OK, so I’m not in the best mood this morning. Daylight-savings-time is messing with me, as are the kids. The rain that’s been pelting the windows all night disturbed my sleep, as did my getting sent to the couch for snoring too loud.
None of it can really be attributed to OCD behavior. This is simply life, and the mood will pass after I’ve been to Church and we’re buried under blankets this afternoon watching “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” Sean just read “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” so it’s time to break out both films.
First, though, I need to gargle more coffee and play some angst music. Angst music is perfect for a mood like this. So let me share what I’m listening to this morning…
The author has learned that it’s damn hard to like yourself at the beginning of sobriety and abstinence. The feeling will pass. Eventually.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/TP06kxW_M3I
A friend and fellow 12-Stepper just hit a major milestone in her recovery: 90 days of abstinence. In the world of compulsive overeating, think of this as 90 days of back-to-back sobriety.
She worked hard for this and has every reason to be bursting with joy. Yet she’s uneasy.
She doesn’t feel quite right in her skin.
She’s going through something a lot of us go through when we kick our addictions. To call it self hatred might be a stretch. I don’t think she dislikes herself. But now that her mind is clear of the intoxicating haze, she sees things about herself that she doesn’t like. She’s suddenly aware for the first time that she has some flaws that are tough to look at in the mirror.
For a lot of people, it can become a matter of self hatred. It certainly did for me.
Truth be told, I disliked myself way before I cleaned up.
I hated how I looked. I thought I was the crappiest son/sibling/friend on the face of the Earth. Certain relatives would tell me just that, and I believed them. There’s no question that I was a lousy friend when my best friend, Sean Marley, was sinking into depression and I was too worried about my career to notice.
Even though my mental illness included a lot of fear and anxiety over getting sick or dying, I did a pretty good job of trying to kill myself. Not in a suicidal way. Not deliberately. But in the end, addiction is a compulsion — an ache — to repeat dangerous behavior even though you know what the likely consequences are.
It’s the weirdest irony there is.
But when you start to fight your demon head-on, you do become super-aware of your own vulnerabilities. For awhile, I became paralyzed by mine. Then I figured out how to get beyond it. But it took a lot of dirty work.
In his book, “Symptoms of Withdrawal,” Christopher Kennedy Lawford writes that after he kicked drugs in 1986, it still took him awhile to actually become a good person.
Those around him weren’t always happy he was sober, especially since that meant he couldn’t make the cocktails at family gatherings like he used to.
He writes about having to learn how to be a decent human being and be clean at the same time. You would think it’s easy. But it’s not.
In the book, Lawford writes:
“There is another great fiction of recovery — that is, once you stop using your life becomes a bed of roses. Anybody who has stayed sober for any length of time knows that living sober is about learning to live life on life’s terms and a good part of life is painful. When I got sober someone said to me that I would get to realize all my greatest fears in sobriety … You know what? He was right, and it’s not half as bad as I imagined.”
The man speaks the truth. And, by the way, I highly recommend his book to anyone struggling with addiction as well as the clean up:
I had a lot to learn, and I’m still learning. Learning how to be completely honest with my wife and drop my emotional wall was hard. I’m much better at it than I used to be, but I still have a lot of work to do there.
Being more disciplined with money is something I need to be better at. After all, spending is also an addictive behavior.
The list goes on.
But while the work goes on — and will continue to go on — there’s an important point to be made.
Somewhere along the way, I learned to like myself.
Today, I can honestly say I’m happy with the man I’ve become, even if I’m still pretty damn far from perfect.
But then perfect people don’t exist. If they did, they’d be pretty boring.
I’ve seen interview after interview where musicians describe their drug habits and how being on the road made them so much worse.
One of the best examples was Motley Crue on the Girls Girls Girls tour, where the four band members’ addictions were well past the point of manageability — not that an addiction is ever really manageable. That was the tour where Nikki Sixx kept a diary chronicling his increasing heroin use.
In fact, sit in front of the TV and watch a “Behind the Music” marathon and you’ll see most bands tell a similar story.
It’s a similar tale for any businessman who nurses an addiction while doing a lot of travel. Every city is flowing with whatever material feeds one’s vice, whether it’s drugs, alcohol or, in my case, binge eating.
