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The OCD Diaries, Four Years Later

This weekend marks four years since I woke up in a funk and started this blog on a whim, figuring I’d at least feel better if I spilled my guts. It did the trick. But in the years since that day, it has become something far bigger than I could have imagined at the time.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/zQzNBTukO0w

I didn’t expect so many people to connect with the writing. I figured it would be no big deal to people, because we all have our stories — filled with happiness, sadness, love, heartbreak and other forms of adversity. I would just be one in a chorus of online voices sharing my emotions and experiences.

But people did connect, especially work colleagues and others in my profession. I thought my soul venting might raise eyebrows at work, but I got nothing but support. The reaction from the information security crowd was particularly stunning to me. People who intimidated me with their outward toughness started sharing back. They became more than just people I did business with. The friendships I’ve gained through the sharing is a huge gift this blog has given me.

The reaction from family and friends was shock, because I had succeeded in carrying on with a stoic, easy-going exterior. I couldn’t believe people saw me as easygoing. Apparently I could have found success as an actor.

The sharing has allowed me to repair some relationships that were broken. In other cases, it made matters worse. But there was no turning back.

My wife was often bewildered by what I wrote, because I was sharing past experiences I hadn’t shared with her up to that point. That led to us doing a lot of work on our relationship, and that’s the absolute greatest gift this blog has given me. As part of that, the blog has become one of the things we do together as a couple: I do the writing, Erin does the editing and bullshit detecting. When something I write doesn’t ring true, she pushes me in the proper direction.

Admittedly, I’ve expanded the subject matter a lot in the last year and a half. I didn’t originally plan to opine about current events here, but I realized a couple things after a while:

  • If I were to write about nothing but my own flaws, I’d risk being defined by them and nothing else.
  • This blog should be about more than just my own personal growth. Part of one’s growth comes from their dealings with the people and events taking place around them. By that measurement, current events became fair game.

In finding the path through adversity, there are many lessons to be had by exploring how we all talk to each other.

I’ve also focused more on the lighter side of life, because few things get us through the fog like humor. That has made this experiment a lot more fun for me. I hope it has worked for all of you, too.

Here’s to many more years of staring adversity in the face and making it blink — becoming better on our own and together.

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Romney’s Lesson: When You Try To Be Someone Else, People Notice

This post is about what happens to politicians when they try too hard to be someone else. Mitt Romney is in the thick of it. John McCain was four years ago, as was Al Gore eight years before that.

Mood music:

It’s not just a problem with politicians. Musicians have fallen in the trap. So have writers. I’ve been there myself.

In the desperate search for success and fame — and getting elected — it’s easy to try to be someone you’re not. The problem is that you inevitably get caught.

The Romney of today is not the Romney that was elected governor in liberal Massachusetts. His brand of conservatism was far more moderate a decade ago. When he decided he wanted to be president, he immediately shifted right. People see right through him, which is why he’s having so much trouble sewing up the Republican nomination.

It’s the same mistake McCain made in 2008, when he was trying so hard to please the right instead of being the straight-talking “maverick” that gave George W. Bush hell in the 2000 Republican primaries. Meanwhile, Al Gore was trying so hard to distance himself from Bill Clinton that he completely denied his role in shaping the policies of the Clinton Administration.

Voters could smell the rat every time.

It’s really no different from what you see elsewhere in life. When we’re not acting like our natural selves, the people who know us best take notice.

I speak from the experience of trying to replace my brother after he died, of trying to be Jim Morrison in college and of trying to be a hard-nosed newspaper editor in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I also speak as someone with an addictive personality who has often lived in denial and lied to bury pain and shame.

The more I talk to fellow recovering addicts and emotional defects, the more I realize we have one big thing in common: We want to please everyone and be loved for it.

I wrote about my own experience with this in a post called “Why Being a People Pleaser Is Dumb.”

I wanted desperately to make every boss happy, and I did succeed for awhile. But in doing so I damaged myself to the core and came within inches of an emotional breakdown. It caused me to work 80 hours a week, waking up each morning scared to death that I would fall short or fail altogether. I wanted to make every family member happy. It didn’t work, because you can never keep everyone happy when strong personalities clash.

In the face of constant let-downs, I binged on everything I could get my hands on and spent most waking moments resenting the fuck out of people who didn’t embrace me for who I am.

I won’t lie. I still struggle with that. It’s possible I always will. But I’m not running for office, so it’ll never be quite so glaring.

But no matter how small your world is, someone will always see through your phony exterior.

The problem for Romney is that his true colors are bleeding through on the big stage.