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The Power of Admitting Ignorance

I’ve often gone through my career feeling like an impostor.

I work with some ridiculously smart people and know many more in my industry. They seem interested in my opinion on things, and I try to deliver. But many times I don’t know the answer. So I sit wondering how the hell I got here. I know people who can bullshit their way through the answer to a question, but I lack that special talent. So I usually just admit that I don’t know.

Mood music:

That answer has only led to more good fortune. We think we’ll be dismissed if we admit ignorance, but the smarter folks among us actually appreciate the honesty. When I write about complex security issues in my work blogs, I often admit my befuddlement and open the floor for discussion in an effort to make readers — and myself — more aware of the given topic. In this blog, my frequent admission of ignorance clicks with readers, who find comfort in knowing they’re not the only clueless people on Earth.

The benefits of admitting you don’t know is the focus of a new book, simply titled I Don’t Know by Leah Hager Cohen. I haven’t read it yet, but I have read the essay it’s based on and have listened to her on WBUR, the Boston NPR affiliate.

It’s a refreshing, comforting, even, take on learning to honor one’s doubt. In the essay that started the project, Cohen writes:

Fear engenders lying. If we want our colleges and universities to be bastions of academic integrity, we need to look honestly at the ways they might encourage fakery by stoking fear. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Émile: Or, Treatise on Education,” the philosopher writes, “’I do not know’ is a phrase which becomes us.” Too often we fear uttering these words, convinced that doing so will diminish us, will undermine our status and block our advancement.

In fact these words liberate and empower. So much of the condition of being human involves not knowing. The more comfortable we become with this truth, the more fully and unabashedly we may inhabit our skins, our souls, and — speaking of learning — the more able we become to grow.

As someone who used to suffer from crippling fear and anxiety, I get that now. Fear of being diminished in the minds of those you respect makes the lies pour from your mouth before you have time to process what you’re actually saying. Then you’ve made matters worse.

By admitting ignorance from the outset and saying “I don’t know,” you’ll have spared yourself a lot of future pain and indignity and instead set yourself up to become wiser. It’s good to see that point has been articulated in a book.

I Don't Know book cover

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Hope and Happiness Amid a Government Shutdown

Forget about the effect the government shutdown has on mental health services; government mental health services suck anyway.

Instead, let’s focus on keeping ours head on straight when political horror stories send our fear and anxiety into orbit.

Mood music:

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I mentioned last week how I used to latch onto world events as if my life depended on it. TV media reports political squabbles as it would report about war: loud graphics, chilling music. Coverage of the government shutting down at midnight was no different.

I don’t want to minimize the impact. A lot of good people get screwed when the government shuts down. Family trips to national parks are ruined. If you need a passport renewed in time for, say, a honeymoon abroad, you’re likely throwing things across a room about now. Some of my conservative friends are making comments about how nobody will notice the shutdown and how, as a result, they’ll have proof that we don’t need government. Some of that is true. But some of that is hyperbole, too.

All that is beside the point. Here’s why I’m not quaking in my boots right now.

I realized a long time ago that I can’t tie my happiness to the success or failure of government. I used to believe that electing the right people would lead to a sunny future for me and everyone else.

But our leaders disappoint us again and again. Democrat or Republican, it doesn’t matter. Politicians are far more interested in keeping their jobs than standing for the greater good. To some extent that’s always been the case, yet it seems worse today. A few years ago, I realized I’d have to find my hope and happiness someplace else.

In the process, I found that the main components of that happiness were in front of me all along: loving family members, loyal friends and work I could take satisfaction in. I also realized it was completely in my power to be loving and loyal to others as well. That support system keeps the world spinning, and no folly of government could ruin that.

We’re all imperfect individuals. While I try to be a good father, husband and friend, I’ve done a lousy job getting along with some family members. And while I’ve exercised my absolute power to have a healthy, fit body and mind, I’ve also done my fair share of abusing both, consequences be damned. The government hasn’t played much of a role in either of those things.

Realizing that elected officials could only have a minimal role in my day-to-day life set me free in a lot of ways, for better or worse. The government shutdown isn’t bothering me in the slightest.

But that’s just my personal experience. If you do depend on government services, I’m sorry you have to go through this.

Super Broken Government

Image source: CNN.com

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Flying on September 11

One of my biggest moments of shame came a week after September 11, 2001, when I scrubbed a planned trip to Arizona for a relative’s wedding. I was terrified to get on an airplane, and fear won out. Not only did I miss an important day in a loved one’s life, I also deprived my wife of the same thing. I didn’t want her flying, either.

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I’ve talked to many people over the years who have similar stories and whose fear of flying lasts to this day. I got over the flying fear several years ago and love doing so now. But it’s always been hard to fault people who have vowed not to get on a plane if it’s the anniversary day of the attacks. For some, it’s not even about fear and superstition. The memories of that day are simply too much to take, and nothing will make you fix on such a thing like being on an aircraft on the anniversary.