I can tell you from experience that it’s true. During my travels to San Francisco, Washington DC, Chicago, Las Vegas and points in between, the opportunity to binge on free junk and alcohol is limitless.
But here’s what I’ve also learned: You can take your recovery everywhere, too.
In all of the cities I mentioned above, I’ve been able to hold firmly to my 12-Step program and related plan of eating. I know what I can eat, how much, and which ingredients are essentially my cocaine (flour and sugar).
There are 12-Step meetings in every city and town, whether it’s OA or AA, and there are phone meetings available around the clock.
And, if you’re like me, you’ve told enough people about your challenges that they’ll watch out for you. That was definitely the case for me in San Francisco last week.
It really comes down to what you want. If you want your junk, you’ll always be resourceful enough to find it.
If you want recovery, same deal.
I’ve found it also helps to read blogs from others in recovery when I’m on the road. One of my recent discoveries is a great blog called “Conquering Crazy” by Greg Dungan. Like my OCD Diaries, Greg’s blog is a recent start-up. He focuses like a laser beam on the core craziness as he experiences it. It reads more like an actual day-by-day diary, whereas mine is more a collection of longer narratives with a lot of focus on the byproducts of my affliction.
Like me, music is important to him, and he is also a seeker who is trying to find the core of his spirituality. I especially love his first entry, “OK, So I’m Crazy.” Here’s an excerpt:
“I have exhibited symptoms of OCD for as long as I can remember. Recently, these symptoms have intensified. What used to be the “things that make me unique” have become the “things that make me crazy”. This blog is about my struggle with this demon. This is where I will record my day to day thoughts and struggles – my defeats and my victories. I have two choices at this point in my life – roll over and die or fight my way out. I’ve never been one for rolling over and I’m not about to start now.
“You’re welcome to walk this valley with me. If you are living with OCD or if someone you love is, take heart. There are brighter days somewhere, and we will find them together.”
Brighter days ahead? You bet your ass there are.
I’ve experienced it. I’ve been to the valley and the mountaintop.
I started blogging about it after I had been on the journey for a few years. Greg is blogging his journey from the start. That’s courage.
And like addiction, depression, Faith and recovery, courage is portable, too.
The following was written one winter in a moment of absolute clarity.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:27xIf7tzHPQFX068pFYlAh]
Today was sunny and warm in San Francisco. After the never-ending winter back home, I got what I needed today: A walk all over the city with my good friend, Rob Westervelt.
We started by walking along Fisherman’s Wharf, then Golden Gate Park and covered a lot of ground in between.
It brought back memories of when I came here with Sean Marley in 1991. We flew into San Francisco, rented a car and spent the next 10 days driving all over California, sleeping in the car, going days without a shower and eating pasta from cans. We went as far north as Eureka and as far south as L.A., where we spent a weekend before driving back to San Francisco. Too bad I spent half the time letting my fears get the better of me.
It was especially good to spend the day with Rob. We’ve been friends for a few years now, having worked together at Searchsecurity.com. We were a potent team, creating a lot of great podcasts and video together. We’ve gone on long jaunts through San Francisco and Las Vegas. When we worked in the same building we’d get together for morning workouts in the office gym.
We’ve kept the friendship going strong since I left to be senior editor at CSO Magazine, having lunch frequently, sometimes once a week.
He used to be Catholic and converted to the Jewish Faith. I did exactly the opposite.
He’s one of those guys I can truly be myself around. We laugh a lot.
One of the many friendships God sent my way to help me through some of my greatest trials.
I truly believe that The Holy Spirit manifests itself in the people around you, those who stick with you when your spiraling downward and when you’re on the way back up.
There have been times in my life where I didn’t have many friends. Good friends moved away or died, so for a long time I was afraid to get too close to people.
Doing so in the last three or so years has been a big leap of Faith.
It has helped me recover and find a new happiness.
Tomorrow the RSA security conference begins and I’ll see many more friends from my industry.
The author on why he chose to “out” himself despite what other people might think.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:1Qdnvn4XlmZANCVy3XjrQo]
A couple friends have asked why I “outed myself” in this blog. Wasn’t I afraid people would blackball me at work? Don’t I worry that I’ll be defined by my struggle with OCD above all else?
