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With Burnout Comes Wisdom (If You Survive)

I’ve devoted several posts to combatting career burnout, particularly in the information security industry. But something recently occurred to me: Burnout can be a good thing, but only if you survive.

Mood music:

The thought came to me after talking to a fellow industry veteran and work colleague. We’ve seen friends younger than us either setting themselves up for the fall or crashing to Earth after burning to a crisp.

My friend knows burnout. So do I. We’ve survived it and are better for it. You don’t often hear about how survivors of burnout become better and stronger. There’s wisdom to be had.

Personal lessons:

  • Accepting more responsibility without more pay seems OK when you’re young, but it’s not. When I was in my 20s and eager to advance my young journalism career, I didn’t think about money. I just wanted to get the job. I assumed that with good work, better pay would follow. All I did was show the bosses that they could keep throwing more weight on me and I’d take it. I nearly destroyed my health in the process.
  • Being a people pleaser is dumb. My current employers treat me well, but I’ve been in jobs where I put everything else in life aside to do more work. I wanted to be the golden boy so badly that I let precious relationships suffer along with my health. As I got older I realized the top brass didn’t put in nearly as much time as I did. I ultimately discovered two things: The best corporate leaders learn to prioritize tasks and keep their eyes on the big stuff. The worst simply ride the backs of minions who won’t say no.
  • Working 90 hours a week and loving it? I didn’t think so. Those who know the history of Apple have heard about the “90 Hours a Week and Loving It” shirts that made the rounds back in the ’80s. It was based on Steve Jobs boasting about his people working those kinds of hours. When you’re in your 20s it’s easy to fall into the trap. I certainly did. But all those extra hours left me with a whole lot of loneliness and depression.
  • Living on your knees will cripple you. As a young man, I was terrified of the punishment bosses would deliver if I ever disagreed with them. Part of the mindset was well intentioned. I knew enough complainers to know that I didn’t like them. The part I missed was that you CAN disagree. The key is to suggest alternative ideas and steer clear of empty whining that only focuses on why something is bad. Even if you don’t always hit the mark, it’s better than letting disagreements in procedure eat you alive.

Set boundaries. Put family and health first. Stand up for yourself. Spend  your time on that and you just might survive the burnout periods.

90 Hours a Week and Loving It

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Coming Soon: The OCD Diaries Book Series

For years, people have told me to write a book based on this blog. And for years I’ve resisted because life was busy enough between work, family and writing for three blogs. But after some brainstorming with Erin last weekend, the decision is made: I’m diving in. The time is right.

Mood music:

In 2016 I’ll still write fresh posts here, but my main focus as far as The OCD Diaries goes will be on book writing. Not one book, but a series. There are several recurring themes in the blog and instead of jumping from one to the other in one book, the best approach is several small volumes that zero in on specific themes. The idea is for these to be relatively short essay collections. Instead of merely cobbling together old posts, there will be a lot of fresh writing to fuse things together.

I also want to use a lot of art. Some will be my own. But I have many friends who are artists and I want to use these to give them some more exposure.

We’ll be shopping around for a publisher, but if we can’t find a suitable one we’re going to self publish. One of the great things about the Internet is that it’s easier to go it alone, whether it’s book publishing or music recording. I have one big advantage going in: a lot of experience with publishing and plenty of connections in the business.

These will not be self-help books. I’m too flawed to be telling you how you should deal with life. These are just my experiences and observations. The reader can do what they will with it.

Here’s my early thinking on the different volumes. Any and all feedback is appreciated:

  • Lessons from an Imperfect Childhood: Don’t expect this to be a laundry list of grievances from childhood. I have no grievances. Life happens, and we all go through tough times. I also believe that most of us have imperfect childhoods and that we even need it to be that way. This volume is where I’ll write about the lessons my experiences produced.
  • Turning Mental Disorder into a Superpower: This volume will be a chronological narrative of my struggle with OCD and the magic that happened once I realized the goal wasn’t to beat the disorder but to manage it in ways that turn weakness into strength.
  • Grief Management 3.0: Here, I’ll collect my essays about loss, with a focus on how one gets through it.
  •  The EddieTheYeti Collection: I’ve written a lot of posts based on the work of friend and fellow infosec practitioner Eddie Mize, who has done a lot of remarkable art under the name EddieTheYeti. This book will feature my writing and his art.
  • Living with Depression, Fear and Anxiety: My experiences and lessons from all three will be collected here.
  • The Rebellious Catholic: This volume will have essays from my ongoing spiritual journey.
  • What InfoSec Taught Me About Dealing with Life: My work in the security industry has produced critical lessons on how I need to live my life. Expect an emphasis on the many mistakes I’ve made and why they were ultimately for the good.