But last year I flew on September 11. And it was one of the most peaceful flights I had all year.

I was coming home from the CSO Security Standard. I was managing editor of CSO at the time, and the Brooklyn event was a favorite, because it always coincided with the anniversary. New Yorkers showed us how to stare down adversity during and after the attacks, and there’s something special about being in NYC around that time of year. But I never managed to fly on 9/11 until last year. I always left on September 9 or 12.

Truth be told, I didn’t think much about the anniversary when I went to the airport. I was too tired to think about much of anything after a super-busy few days. I was also more focused on being annoyed with the third-world experience that is LaGuardia Airport. But once we took off, I looked out the window and could see Lower Manhattan, with the Freedom Tower rising up next to where the Twin Towers once stood. I could clearly see the two memorial pools built in the footprints of the towers as well.

It brought my mind right back to the anniversary. But it also inspired me in a major way, which suppressed any feeling of dread or sadness I might have otherwise had.

I’ve been to the site many times. But on the ground it can be hard to get the full appreciation of what’s taking shape there. It is, after all, a large construction site with all the noise and barriers that drive a person to distraction. It’s also not easy to get a clear view of the memorial unless you’re right there, behind the fencing, boards and signage. Seeing it from above was quite a trip, indeed.

It wasn’t an exercise in banishing fear, since I had already overcome the fear of flying years before. But it was one of those moments that marks you forever.

In this case, it’s a mental mark I’m happy to have.

World Trade Center

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Perception or Reality?

A couple friends who were at the 1992 Lollapalooza show I recently wrote about agreed with my general retelling of events but experienced something much different than I did.

Said one: “I guess it’s true: Perception is reality.”

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I couldn’t agree more. It reflects a point I’ve repeatedly tried to drive home: The events I describe in this blog are based on my own personal truths, the most accurate retellings I can offer. But I know my perception of things isn’t exactly the whole picture.

I’ve heard from family and friends over the years who have suggested that my take on particular events was different from how they remembered them. One family member whose privacy I’ll respect here told me that most of my childhood memories are fabrications.

Many people tend to see the world in black and white. Something is either the truth or a lie. Nothing in between. I’m not one of those people.

From my perspective, we all see things our brains try to interpret as honestly as possible, but there’s no objectivity. We have built-in biases and perceptions of the world around us. The result is that if you put 10 people in a room and something eventful happens — a fight or medical emergency, perhaps — two people will tell you what they saw and it’ll differ from what three other people saw. The rest of the room will add different perspectives to the story. This is especially the case if you ask those people to describe the event a year or more later.

In the case of that Lollapalooza show, what I saw was filtered through a brain that was off-balance and sick, which made my memory one of terror. Others will tell you that they were there and were not afraid. They just had a good old time reveling in rock and roll. Some will have seen events through brains that were also unbalanced at the time, but in different ways. I suffered from heightened fear, but someone else could have been prone to death wishes and such.

To really get at the truth, you have to get multiple perspectives from multiple people. The real truth will usually be something in between the opposing perspectives.

This case is no different.

Lollapalooza II

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Good Luck, Gretchen 2.0

A quick note that long-time friend and former boss Gretchen Putnam is leaving The Eagle-Tribune to pursue new creative opportunities.

The news organization won a Pulitzer and many other awards under her leadership as metro editor and managing editor, and her dedication to the communities she covers has been inspiring to watch.

Though I left the paper nearly a decade ago, I have memories of working with Gretchen that I’m forever grateful for. I was a mental mess back then and I know it often made her life difficult. But she continued to be a steady, reliable friend who always made sure I put my family and health above all else.

Anyone who has worked for her will tell you she’s a nurturing soul, and a lot of us are better for it.

Good luck in your new adventures. I expect big things from Gretchen 2.0.

GretchenPutnam

 

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Kiera Wilmot Case: Proof We’ve Gone Off the Deep End

You want an example of how fear has pushed society off the deep end? Check out the case of 16-year-old Kiera Wilmot.

A student of Bartow High School in Florida, Wilmot did something worthy at least a few weeks of after-school detention: She mixed a few chemicals together in the science lab and caused a small explosion. But she had no sinister intent. She was being a curious teen, doing something stupid and reckless.

Now she faces criminal charges and has been expelled from school. There was no damage and nobody was hurt, but she’s being treated like a terrorist.

Florida’s WTSP News 10 reports that Wilmot was charged with “possession/discharge of a weapon on school property and discharging a destructive device,” both felonies. According to WTSP, Wilmot has been expelled. She will need to finish high school through an explusion program

By all accounts, Wilmot has been a good, well-behaved student who gets good grades. But because she did something stupid in a society overfilled with fear, the authorities want to make a convicted felon of her.

