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When The Going Gets Tough, I Disconnect

I’m leaving my weekly therapy sessions with a headache these days, because I’m working through another deeply embedded flaw in my soul.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/louQ7s1ZkGU

It’s not nearly as bad as the therapy I had in 2004-2006, when I had to endlessly churn the sewage of my childhood memories in search of clues on what was wrong with me and how I got that way. Back then, I didn’t know myself very well. Now I do.

Knowing myself as I do, I’ve started to zero in on the ongoing flaws that hold me back and hurt loved ones. That apparently requires a few more trips to the sewer.

I’ll give you a fuller account further along in this process. For now, let’s just say I have a wall I tend to hide behind when the going gets tough. This wouldn’t be much of a problem if not for the fact that life is ALWAYS tough. Not just for me, but for everyone. We all have our Crosses to carry and difficulties to endure. In my case, it’s a lot harder with a wall in the way.

So here we are again. Back in the mental sewer. I know my way around now, but the stench can still be too much to take.

The first question from the therapist was if I had talked to my mother lately. No, I told him. I thought Mom and I were making progress in December, but she couldn’t handle this blog and went off the deep end. I won’t defend myself. She’s entitled to her point of view. But let’s just say I was hoping to be writing posts by now about how we were reconciling.

So no, I told him. We’re not talking.

Then he asked about how I handled my brother’s death when I was 13. I told him I pretty much disconnected from the world. Same thing after my best friend killed himself in 1996.

“You’re starting to see the pattern?” the therapist asked.

Yeah. When the going gets tough, I disconnect. The bigger events caused that self-defense mechanism to take root all those years ago. But it kicks in during life’s more routine challenges. And when the wall goes up, my anger level kicks up a few decibels. I don’t do what I did in my teens and 20s: Throwing furniture through walls and plotting endless ways to find those who hurt me so I could hurt them back.

I’m not THAT guy anymore. But I do still get angry. When I do, I turn in on myself and brood.

But I knew that already.

Now the question is, what to I do about it?

I love my life now, and I’m blessed beyond measure. But the better my life gets, the more of an eyesore the wall becomes. It’s got to go.

My therapist has seen this stuff before. He knows the wall is rooted in the memory sewer.

So I guess I’ll be here for awhile longer.

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Working-Class Hero Syndrome

I’m a sufferer of working-class hero syndrome, a condition that makes me look down on everyone who doesn’t work as hard as me, all while wasting hours on work that proves fruitless.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/KLe2pA5KTIE

My favorite cinematic version of a working-class hero is Quint from the movie JAWS, who relentlessly needles boat mate Hooper for being rich and having a bunch of excess gadgetry to do his job. Of course, Hooper survives while Quint gets eaten by the shark.

The disease takes different forms.

There’s the white-collar working-class hero who thinks he-she is so much better than the person bagging groceries. I probably fall closer into that category, because I’ve often labored under the delusion that working 80 hours a week in journalism made me better than everyone else.

There’s the blue-collar variety who will look down at the guy in the desk job because that person isn’t out there getting dirty and operating big, dangerous machinery.

The common symptoms:

–Moments of extreme irritability from too much work and too little sleep.

–A tendency to dive into a self-righteous rage at the drop of a hat, blaming all the problems of the world on everyone but yourself. This usually leads to many hours spent complaining about people at work, in your family and in your town.

–An addictive personality that grows more ravenous with each of those rage moments. You do more drugs, drinking and binge eating to comfort yourself and hold it together, all while carrying on with the belief that you’re somehow better than the people who look at you with worried eyes.

–A tendency to lie about how exciting your job is and how well-payed you are upon learning that the person you’re talking to is better payed and has a more exciting job than you.

I’m pretty sure I got this disease from my father, who allowed the family business to become the center of his universe. He didn’t have a choice. My father was the middle child of his generation, but he was the only son. My grandfather, who came off a boat from the former Soviet Union with all the typical old-school values, expected the world of my father. As my grandfather descended deep into old age and illness in the mid-1960s, my father became increasingly responsible for the family business.

My father always had the attitude that you were useless unless you were working 24-7. He once joked that he was indeed prejudiced. “I hate lazy people,” he’d say.