Will I get through this whole list in 2016? I doubt it. But the new year will be my starting point. Titles and the number of volumes are also likely to change.

Let the games begin.

Uncle Fester reading a self-help book while lying in bed

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A Basement in Revere

A photo from the old days in Revere is sparking some flashbacks. It’s November 1991, and Dan Waters, Sean Marley, and I are in the basement of the old house I grew up in.

Bill Brenner, Dan Waters, Sean MarleyFrom left to right: Bill Brenner, Dan Waters, and Sean Marley

We partied a lot in that basement. It was the scene of many impressive and entertaining mood swings.
I could be mistaken, but I believe we were having a belated Halloween party in the photo, which is why Sean is dressed as a vampire.

On Halloween 1991, the No-Name Hurricane, immortalized in The Perfect Storm, had blown through, badly flooding out the neighborhood. My basement, Sean’s basement and that of the house in between ours were among the handful of homes that escaped the damage. I was gearing up for one last semester at North Shore Community College before transferring to Salem State College.

A lot of good metal blared from that basement.

It’s also the place where I would literally run in circles for one to two hours to keep thin after going on binge-eating jags.

I moved out of there in late 1992, so that was in the last year in that basement.

Sometimes I miss it. But not much.

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For Parents With Kids Freaked About Winter Storms

With a blizzard in the New England forecast this week and next month’s 37th anniversary of the Blizzard of 1978, I thought this might be of use:

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/6-WMbP1RcC4

I got a message awhile back from a mom who reads this blog regularly. I’ll keep her anonymous but share some details of the note:

“My son, only 7, has suffered from pretty severe anxieties about weather over the past 3 or so years. It took me forever to figure out what was going on (the doctors couldn’t) and finally found an amazing counselor for him that has given him the tools to deal. But still it is a lot for a little kid.”

Since this one really hits me where I live, I’m going to take a stab at offering something useful. But be warned first that I AM NOT a doctor. It’s also important to note that one person’s perfect solution might make things worse for another individual. What I offer is simply based on my own personal experience and some of what I’ve read from smart people in the medical community.

Tricky stuff, mental illness is.

I do think there’s good news for children who suffer:

1.) Getting the right help early will spare him/her from a lot of pain later on.

2.) Children seem to learn things like coping mechanisms more readily than adults.

3.) If a kid has to deal with any form of mental anguish, anxiety is probably one of the more natural, normal reactions to life. Even the healthiest of children live with a certain level of fear. My kids are healthy boys, mentally and physically, but they still crawl into bed with Mom and Dad in the middle of the night because their minds are spinning with worry over a ghost story they heard in school.

What really resonated with me is that this child gets anxiety over the weather. It’s been nearly 35 years since I watched in fear as the ocean rose up and ripped apart my neighborhood along the northern edge of Revere Beach in Massachusetts during the Blizzard of 1078..

Houses were torn from their foundations. Schoolmates had to stay in hotels for a year or more while their homes were rebuilt. The wind tore the roofing off some of the pavilions lining the beach.

Every winter since then, every nor’easter riding up the coast filled me with anxiety. The TV news doesn’t help. Impending storms are more often than not pitched as the coming apocalypse.

From the late 1970s straight through the 1990s, I’d shake from weather reports mentioning the Blizzard of 1978 with each new storm. As a young adult, I developed a pattern of throwing a blanket over my head and going to sleep. That’s exactly what I did in 1985 when Hurricane Gloria grazed us and, at age 21 in August 1991, when New England took a direct blow from Hurricane Bob.

My step-sister still likes to bring up how, on the morning Hurricane Bob was coming, I came into her room and yelled at her to wake up, telling her, “This aint no (expletive) Gloria.” That was me in OCD mode.

That rough weather scared the heck out of me as a kid, I think, was perfectly normal. Carrying that same fear and anxiety well into adulthood? Probably not so normal.

