The OCD Diaries

April 25, 2015April 25, 2015

Post #RSAC 2015: Coming Down the Mountain Syndrome

It’s the Saturday after RSA Conference 2015. I spent most of Friday sleeping and have been off balance today. I know from past experience that depression is next. Not clinical depression, mind you. It’s more like what seasoned conference travelers call “ConFlu.”

Mood music:

I actually call this Coming Down the Mountain Syndrome, and it arrives every year like clockwork.

In my industry RSA is one of the biggest conferences of the year. Months of planning goes into the four-day event. There’s endless strategizing on how to make the biggest bang at the show: how the exhibit booth should look, what kind of blogging to do, which dinners and meetings to attend, and so on.

Then you get to San Francisco and haul ass for the week, sleeping an average of three hours a night. You walk several blocks around the city daily, getting from one meeting to the next. You spend much of the time too warm or cold, depending on which climate you come from.

You talk to hundreds upon hundreds of people about what you’re working on and how it’ll benefit them, until your throat is so sore that you can’t talk anymore.

Then you fly home and life returns to normal … eventually.

Since it’s been so long since the schedule was routine, your adrenalized body struggles hard with re-entry. It becomes difficult to keep thoughts organized. Those who expect you to return to a business-as-usual mindset become the object of your crankiness and scorn.

That’s my annual experience, anyway.

This isn’t exclusive to my industry’s conferences, either. It can happen after any intense event with a long lead-up. I know many people from different business sectors who feel the same way after a big event. I’ve also experienced it and seen it happen to others after religious retreats. There’s even a book about it.

The good news is that the feeling is short lived. Monday and Tuesday suck, but by Wednesday the universe comes back into alignment.

Now if I can just keep from punching people until then…

March 12, 2014

From Stress and Fear to Passion

A friend shared one of those inspirational memes with me yesterday, and it got me thinking about my approach to work — and how far I’ve come in general.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/MhtednkzJl4

The meme says, simply:

Working Hard Is Called Stress

Man, is that ever true. I know, because I’ve been on both sides of the equation.

Sometimes the job was intolerable. Mostly, my own demons were intolerable.

During my days as a newspaper reporter and editor, all I knew was stress. Stress over the next deadline. Stress over the backstabbing and petty squabbling often prevalent in newsrooms.

I used to hide by trying to sleep by day as much as possible — especially on weekends — and at night my sleep was pierced with the nightmares stress will generate deep in the brain.

My first job as a security writer was full of stress, too, but it was different. The job itself was good. My coworkers welcomed me from the beginning, and I was well compensated compared to what I had made before. But I was also full of self-loathing, anger and addictive compulsion due to a variety of issues.

I sorted it out, mostly during my time at that job. Then the next job came along, and I had a blast. By then I had pretty much come to grips with my OCD, depression and other issues, and I had a stronger spiritual foundation under me. I was more confident and finally had the ability to approach assignments with an almost child-like glee.

Now I’m at Akamai in a position that’s quite different from those I’ve been in before. I’m inside a security operation instead of outside looking in. I’m part of a team of awesome people I learn new things from every day, and I have the freedom to swing for the fences with my ideas.

It fills me with a lot of passion. Sometimes the passion feels like stress, but that’s usually when I fail to use the myriad coping tools God has given me.

All in all, it’s a great station to be at in life. I’m blessed for sure. The equation started to turn when I faced down my fears, which brings me to another meme I’ll end with:

The Other Side of Fear

February 11, 2013

The Information Technology Burnout Project

The Information Technology Burnout Project, created by friends in the security community, addresses something most of us experience at one point or another: work-induced depression.

Mood music:

The website is only part of the project. Project members have also held panel discussions about job stress and burnout at various security conferences across the United States. During those discussions, people have been open about the depression, despair and hopelessness they’ve traveled through in the face of mounting job stress. We know that stress has led to suicide in the IT world. Aaron Swartz is just one of the latest examples.

When I started this blog, I worried about how I’d be perceived in the infosec community. By that point my need to rip the skeletons out of my closet overrode such concern, but I held my breath and sweated it for a few days. I didn’t expect the eventual response, though I probably should have.

My work community started opening up about their own struggles with depression, anxiety and the resulting addictions. These were and still are people that are tough as steel, which was actually comforting. If people like that could let cracks in their armor show, perhaps I wasn’t so crazy after all.

The work of breaking the stigmas around mental illness took on a more intense urgency for me, and here we are, more than three years later.

I’ve had my bouts of job burnout and all the depression and anxiety that goes with it, though most of it was before I started focusing on infosec. As an editor at a daily paper, I struggled to keep newsroom politics from getting to me. I tried to stay above all the backstabbing, criticism from upper management and side effects that came from working late-night hours. I failed, at least for a while, and conducted myself in ways I’m ashamed of to this day.

When I finally got out of the mainstream news business and landed in a much more supportive office environment, I remained on edge. On the surface I appeared calm, and the bosses were happy with the work I was doing. But inside I was dying, one traumatized molecule at a time.

I eventually found my way out of it. But when someone in my work circle is going through something similar, I can spot it from a mile away.

Fortunately, I’m not the only one who can.

I’m proud of the friends who started the Information Technology Burnout Project. They are breaking the stigma and, through the website, offer coping tools and inspirational stories that can and will make a difference.

One such friend noted last week that the project has lost some momentum since last year’s RSA Conference, mainly because everyone is increasingly busy with work projects. He’s hoping to rekindle the earlier momentum and asked for help.

Count me in, starting with this post.

Burnt match