I started my life as the youngest of three kids, the proverbial baby of the family. My late brother Michael was the oldest and, as such, was the kid my father expected the most from.

Michael was encouraged to chart his own course and was studying to be a plumber. But he was expected to help out with the family business and do a lot of the grunt work at home.

I was the baby, and a sick and spoiled one at that. I came along almost three years after my sister Wendi, and by age eight I was in and out of the hospital with dangerous flare ups of Crohn’s Disease. I got a lot of attention but nothing hard was expected of me. I was coddled and I got any toy I wanted.

The result was a lower-than-average maturity level for my age. At age 10 I acted like I was 5 sometimes. I would crawl into bed with my father for snuggles, just like a toddler might do.

My maturity level hadn’t changed much by the time I hit 13. I probably regressed even further right after my brother died. But as 1984 dragged on, I was slowly pulled into the role of oldest son.

All the stuff that was expected of my brother became expected of me, and I wasn’t mentally equipped to deal with it. My brother had a lot of street smarts that I lacked.

As I descended into my confusing and angry teen years, I would be sent on deliveries for the family business. I’d get flustered and lose my sense of direction. One time my father sent me to Chelsea for a package. It was 4:30 and the place I was going to was closing at 5. I got there at 5:10 and had to drive back to Saugus without a package. I felt humiliated and ashamed.

As I reached my 20s all that immaturity and feeling of inadequacy hardened into an angry rebellious streak. I started getting drunk and stoned a lot and would hide behind boxes in my father’s warehouse, chain-smoking cigarettes and binge eating while everyone else did the dirty work.

And yet working-class hero syndrome took hold anyway.

Because I was going to college, I developed the idea that I was better than the guys I worked with. Learning how to write and crash-study for days at a time made me feel like I was the hard worker who deserved life’s biggest prizes.

After college I dove head-first into a journalism career and put in 80 hours a week. I worked so many hours that I began to lose my health. I binged regularly and ballooned to 280 pounds. I lost track of family and friends.

By the time I began my big turnaround, I didn’t have many friends left.

I manage the disease better than I used to. I’ve forced more personal time into my schedule and I stopped working 80 hours a week once I realized I’m better at my job when I cut those hours in half.

But it still surfaces on a regular basis.

When I’m running my kids to appointments all over the place and cleaning the house from top to bottom, I tend to see it all as part of the working-class hero’s life.

When someone tells me about their job and it isn’t something I would choose to do, I sometimes catch myself thinking I’m better.

The remedy is a daily look in the mirror and a lot of prayer.

Work-life balance has become the Holy Grail. But I’m still digging around for it.

When I find it, I’ll let you know.

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Was ‘Hunger Games’ Star Too Fat For The Role?

There’s a controversy swirling around online regarding “Hunger Games” star Jennifer Lawrence. With one critic suggesting she was too curvy to play the role of emaciated heroine Katness Everdeen, the anger is on.

What is making some people bristle is that this smacks of the bullshit talk that sends girls into the hell of eating disorders.

Mood music:

I’m not a girl. But I’ve dealt with an eating disorder for much of my life. So, naturally, I have some thoughts on the matter.

First, let’s look at what people are saying, starting with the movie review by Manohla Dargis of the New York Times that set people off. In the review, she makes a point that the character Lawrence plays is a starved teen with bones sticking out everywhere. Specifically, she wrote:

A few years ago Ms. Lawrence might have looked hungry enough to play Katniss, but now, at 21, her seductive, womanly figure makes a bad fit for a dystopian fantasy about a people starved into submission.

The L.A. Times “Ministry of Gossip” column ran with that single comment, calling it a “bold indictment” of a 21-year-old star “who currently captivates the attention of impressionable young females and her same-aged peers in show business.”

Are the critical sentiments — Vulture has a comprehensive roundup — correct? On the one hand, the content adapted from Suzanne Collins’ dark novels dictates that these oppressed citizens are in fact emaciated. But by all standards Lawrence is hardly overweight, though widely attributed with that dread celeb magazine buffer of “curvy.” 