In more recent years, I’ve overcome that fear, and I actually like a good storm now and again. I love to drive through the snow. And when Washington D.C. got smacked with 30-plus inches of heavy snow in a blizzard in 2010, I gleefully walked the streets as the storm continued to rage.

That’s my long-winded way of saying this 7-year-old probably — hopefully — will grow out of his weather-based anxiety, and hopefully sooner than I did.

I think the best thing his mom can do is talk him through it, explaining that weather changes all the time and we usually get through the rough stuff just fine, even if a tree is blown over.

I’d tell him it’s ok to be concerned about a coming storm, but that the storm always passes and is followed by the sun.

When the TV news starts to hype up a storm, make fun of them for making mountains out of molehills. Sometimes, the hype is warranted, like when Hurricanes Katrina and Andrew came along. The Blizzard of 1978 certainly lived up to the hype.  But most of the time, the media exaggerates the importance of a storm, and they deserve to be picked on for it, especially if it makes a little kid feel better.

Now, for those seeking a more scientific, medically-grounded piece of advice on treating childhood anxiety, I once again direct you toward the excellent WebMD site. I did some digging and found some helpful tips, which include the following:

Professional counseling is an important part of the treatment for depression. Types of counseling most often used to treat depression in children and teens are:

  • Cognitive-behavioral therapy, which helps reduce negative patterns of thinking and encourages positive behaviors.
  • Interpersonal therapy, which focuses on the child’s relationships with others.
  • Problem-solving therapy, which helps the child deal with current problems.
  • Family therapy, which provides a place for the whole family to express fears and concerns and learn new ways of getting along.
  • Play therapy, which is used with young children or children with developmental delays to help them cope with fears and anxieties. But there is no proof that this type of treatment reduces symptoms of depression.

Hope that helps!

“Blizzard of ’78,” by Norman Gautreau, depicting the devastation of Revere Beach following The Blizzard of 1978:

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So You Wanna Blog About Your Demons

Quite a few people are starting to share stories about their mental health challenges and other demons. Some ponder if they should start blogging about it. Having written such a blog for almost five years now, here’s my take.

Mood music:

If you feel you have reached the right point in your journey to start sharing, then do it. If nothing else, it will help you keep things in perspective. I always feel better after I’ve torn a few skeletons from my closet and tossed them to the light.

Once you expose them, they seem a lot smaller. Chances are you will also touch a few people who need to know they’re not alone; that they’re dealing with the stuff that makes us all human. They need to see proof that they are not freaks.

If you are still at the beginning of figuring out your issues and you’re in that confused state where you don’t know up from down, it might be better to start writing just for yourself. Fill notebooks but don’t share yet. Wait until you reach a point in recovery where you’re ready to come out. Then you can take what you wrote when emotions were still raw and put them out there along with fresh perspective of where you’ve been since then.

When I started this blog, I wanted to break stigmas and make people more comfortable outing their own demons. Not many people were doing it back then. Today, many are taking the leap. Whether I’ve influenced any of it is for others to determine. All I know is that I’m happy to see it.

Whatever you decide to do, know that I admire you and gain extra strength from the experiences you already share.

Godspeed and good luck.

skeleton closet dance

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Dzhokar Tsarnaev’s Age Can’t Shield Him From Justice

After the elation everyone felt Friday night when the second suspected Boston Marathon bomber was captured after a bloody manhunt, the mood dropped again.

Some fellow parents lamented the fact that a 19-year-old kid could do what Dzhokar Tsarnaev is accused of doing. They pictured him curled up in a ball in that backyard boat in Watertown, scared beyond all comprehension. Tsarnaev
is someone’s child, someone pointed out.

Here’s why I’m less sympathetic.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:22f0HfO1PUGJ3bjVozEewR]

I was a real punk at 19. I had little to no respect for my elders. I had a violent temper and broke things on an almost daily basis. I drank, I smoked, I lied. I drove recklessly. I held people in contempt if they didn’t share my so-called values. You could say I was a time bomb. Sooner or later, I could have done something that would have landed me in jail. As it turned out, I chose to turn that destructive energy on myself instead.

I’m not a special case. I know a lot of people who were like that at 19. Some of them are no longer among us. Those who are have built beautiful families, careers and lives.