I’m doing this more because the point arrived where, for the sake of my own sanity, I had to start being myself as openly and honestly as I can. Honesty can be tough for people who deal with mental illness and addiction. [More on this in “The Liar’s Disease“] But I decided I had to do better.
Admittedly, some of the motivation is selfish. We OCD types have overdeveloped egos and tend to go digging for attention. It’s hard to admit that, but it’s the truth. Being open about that forces me to keep myself in check. It’s also an invitation for those around me to call me out on acts of ego and selfishness.
The biggest reason for doing this, without question, is my Faith. I realized some time ago that when you rip the skeletons from your closet and toss them into the daylight, they turn to dust. Big sinister stigmas become very small indeed. Then you can move on.
I didn’t arrive at that viewpoint easily. It took many years of dirty work.
With my Faith comes a need to do service for others. In this case, I accumulated experiences that might be of help to other sufferers. Sharing wasn’t exactly something I wanted to do. It’s something I HAD to do.
We’re all in this together. Many good people have helped me along the way. Trying to help someone else is the very least I could do. In the final analysis, we all help each other.
Getting it all out of the head and into this blog has certainly been helpful, so thanks for indulging me.
Was it a risk to my career to do this? I don’t think so.
I don’t think I’d be doing this if I still worked for The Eagle-Tribune. The culture of that newsroom wouldn’t have allowed for it when I was there. I have no idea if the culture has changed, but I suspect not.
I’ve gotten a ton of support from those I work with now. I’m definitely lucky to work with the folks in this office.
Does that mean everyone should put their demons out in the open as I have?
Difficult to say.
It’s not going to be the right decision for everyone to make. There are a lot of honorable reasons for people to keep their demons private. In many cases, the veil is what you use to protect others as well as yourself.
But my veil blew away in the storm that was my life. Walking forward without it was all I could do.
Yesterday at All Saints Parish Father Michael Harvey delivered one of those Homilies that sent my mind and soul all over the map.
I like Father Harvey. I wasn’t sure about him at first. He had the massive shoes of Father Mark Ballard to fill, so the deck was stacked against him from the start. He’s very conservative, and sometimes I wonder if his collar is stuck to his neck with thumb tacks. He tackles the most taboo of topics — politics — when he delivers a homily.
Truth be told, I like how he goes for the throat in his Homilies without fear of offending someone. One Sunday he gave a Homily about Natural Law, otherwise known as the “contraception is bad” talk. After Mass, we got in the car and Sean, the 8 year old, blurted out, “Gee, I guess Father Mike wasn’t expecting there to be any kids at Mass this morning.”
The larger message of the Homily was that the pursuit of power takes a person further and further from God, because when one is spending all his or her time groping for attention they’re too busy thinking about themselves to be thinking about God.
He then brought up “a politician from Rhode Island” who decided not to run for office anymore. “Oh, great, here it comes,” I mumbled to my wife.
He brought up the fact that the Bishop down there had asked Kennedy to stop taking Communion because of his pro-choice stance. The Bishop tried to handle it in private, but Kennedy took it public.
In the end, Father Harvey speculated aloud, Kennedy was probably coming around to the decision that it was time to leave public life because holding onto power had corrupted his soul. I’m not sure Kennedy would share that exact assessment, but I think he would agree that power isn’t worth having when it plunges the rest of your life into a dark, unhappy place.
So I walked away with mixed feelings. I am pro-life but get incensed when someone paints a pro-choice person as evil personified. I don’t think it’s so simple. I know a lot of people who hate abortion, but believe it’s between a woman, her doctor and God. They are pro-choice but NOT pro abortion. They are the types that vote for someone based on a wider range of issues than abortion alone. But they are told they’ve voted against God if they vote the wrong way. [See also: The Better Angels of My Nature]
I have a lot of trouble with that notion.
But in the larger picture, there’s no question that the pursuit of power is a tricky thing, and the longer one wields it the worse off they are.
I see myself in all this. As I’ve admitted before, I have a fairly big ego that comes with being a writer. The ego is frequently driven into overdrive by the OCD [See: The Ego OCD Built]. It’s painfully true that this ego carries a certain level of attention seeking. After all, it’s the writer’s goal to make sure people are reading their work, and that involves a lot of self promotion.