My colleague at CSO Magazine, Joan Goodchild, expressed her outrage in a Facebook post, which is where I saw all this for the first time. She wrote:

This is the kind of b*llsh*t story that pisses me off. I haven’t seen the film, or read the book. But if it is a “Hollywood interpretation” of the book, then this is hardly the first time the film deviates from the book. Yet here we have an article about how a thin, yet healthy, young actress was “too well fed” to play the part she had. And we wonder why so many young women have issues with food and eating disorders in this country? This is ridiculous!

I agree in the sense that there is a lot of this bullshit in Hollywood. How “curves” got to be synonymous in Hollywood with overweight is beyond me. Media in general has perpetuated the myth for years that stars need to be super thin. That warped view is especially glaring in the case of women.

There’s a certain evil to how Hollywood carries on this way, because filmmakers know their work influences young people and instills them with the idea that they have to look a certain way to fit in and be loved.

Did Hollywood influence my own eating disorder? Absolutely, though my relationship with food was corrupted long before by growing up in a family of compulsive over-eaters.

For me, the Hollywood part stemmed from my love of Heavy Metal music and the culture built up around it. The heroes in this world of musicians were the skinny guys with long hair. To be emaciated was to look good. Wanting to be like my heroes, I did a lot of things I covered in a recent post called “Skinny Like A Fool.”

I think, to a certain extent, I abandoned my earlier goal of being a musician and got into journalism because in the latter profession, you could be fat and cool at the same time. Of course, I took that to the other extreme and became a 280-pound pile of waste before it was over. While I’m some 80 pounds lighter than that today, I’m still a big, stocky guy who had to drop flour and sugar and start weighing all my food to regain some sanity.

I was never trying to make it in Hollywood, and, being a guy, there were certain pressures I never felt. But what I did and why still left a lot of scars.

Having been down that road, I share Joan’s anger. But I also think some of the rage over calling Lawrence well-fed has been blown out of proportion.

In the original New York Times review, the words “too well fed” are never used. “Seductive” and “womanly” are over the top, but not the same as calling someone fat. The L.A. Times gossip column is where the “too well fed” came into play. Of course, that’s the newspaper of Hollywood, so spin that as you will.

Maybe someday we’ll move beyond looks and start judging each other by what’s in our heads and hearts. But not today, apparently.

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Hey, Kids! Here’s Something For ‘When Your Brain Gets Stuck’

I just got a book in the mail called “What To Do When Your Brain Gets Stuck: A Kid’s Guide To Overcoming OCD” by psychologist-author Dawn Huebner. I asked for a copy so I could review it, but it might warrant more than one simple review.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/HiYK8TDbPRQ

Someone I’m connected to on Facebook got a copy to help her OCD-suffering child. Since the upcoming relaunch of THE OCD DIARIES will have an expanded section for children’s mental health issues, reviewing this seemed natural.

The book, published by Magination Press with illustrations by Bonnie Matthews, guides kids and parents through cognitive-behavioral techniques used to treat Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I’ve learned a lot of techniques in therapy over the years, but my first impression from this book is that a few more simple tools could have helped me nip this disorder in the bud BEFORE I reached adulthood.

From the synopsis:

Did you know that people have brain sorters that keep their brains from getting cluttered with unnecessary thoughts? Sometimes these brain sorters get mixed up, though, holding onto thoughts that frighten kids. If this has happened to you, if it’s hard for you to feel safe or sure of yourself because scary thoughts have gotten stuck, this book is for you.

Two-plus years into this blog, I’ve never been able to explain it that clearly. I came closest in a post comparing the brain to a car engine.

What To Do When Your Brain Gets Stuck guides children and their parents through the cognitive-behavioral techniques used to treat Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This interactive self-help book turns kids into super-sleuths, able to recognize and more appropriately respond to OCD’s tricks. Engaging examples, activities, and step-by-step instructions help children master the skills needed to break free from the sticky thoughts and urges of OCD, and live happier lives.

First impressions:

–The illustrations are terrific. Cheers to Bonnie Matthews. She managed to give OCD a face in the form of this little furry guy who resembles the tribbles from Star Trek — with legs. When you can put a face on your nemesis, it’s easier to fight him.

–Huebner scores points with me by setting the exploration of OCD up as a game. Right off the bat, if you can make something look like a game, dealing with it becomes less scary.