Back when I was in high school, we made stupid decisions all the time. We threw rocks through windows. We pulled fire alarms and ran. We set off stink bombs. When caught, we were punished, as we deserved to be. But the police and bomb squad weren’t called in, as they are today.

Wilmot did wrong, intentionally or not. She deserves some kind of punishment. But felony charges? That’s way over the line. It illustrates how easily we overreact these days whenever something goes boom.

Kiera Wilmot

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Williams-Sonoma’s Overreaction to Boston Bombings

I wish I could appreciate Williams-Sonoma’s decision to pull pressure cookers off the shelves in Massachusetts following the Boston Marathon bombings. It was done to show some respect for those who might be traumatized at the sight of a pressure cooker, which the bad guys used as their bombs.

But the move was foolish. It’s the typical knee-jerk reaction to fear that makes me wonder how the human race got this far.

Mood music:

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According to Dedham Patch, the store manager of Williams-Sonoma’s Natick store said, “It’s a temporary thing out of respect.

I’ve struggled with crippling fear and anxiety, especially after 9/11, and I can appreciate the sentiment. But bad people use all kinds of tools to conduct evil. These guys used pressure cookers and put them in backpacks. Pulling pressure cookers off the shelves is simply feeding the fear the bombers want us all to feel. I can’t help but wonder when someone will suggest pulling backpacks from shelves. That would be unfortunate, too. Kids need backpacks to cart all those heavy books to and from school.

Objects don’t murder people. People murder people. You’ve heard that line often enough to roll your eyes and groan. But it’s the truth.

We can’t rid the world of the tools murderers use, nor should we. Most people use pressure cookers, backpacks, knives, automobiles and firearms responsibly.

People kill people every day with cars. Does that mean we pull all the cars off the road?

Williams-Sonoma overreacted to the bombings, just as we tend to overreact to other national tragedies.

Here’s a thought: Instead of banning and packing away everything, why don’t we try harder to identify people who are in danger of turning down a violent path and help them turn the other way?

We can’t save every soul, of course. But I’d rather put my efforts there than on removing every potentially scary object from view.

Williams-Sonoma

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The Worst Abuse of All

I’m taking a lot of abuse lately, the kind that leaves me mentally tired and physically aching. It’s not abuse from family, work colleagues or law enforcement, however. I’m doing it to myself.

Mood music:

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In the past, I’d binge myself sick in times of uncertainty, but these days the abuse takes other forms: I allow myself to get lost in the deep weeds of worry. The kicker is that I’m not worried about anything bad. No medical scares or fresh family strife in my world. Deep-fried worry over those things would be more understandable.

In this case, I’m worrying about potentially awesome changes in my life. Someone with a more balanced mind would enjoy the potential for good things and take it a day at a time. But when you have OCD, anticipation is the spiked club you use to repeatedly club yourself. We crave control like a newborn craves mother’s milk. In reality, however, there are few things an individual can control.

So here I am, walking around in a daze, waking up in the middle of the night and having trouble going back to sleep, checking my computer way too often for some sign that answers will come.

I keep repeating a phrase that I learned in a recent course I took on mindfulness-based stress reduction: “The past is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and the present is a gift.” I know these words to be true. Knowing them and living them isn’t necessarily the same thing in my world.

Eventually all this will pass; it always does.

I’ve been praying a lot. Some of you scowl at the idea of praying, but it really helps me. If nothing else, it calms me down and reminds me that I’m not a soul adrift or alone. I have all the support I could ever ask for, and that’ll see me through.

I did a lot of house cleaning this weekend. Ironically, this activity, often conducted in OCD overdrive, helped me wring out some of the anxiety. I guess I needed the exercise that comes with running up and down three flights of stairs all day.

I played a lot of guitar, too. Few things have been better at helping me stay in the moment. And I feel younger when my kids tell me to turn it down.

I used to be a mental mess most of the time, so I’m grateful that these worry binges only come in waves now. The trick is to take them from frequent or even infrequent events to absolutely rare moments.

Out of control

Art by Bill Fennell
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Control Freak-Out

OCD sometimes makes me feel adrift even when things are going well. I’m feeling it a lot these days and this post, originally written in 2010, captures the malady well.

Mood music:

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There’s another byproduct of OCD that I’ve described indirectly before, but never head on. A byproduct for my own special blend of dysfunction, that is.

Sometimes, no matter how well things are going — and no matter how good my mood is when I wake up — I’ll sit at my desk and suddenly feel awash in melancholy.

It comes over me suddenly, and it can be even more frustrating than the black moods that hit me when there are visible troubles to spark it. When a wave of melancholy hits for no good reason, I sit here feeling like an idiot.