I never seriously plotted to hurt anyone. I sure as hell would never have dropped a bomb at someone’s feet and have run. Most of the young punks I knew wouldn’t have done so, either.

If the charges are proven true, Dzhokar Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlan had something in them that most of us lack: the will and desire to take innocent lives.

I do feel badly for Dzhokar on one point: He was probably under the influence of and led astray by his older brother. It wouldn’t be the first time in history that a kid did things he wouldn’t have done unless pushed by an older sibling he revered and wanted to please at all costs. I wanted to please my older brother, too. But he was a better role model and, had he lived to adulthood, I’d have been better for it.

Dzhokar killed and maimed people. It’s harder to feel sympathy for him than for your typical 19 year old.

Maybe he’ll turn his life around and do some serious soul-scouring. He may earn forgiveness along the way and find ways to help people. If convicted, he’ll have to tend to those things from prison. When you hurt people the way he is accused of doing, you lose all rights to freedom.

That may be cold, but it’s how I feel.

suspect 4

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Human Tourniquets And Freaks Who Love Them

I originally wrote this three years ago. Looking at it again, it’s an important post describing a time when not even best friends were safe from my insanity. I’ve updated it for the present. 

Mood music:

[spotify:track:2YGwSRjcY4Hjz6fktW9619]

You know the type. They hang  out with people who act more like abusive spouses than friends. They are human tourniquets. They absorb the pain of their tormentor daily and without complaint.

This is the story of the man who used to be my tourniquet.

I met Aaron Lewis in 1985, my freshman year of high school. He was the kid with really bad acne. But nothing ever seemed to bother him. I’m sure a lot of things bothered him, but he was very good at hiding his feelings.

That made him the perfect target for a creep like me.

Don’t get me wrong. He was a true friend. One of my best friends. We shared a love of heavy metal. We both got picked on, though unlike me, he didn’t take it out on other, weaker classmates.

We hung out constantly. He practically lived in my Revere basement at times. I let him borrow my car regularly. And if I drank, that was OK, because he almost never drank. He could be the driver.

Except for the time I encouraged him to drink a bottle of vodka. He had just eaten a bag of McDonald’s and I told him I was sick of him trying to get buzzed off of wine coolers. This night, I told him, he was going to do it right. He got smashed, and proceeded to puke all over my basement — on the bed, the carpets, the couch, the dresser. That was some strange vomit. It looked like brown confetti.

I sat on the floor, drunk myself, writing in my journal. I wrote about how drunk Aaron was and prayed to God that he wouldn’t die. Man, would I love to find that journal.

We saw a lot of movies together. We watched a lot of MTV.

He was the perfect counterweight to Sean Marley. Marley was essentially my older brother and I spent a lot of time trying to earn his approval. I didn’t have to do that with Aaron. He didn’t criticize. He didn’t judge. He just took all my mood swings on the chin.

I would sling verbal bombs at him and he’d take it.

I would slap him on the back of the neck and he’d take it.

I was evil. And he took it.

That’s a true friend.

Aaron got married, moved to California and has a growing family. He’s doing some wonderful things with his life. I cleaned up from my compulsive binge eating, found my Faith and untangled the coarse, jagged wiring in my brain that eventually became an OCD diagnosis.

If he’s reading this, I apologize for all the times I was an asshole. I hope somewhere in there, I was a good friend, too.

Buddies
Left: Aaron Lewis. Right: His asshole friend
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‘This Post Is Escapism and Blame’

A dear friend hated the post I wrote yesterday on how we’re all lousy parents. He found something in every paragraph to disagree with and found the opening particularly offensive.

He told me: “Not all of us were raised by lousy parents. Not all of us ARE lousy parents. No matter how one was raised at a certain point your life becomes your own responsibility. Not your parents. Not your genes. Not your phobias. This post, to me, is escapism and blame. I choose to fix the problem and not the blame.”

Those sentiments were not what I was going for, so let’s clarify a few things.

Let’s start with the opening:

I’ve had conversations with other parents recently that highlight a fear we all share: Despite our best efforts, we’ll scar our children anyway.