I’m guilty as charged.
It’s a double-edged blade, really. I don’t write with the idea of sticking the papers in a drawer for someone to find after I’m dead. I’m a journalist whose goal is for people to see what he’s writing today, not 30 years from now. Social networking makes it all the more dangerous. I’ll let this illustration drive home the point for me:
At the same time, I have a faith that has deepened with time, and my Religious beliefs often come into direct conflict with my profession. In the end, it doesn’t have to be that way. I just have to find my way on this twisted path.
That’s why I keep coming to Church. It’s ultimately about my relationship with God and how to strengthen it. People can get uptight about church politics and get angry because their beliefs have been challenged by the priest. But to me those things are distractions that are as big as any shiny object that distracts us from our core Faith. I think that’s why Confession is my favorite Sacrament. It forces me to come clean with God on a regular basis. It keeps the emotional trash from piling up and stinking too much.
In this particular case, the priest gave me something to think about. He zeroed in on an unpleasant truth.
And so, he did his job.
It’s up to me to ultimately reconcile it with how I live my life. I think I’ve come a long, long way. But I have a long way to go yet.
The author salutes Anne Saita, a former co-worker who showed me how to stand up to people and face down my fears — and whose blog is a must-read.
I’ve been reading the blog Run DMZ a lot lately.The main reason is that it’s chock full of excellent content on how to eat and exercise properly. The other reason is that the author is someone near and dear to me: Anne Saita, my former boss at SearchSecurity.com.
She’s an avid runner, an inspirational Mom to her two daughters and to people like me, and one of the best writers I’ve ever seen. [Side note: She sends Christmas cards each year featuring her daughters, and last time my six-year-old saw it he declared: “Wow. They’re really, really pretty.”] The boy is a flirt and knows what he’s talking about.
With her I’ve power-walked along Lake Michigan in Chicago and gallivanted with her on the rainy streets of San Francisco during security conferences.
At SearchSecurity.com, she was a nurturing soul. She encouraged me to make time for family, something I wasn’t yet good at. She knew I feared travel at the time, but gently coaxed me into doing more of it. Now I love travel. She showed me what courage is by constantly standing up to the TechTarget/SearchSecurity brass when she felt the brand’s reputation was being compromised by stupid marketing ploys. At the time I often thought she was being stupid. But at the time I was also so obsessed with pleasing my masters that I didn’t know any better.
I always got a chuckle out of her gift for gab, especially when she was offering up explicit details on a medical procedure she was having.
Because of her motherly disposition, I was able to come clean with her in late 2004, when I was inches from a nervous breakdown and realizing for the first time that I needed some serious help. The morning after I had my first appointment with a therapist, I told her about it, along with the rest of my warped behavior. She didn’t flinch. She urged me on, and in the coming months, when I was pushing up against depression and emotional breakdowns, she gave me the room to fall apart and then pick up the pieces.
When I started to react to the pain of therapy and digging deep into a sordid past by embarking on the most vicious binge eating stretch of my life, she saw that the weight was piling on but didn’t shame me over it. I was feeling shame in her presence anyway, because she had once told me that when checking my references before hiring me, the deal was sealed when a former CNC co-worker told her about my singular determination to lose 100 pounds in the late 1990s.
That kind of toughness impressed her, and there I was, losing that toughness as I packed on each pound.
Unfortunately, I only started to gain the upper hand on my demons after she left SearchSecurity.com for another job.
But thanks to the Internet and our two blogs, we still keep in touch regularly.
She’s gone through a lot herself, with physical injuries that kept her from running, blinding headaches that came and went without explanation, and the loss of a job she loved last year, as the Great Recession gunned down millions of jobs.
But she always comes back. Stronger than before.
In the photo above: Anne at the right, with Dennis Fisher, another former [and good] boss and avid runner, after a run in San Diego.
If she didn’t know before how much her friendship means to me, I think she’ll understand after reading this post.
She may also yell at me for revealing a bit too much about her. But then I always did enjoy the motherly rebuke that only she can provide.