–She covers several coping techniques that deserve more attention than I could offer in one post.

I’m going to approach my study of this book from the perspective of a kid who lacked the right tools and allowed OCD to follow him into adulthood.

The author takes kids on an important journey, and it seems fitting to show their parents what happens when their little OCD cases miss out on that journey. I’m the guy who went through puberty and into adulthood with that insidious fur ball following me around. It grew up with me and got a lot uglier and menacing than the little guy in the book.

I’ll look at the different symptoms the author lays out and explain how they manifested themselves in the younger me. From there, I think I’ll be able to tell you how this book — though designed for kids — can be a life-saver for grownups, too.

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What Else Is There?

When I’m wallowing in self-pity, I like to ask that question. It always goes back to those moments when I’m not particularly enjoying the clean and sober life.

Mood music:

For the most part, it’s gotten easier. When you don’t spend all your time thinking about how to pull off a binge, you get to experience a much fuller life. You enjoy the company of people more. You pack a lot more living into your travels. Best of all, you don’t go through the day under a foggy shroud that follows a drinking, eating or drugging binge.

But I won’t lie. Sometimes, when everyone around me is enjoying a glass of wine, a few beers, some cake and a smoke, I feel like the spoiled child who sits with his arms folded, pouting, because he lost dessert for leaving vegetables on the plate.

Saturday night kind of left me feeling that way. Erin and I had a fabulous evening at an auction to benefit our kids’ school and afterwards we went to the home of friends. The kitchen was packed with people whose company we’ve come to treasure. We didn’t go home until around 2 a.m., which for us is almost unheard of.

It was St. Patrick’s Day. Part of me would have loved indulging in the whiskey and wine on the table, and I would have enjoyed a cigar even more. But I can’t do that stuff anymore. Luckily, our hosts had Red Bull on hand. That’s my go-to beverage when the temptation for alcohol becomes too much.

I’m starting to realize something about these “what else is there” moments. It’s the dark side of my soul trying to trap me in old behavior. The devil whispers something in my ear about how I should be able to enjoy some of the finer things in life; that I shouldn’t be living the clean life if it’s going to make me a miserable bastard.

And yet I still weigh out every meal I eat. I avoid flour and sugar as if it were lethal poison. And whenever I have the opportunity to drink alcohol or smoke — particularly during travel — I don’t follow through.

I suppose I have a strong enough memory of all the pain that followed indulgence and I remember how hard I’ve worked to clean myself up. I guess the thought of falling backwards pisses me off and sparks worry more than the self-pity I feel when I can’t party.

Strangely enough — particularly where the smoking is concerned — I think the Wellbutrin I take along with Prozac to keep depression at bay has eased the craving for smoke. I’d heard about Wellbutrin having this effect on people, but I quit smoking several months before taking it and I didn’t really connect the dots.

What I’ve discovered, I told Erin Saturday night, is that I stopped being pissed about the no smoking when the Wellbutrin took hold. Until then, though I had quit, I was pissed about it. I wanted to smoke and only stopped because I got caught.

The clean and sober life is a lot more complicated than I thought it would be.

But when I look at the things I’ve gained in life, I know it’s worth every deprived minute.

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Such A Waste To Lose One’s Mind-Fulness

A combination of OCD and ADD has given me a bitch of a handicap: Living in the moment and being present has become tough as nails. Health experts call this elusive thing I search for “mindfulness.”

Mood music:

Here’s what happens:

When the OCD runs hot, I develop tunnel vision. I focus in on the task I’m either doing or thinking about. That’s good if you have a major work project to complete. It’s bad when someone is trying to talk to you and your brain is weaving a hundred schemes.

When the ADD picks up steam, I lose my focus. I’ll start thinking about a song I heard that day or how good it’ll feel to get into bed with a book. All while someone is talking to me.

I thought I stabbed this problem in the heart and killed it. On further reflection, I’m finding that the same problem has simply changed bodies like Dr. Who.

That in itself is still good, since the old persona was intense fear and anxiety that often incapacitated me. I broke out of that shell and life has been so much better as a result. But my current troubles are still painful.

