unicorns and Rainbows

In recent days I’ve watched an interesting online discussion about depression and bipolar disorder. One one side is author and speaker Natasha Tracy, whose writing pulls no punches about the dark side of such maladies. On the other side is a blogger named Sarah Ryan. She believes the approach to addressing the subject should be uplifting and sunny.

The truth is somewhere in between, in my opinion. But I must say that the sunshine part is useless if we don’t pick apart the darkness first.

Mood music:

Taking a shot at Tracy and her work, Sarah suggests a new voice is needed. Her beef: Tracy’s articles are dark to the point of ridiculous. She writes:

I am struck by the negativity that many major health-care websites are perpetuating, such as healthyplace.com, healthline.com, and answers.com. They are advertising Ms. Tracy as an expert on those sites, so if that is the case, I’m sure the vast majority of her readers will assume they can trust her message and treat it as fact-based. Here’s the rub: I find her message to be wrought with negativity, misinformation, and deeply internalized social stigma.

Sarah hopes to be a “much needed counter balance to this sort of negativity.” Sarah’s blogging is part of a larger project called “Find More Out There,” designed to explore the realities of bipolar disorder via film and other media.

As a long-time sufferer of depression and OCD, I appreciate what she’s doing. Sufferers do need hope, and in my own blogging I try to outline all the light I’ve found at the other side of the darkness.

But I also respect Tracy’s work. Sure she leans more toward the dark side. The titles she uses demonstrate that:

  • How Are You? – I’m Not Fine, I’m Bipolar
  • Can You Die From Bipolar Disorder? (*Saving you more time, the answer is yes)
  • More Ways to Die from Bipolar Disorder
  • Trying Bipolar Therapy You Don’t Believe In – Mindfulness Meditation
  • I’m Too Tired to Keep Fighting Bipolar Disorder

Sarah uses those titles as proof Tracy is too negative.

But here’s the thing: Depression and all the mental disorders that feed it are a nightmare. When you’re in the thick of it, all seems lost. It sucks. People need to say it sucks. My healing — an ongoing process with plenty of setbacks and advances — couldn’t begin until I peeled back every layer of my fear, anxiety and depression. That took years.

For the sufferer to find tools to get better, they have to know they’re not alone. The old cliché that misery loves company is true. When you realize you’re in good company, it becomes easier to stand up and do something about it.

But once the sufferer has that epiphany, they need guidance to start building the tools of recovery. Sarah’s project holds promise there.

I’d love to see these two voices collaborate on something. The fruits of such an effort could be powerful.

unicorn pooping a rainbow

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“A Christmas Story” Made It OK to Be Weird

Sunday, I settled in with Erin and the kids for our annual viewing of A Christmas Story. Like everyone else, I have my 10-15 favorite lines:

“It was… soap poisoning!”

“Notafinga!”

“You used up all the glue … on purpose!”

But those lines, as much as I enjoy them, are not why I consider this movie so special. The main reason is that the movie made it OK to have strange thoughts.

Mood video:

http://youtu.be/Ktzt096mlxs

When I was a kid, I always thought something was wrong with me because I’d dream up all these crazy thoughts and scenarios. If I got punished, I’d dream up all manner of revenge scenarios. If I wanted a certain toy, I’d dream up hundreds of scenarios of me playing with said toy.

All kids do that. For that matter, adults do it to. But it took seeing A Christmas Story for me to get that. Before that, I thought I was just a bizarre kid doomed to a future of sinister thinking that would make me an alien among more “normal” people.

It also taught me that mine wasn’t the only family that failed to fit all the Brady Bunch parameters.

I’m not a special case. The movie was an eye-opener for a lot of people.

The reason those scenes cause us to laugh so vigorously is because there’s a release — or, more to the point, a relief. Relief in knowing we’re not alone in our weird families and weirder thinking.

That’s what I call a Christmas gift.

Ralphie

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Therapist Shopping

A few months ago my therapist retired and moved to warmer environs in the south. He said I was managing my OCD well and that I didn’t need therapy until the autumn.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/Ils9GXqU03c

That last appointment was in the spring, with the season’s increasingly long periods of daylight, the environment I function best in.

Now it’s late October, with shorter days, and the seasonal issues are starting to kick in. Sunday I started getting chest pains and Monday I was breaking out in a sweat for no good reason. I’m familiar with these symptoms. It usually starts as heartburn and then my OCD runs wild with thoughts that I might be having a heart attack. When that worry increases, the sweat appears.

It’s a classic anxiety attack.

I used to get them all the time, but in recent years they’re few and far between. When I get one, it usually means I’m experiencing some big stress in my life.

I thought about what might be causing it. All in all, life is good. My wife and children are healthy. I love my job. Most things are status quo, except that we’re still helping the kids adjust to life in a new school. But that’s been an ongoing processes and hasn’t kept me up at night. So what’s the deal?

Of course, that’s what therapists are for: helping you yank out the underlying issues you can’t see on the surface.

I’ve been shopping for a new therapist for a couple months now. It hasn’t been easy. I’ve called several that I researched online. Most haven’t called back. The rest weren’t the right fit.

Fortunately, I have great friends looking out for me. One friend, herself a mental health specialist, is working her contacts and getting me names. From that list, I may have found the therapist I’m looking for.

Wish me luck.

patient therapist