I start to contemplate doing things that are bad for me, like going and binging on $30 of junk food. It used to be that less than 10 minutes after a thought like that entered my head, I’d be doing just that. (See “The Most Uncool Addiction” for a better explanation of why this used to happen)

Things are going very well for me these days. Yet the blues persist. 

As I sit here analyzing my head, an answer is emerging. What I’m feeling is adrift. Not in the sense that my life is adrift, because it’s never been more full of purpose. The adrift feeling is over things I can’t control.

Why yes, everything you’ve heard about OCD and control freakism is true. People like us crave control like a junkie craves a shot of smack to the arm. It grabs us by the nose and drags us down the road until our emotions are raw and bleeding.

That’s why I used to be such an asshole at The Eagle-Tribune. Every story I edited then went through three more editors and then to the page designer. Along the way, everyone after me had to take a whack at it. I’d hover over the poor page designers because it was the closest thing I had to control. Ultimate control would have meant laying out the pages myself. That would have been a stupid thing to do, mind you. I couldn’t lay out a news page to save my life.

When I was the assistant news editor for the paper’s New Hampshire editions, I was out a week when my son Sean was born. I came in one night to catch up on e-mail and saw the message where my boss announced my son’s birth. In it, he joked that I probably stood over the doctor and told him how to deliver the baby.

I wanted to punch him.

I saw red.

Because I knew that was something I could easily be pictured doing. It hit too close to the truth.

The control freak has emerged in a variety of other ways over the years. Getting stuck in traffic would send me into a rage because all I could do is sit and wait. Getting on a plane filled me with dread because I could only sit there and wait. There was the fear that the plane might crash. But the bigger problem for me was that I was at the mercy of the pilots, the air traffic and the weather. I had no control over the schedule, and that incensed me. Today, I love flying.

So what’s my problem now?

I think it’s that all the cool things going on right now are still in play. The various projects are set in motion, but now I have to sit and wait on others to work through their processes. A more normal person would just take these things as they come and just live in the moment. But I’m not normal.

I have to wait my turn. I don’t like that.

But then it’s appropriate that I should be made to feel uncomfortable about it, since I really have no business trying to control any of these things. Other people have their jobs to do, and I should trust them.

I’m working on it.

I handle it better than I used to.

And this particular strain of melancholy is like New England weather:

If I wait an hour, it’ll change.

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What’s Your Phobia?

I’ve recently come across a couple of interesting phobia lists, and being the OCD head I am, I decided to carefully go through the lists to see which applied to me.

Mood music:

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The Phobia List is a straight-up dictionary of phobias, in alphabetical order. Here are some of the phobias that have applied to me at various points:

  • Agateophobia: The fear of insanity. Who’s not afraid of insanity?
  • Aviophobia or aviatophobia: The fear of flying. This used to be a big one in my book. The thought of being in a metal tube hurling across the sky with no safety net below terrified me. Because of that, there were many years I didn’t travel beyond what I could do by car. I got over it, though, and love flying today.
  • Brontophobia: The fear of thunder and lightning. This one dogged me as a kid. There was one storm when I was about 10 that made it pitch-black outside at 1 in the afternoon, and for a long time after that every clap of thunder hit me like a whip to the back. I don’t feel this one so much anymore, but there are still occasions where a good storm will rattle me.
  • Claustrophobia: The fear of confined spaces. I used to find confined spaces safe and cozy. Now I can’t stand them. I much prefer big, open spaces.
  • Iatrophobia: The fear of going to the doctor or of doctors. I avoided doctors for several years because of this. Then I went to the other extreme, running to the doctors for everything. I don’t fear doctors today, though I have met many who are so incompetent that they should be feared. But I’ve know some outstanding doctors, too.

Some of the items on this list surprised me and even made me laugh at first. Then I realized how cruel life would be to hand a person such fears:

  • Anthrophobia or anthophobia: The fear of flowers.
  • Bibliophobia: The fear of books.
  • Dendrophobia: The fear of trees.
  • Francophobia: The fear of France or French culture.
  • Geumaphobia or Geumophobia: The fear of taste.

The other site is The ABC of Fears: The Famous People’s Phobias. It’s actually the website for a leather-bound book of art focusing on different phobias. Here are a few pages:

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web-666
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It didn’t take long before I gave up scouring these sites; the lists are just too vast. We all have our little fears, and if you look long enough at a list, you’re bound to see a bit of yourself in many of the definitions. I’m no doctor, but I don’t think you automatically have a phobia if you tend to fear or loathe certain things. The question is whether they make our lives unmanageable.

If you never leave the house and avoid all human contact for fear of catching a disease, for example, it’s a safe bet that you have a phobia. If you simply find certain things unpleasant, such as doctors or certain foods, but you’re able to deal with them, it’s probably not a clinical phobia.

The good news is that phobias don’t have to dog us for life. Or so I’ve learned from personal experience.

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