Dealing with this issue has become the main focus of recent therapy sessions. I started bringing up the issue with my therapist because I’ve been realizing how unfair and hurtful zoning out can be at home. I don’t want to be that guy. And yet, for the moment, I am.

It’s not just a problem at home. Anywhere I go, when people are talking to me for anything longer than five minutes, I start to enter a fog. I still capture the main points of the conversation, but it requires heavy effort — effort that can be physically painful.

In recent weeks, I’ve considered what this handicap could cost me. My first reaction was to feel scared. That has settled into a low-grade anger.

Anger that I can’t just fix my brain and be done with it.

Anger that I have to do more therapy than usual.

Anger that the whole thing is exhausting me.

But that’s life. I have a problem, and I intend to beat it. And if I can’t beat it, I intend to figure out how to manage it.

At my age, I’m really not sure how much more I can fix. But even though I haven’t achieved perfection up to this point, the journey has been a beautiful one, full of experiences I never could have had a few years ago.

What lies ahead could be unpleasant. But as with past challenges, I may find gifts buried beneath the ugliness.

Art by Bill Fennell
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Beyond Boing Boing: Xeni Jardin Inspires Me

I’m a long-time reader of the Boing Boing site and have always been particularly fond of the work of editor Xeni Jardin. Her openness in talking about her breast cancer makes me appreciate her all the more.

Jardin’s greatest strength as a writer has always been her ability to focus on the human side of technology, and she was doing just that in early December when she live tweeted her first mammogram. She poked fun at a procedure that scares the hell out of most women who have one for the first time, saying, among other things:

Comparing her experience to Katie Couric’s TV-documented colonoscopy some years back, she said:

At the end of this string of tweets came this:

She filled in the blanks with a column later on, in which she described having an ultrasound:

Dr. Kristi Funk is her name. How can anything go bad when the doctor’s name is Funk, and there are so many funny things to tweet? She told me to lie down, put some goop on my chest, and waved a wand through the goop. The waves appeared on a screen. It looked like NASA video, something the Mars rovers might transmit home to a JPL engineer searching for distant water.

She showed me a crater in the waves, a deep one, with rough edges and a rocky ridge along the northern rim. Calcification. Badly-defined boundaries. Not the lake we’d hoped to find.

“The first thing you’re going to learn about working with me is that I’m a straight shooter,” Dr. Funk said. Her voice was steady and reassuring.

“That’s how you know you can trust me. I’m going to tell you everything, and I’m going to tell it to you like it is.”

I forget the rest of what she said, but it added up to this: the crater was cancer.

As the words sank in, the Mars rover crawled over another steep ridge, out of the crater and into a valley, and found one of my lymph nodes, larger and darker than the others. A rocky prominence. A sentinel node. No water there, just fast-dividing cells that kill.

I believe that we are looking at breast cancer, and that it has spread to one of your lymph nodes, she said. 

Since then, Jardin has taken her readers through every step of her treatment experiences. She started a Twitter exchange the other day about how to wake up veins that have collapsed from too many IV needles. Having suffered through the collapsed veins as a kid when Crohn’s Disease made regular IV drips necessary, I knew how valuable this kind of exchange was.

She has tweeted about the sickening effects of chemo and not being able to taste her coffee in the morning.

She’s done it all with a lighthearted demeanor that makes the suffering accessible and less scary. For us, at least.

I’ve always had enormous respect for those who share the experience of a medical procedure many consider embarrassing. Many women are reluctant to get their boobs flattened into pancakes, just as I’ve never enjoyed the frequent colonoscopies I have to have because the childhood Chrohn’s Disease makes me a high risk for colon cancer in middle age.

But when someone shares the experience, it becomes less embarrassing and, more importantly, less mysterious and scary.

That’s why I’ve always respected Couric. Her on-air colonoscopy happened before Facebook and Twitter, where people share so much that nothing is surprising anymore. She did it to raise awareness after colon cancer killed her husband.

It made the procedure a lot less scary for people.

Jardin has done an admirable job making breast cancer treatment less scary. I think that will inspire a lot of women to get early mammograms that may well save some lives.

This post is to thank her and encourage my own readers to tweet her some words of support as she continues the fight. Her Twitter handle is @xenijardin. Thanks.