Whenever I share my experiences with OCD and the related binge-eating disorder [See: The Most Uncool Addiction], there’s a word I always refrain from using if I’m outside the safe confines of my OA group: Abstinence.
I don’t hate the word. But I don’t like it much, either.
All anyone ever thinks about when it’s uttered is refraining from sex or studying for the Catholic priesthood. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I am a devout Catholic, after all.)
Nevertheless, it’s a word I can’t get around any longer, so let’s talk about it.
In the world of a recovering food addict, abstinence means to abstain from eating compulsively. It’s the exact same thing as the word sobriety in the world of a recovering alcoholic.
Think of OA and AA as essentially the same thing, only OA folks are addicted to compulsive overeating to the point where they walk around dazed like zombies, unable to manage their lives. Ailments boil over and friends and family suffer with you.
I’m abstinent from binge eating, which means I eat nothing with flour and sugar in it and most meals are portioned out on a small scale. I’m sober, too. I used to drink a lot of alcohol when traveling. This weekend I spent a security conference sober. [See: ShmooCon and Snowmageddon and The Engine in Hyperdrive]
This weekend was challenging to be sure. It wasn’t always easy drinking club soda while everyone else drank wine, beer, etc. And while I kept it together with the food plan, being away from the normal routine makes it challenging to keep all the portions straight. I probably could have done it better, but I think things worked out pretty well on balance.
Of course, other, smaller addictions try to reassert themselves [See: How to Play Your Addictions Like a Piano]. One of them is spending. I have a weakness for collecting political and historical knickknacks, especially when I’m in Washington D.C. That weakness is evident to anyone visiting my work space. [See: Someone to Watch Over Me (A.K.A.: Desk Junk] This time, I held back.
I also like a good cigar when traveling, and probably enjoy it more than I should. I’m going to abstain from the stogies during Lent, which starts next week. We’ll see what happens after that.
The author finds that he gets the most relaxation from the things he once feared the most.
Mood music
A strange thing happened to me on the way to recovery: I started finding peace and relaxation in the very things that used to fill me with fear and spark anxiety attacks. [See Fear Factor]
It used to be that relaxing meant holing myself up in the bedroom watching endless episodes of Star Trek. I watched a lot of the news, too, which instead of relaxing me would send my brain into an endless spin of worry about things happening at the far corners of the world.
Lying on the couch all weekend — sleeping for a lot of it — was relaxation.
Then Sunday night would arrive and I’d go into a deep depression about the tasks that awaited me the next day at work.
Writing — the very thing I earned a living from (and still do) — filled me with dread. Oh, I loved being a journalist even back then, but I was always in fear of not getting a story perfect. I would sit on a story for hours; writing, re-writing, polishing and reading it aloud multiple times to make sure it “sounded” perfect.
If I had to make a business trip, the heart would pound. I’d obsess about the travel itself and whether I would actually make it there alive. Conferences filled me with dread. What if I didn’t manage to cover every piece of news coming from the event?
Oh, and when writing, it had to be absolutely silent around me. Noise would interrupt the gears in my mind — except for the sound of my voice when reading my articles aloud.
I would go crazy about getting the kids to bed by 7:30 so I could lie comatose in front of the TV. If my wife wanted to talk instead, rage would build inside, though I would try not to show it. I sucked at hiding it, though, and in my own passive-aggressive way, she knew she wasn’t getting through. And yet she stuck around anyway. (See: The Freak and the Redhead: A Love Story]
I’m not sure when things changed. But here’s what relaxation and peace mean to me now:
–Family time. Of course, I’ve always craved being with my wife and children more than anything else. But it used to be that I wanted us all sitting around the house doing nothing. Now I love experiencing things together. Trips with Erin to Campobello Island off New Brunswick, Canada, the mountains of New Hampshire or Newport, R.I. for the Newport Folk Festival. Trips with kids in tow to Battleship Cove, Old Sturbridge Village, The N.E. Aquarium, The Museum of Science. I always cherished my time with them. Now I cherish it more. A lot more.
— Writing. For the life of me, I can’t figure out the reason for this, but writing is relaxing now. Other than when I’m with my wife and kids, writing is when I’m happiest. And I no longer re-read my stuff over and over again. I decided that’s what editors are for. Sure, I’m an editor. But every editor needs an editor. And no, I don’t read ’em back to myself anymore.
–Writing WITH music. In another bizarre twist, I went from needing quiet while writing to needing music. The louder the better. Henry Rollins. Motley Crue. Metallica. Thin Lizzy. Cheap Trick. All perfect writing music.
–Travel. Instead of fearing travel, I now relish it, though I don’t like being away from my family for too long. I start to miss them the second I hit the road. They’re on my mind the whole time I’m away. But I love to go places, see things, experience cities outside my own comfortable Bostonian walls. Last year alone, I visited Chicago twice, Washington DC twice, and went to San Francisco, Nevada, Arizona and New York.
One of the DC trips was in an RV with a group of IT security guys. That was the trip back from the Shmoocon security conference. It’s a 12-hour ride and it’s cramped. But I get to hang out with some of the smartest people in my industry.
Thursday, I leave on the RV for the trip down to DC for Shmoocon 2010. I’ll do a lot of writing for work this weekend. But I’m going to have a blast doing it. I’ll get impatient to be home by Sunday afternoon. I’ll miss my family. But I’ll be a better journalist for making the trip.
I’m determined to take the family to DC this year. There are logistics and financial realities to work out, but it’s going to happen.
I don’t spend much time wondering how I came to enjoy what I once feared. I know the answers.
Erin and the boys teach me something every day about living, whether it’s Erin showing me courage by quitting a steady job to try and make her own business work or Duncan, the youngest son, convincing his older, more skittish brother to go with him on a camping trip with the grandparents because “It’ll be fun, Seaney!” That was a couple years ago. Since then, Sean, who has overcome a lot of fears himself and made his Dad proud, relishes those trips as much as Duncan does.
But above all — and the family examples are a huge part of this — I think the transformation came with my conversion to the Catholic Faith. My bringing God into my life, everything has changed for the better. That includes my concept of rest.
To me, rest is not about lying down and shutting off. It’s about living to the best of your ability. When that living gets scary, I put my trust in God. And that makes everything come together.
Make no mistake: I still have a lot of work to do on these things. But I’m glad to be making the journey.
As Henry Rollins once sang:
No such thing as free time. No such thing as downtime. There’s only lifetime. It’s time to shine.
The author has written much about his Faith as a key to overcoming mental illness. But as this post illustrates, he still has a long way to go in his spiritual development.
The scene is the parking lot of All Saints Parish, just after today’s 9:30 Mass. Father Mike Harvey greets the Brenners and the conversation somehow turns to the kids listening to their mother and father.
Father Harvey: Remember kids, if your mother asks you to do something or tells you something, she is always right.
Me: Does that rule apply to me?
Father Mike: Yes. You always should answer her with “Yes Dear.”
Me: I’m an editor so I always try to make do with fewer words. So instead of “Yes Dear,” I shorten it to “Whatever.”
I have to be honest: While Sunday Mass is always a place for me to find peace and get closer to God, sometimes I ruin it for myself. I’m not a special case, because we all have our good days and bad days, but it’s worth noting here because it shows that while I’ve come far in conquering my demons, sometimes I backslide.
Case in point: I woke up cranky as all hell this morning, and as a result I went to church with a lousy attitude.
I didn’t hear the Homily, or the Gospel, or the Readings. I stood stone-faced during the Prayers of the Faithful. I got annoyed with the school principal sitting in the pew in front of us because her perfume was inflaming my allergies. I looked with disdain at a couple people who were reading the church bulletin during the Homily. It’s not my business, and I was as poorly-focused as they were. I was being judgmental, something I need to work on.
What’s this have to do with managing OCD? Let me explain:
Even though I’ve come a long way in managing my demons, there are still going to be days where I’m not as on top of things as I should be.
It’s also easy to get caught up in parish politics and attitudes. Sometimes we get pissed because we feel someone is judging us. Yet we turn around and judge them back.
Today was a reminder that my mental tools are only going to remain effective if I keep working to perfect them. That includes the eating plan at the center of my recovery for binge eating.
The battle against the demons is never completely won. It’s a battle that continues until death.
I like to think of it as something more positive: a journey.