I’m thinking my friend took this as me saying all parents suck, period. Not true. I was saying that among those parents I’ve had the conversation with, all of us share the fear of damaging our kids. That doesn’t mean we will. It’s simply something we worry about. He took the title in the fullest literal sense, which is unfortunate because I was being partly facetious. Since those of us who had the conversation are convinced we are imperfect parents, I was lightheartedly saying, “OK, but let’s try not to suck too much.”

The escapism and blame he frowned upon comes from this passage, I assume:

My father could be a brutal teaser and taskmaster when it came to things like yard work and working in the family warehouse. It always seemed like my best was never good enough. Even as a grownup, I would tell him about promotions and raises at work, and when I told him what I was earning, he’d deliver these stinging words: “That’s it?” Dad also doesn’t have a verbal filter. If you put on weight, he’ll look at you, smile, and tell you you’re getting fat. Yet here I am, teasing my kids all the time.

If I had stopped there, it would have been about blame. But I continued:

Like most moms and dads, I always swore I’d do better than my parents did. But the older I get, the more I realize I haven’t been entirely fair to my mom and dad. They made their share of mistakes, but they did a lot right, too. With the help of excellent doctors, they kept me from dying of childhood illnesses. They got me through school and made my college education possible. My father has helped me out of more than a few financial jams. Yeah, bad things happened when I was a kid, but they were often things beyond my parents’ control. They tried to keep my older brother healthy, but he died anyway. They tried to keep their marriage together, but it wasn’t meant to be.

The point is that I blamed them for a lot of things earlier on, but being an imperfect parent has made me realize they didn’t deserve my scorn. My own challenges have given me a better understanding of what they did right despite all bad cards they were dealt along the way. Bitterness and blame were long ago replaced by forgiveness and gratitude. True, my relationship with Mom and Dad could be better today, but I attribute that more to the differences we struggle with together as adults.

My friend ended his comment with this: “I choose to fix the problem and not the blame.”

So do I.

As imperfect as I am, my boys are growing up with love and encouragement. I’m a constant presence in their lives, and when I see myself screwing up, I work to correct it. I’m also as honest as I can be with my children. If I’m in the wrong, I acknowledge it. And every day I tell them I’m proud of them, no matter how badly they’ve tested my patience. That’s progress.

I point out the lousy parts of my parenting because in acknowledging it, I can improve. And in sharing, my hope is that other parents can do the same.
Bad Parent Alarm

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Two-Alarm Fire at My High School

There was a two-alarm fire last night at Northeast Metro Tech, the place where I attended high school. Back in my day, it was called Northeast Regional Vocational High School or, as most of us called it, the Voke.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:0oO29Ht2H9AiENqRsq3zIT]

I have good and bad memories of the place. It’s where I:

  • Grew my hair long and cemented my love affair with metal music.
  • Truly started to understand, for the first time, that I could be capable of doing meaningful things in life if I would just fill in the deep chips on my shoulders.
  • Studied drafting and design. I didn’t become an architect, but I use the skills I learned there every day in my writing.
  • Swallowed a worm in the courtyard for a pack of cigarettes. Not surprisingly, you can’t smoke there any more.
  • Tortured and later befriended a kid everyone called Stiffy. I still shudder when I think of how mean I was to that kid.
  • Cut classes and smoked weed in the woods of Breakheart, the reservation that school sits at the edge of.

My time in the Voke included my last serious bout with Crohn’s Disease in 1986, during my sophomore year. I wasn’t hospitalized that time, but I pretty much lived on the living room couch. On that couch, I read “Helter Skelter” twice. I also got daily visits from a childhood friend who went on to become a thrice-convicted child molester.

I remember the teachers putting down the kids all the time. The jocks and nerds were embraced and nurtured. Everyone else was pretty much written off as damaged goods. This was especially the case in my shop.

A couple of years ago, my friend Kevin Littlefield coaxed me into a field trip to the Voke. It was my first time back in about 20 years, and it gave me more than a little hope for the future. The kids in our old shop that day were polite and appeared to work well together — nothing like the way we carried on in the 1980s. The big drafting boards had long since been replaced by flat-screen computers.

We also met some kids we graduated with who now teach there. One former classmate is the dean of students. Another, John Spagnola, is a teacher. Seeing him as a teacher was a trip. The kids really seem to connect with him. and his humor is as sharp as ever.

Back in our day it seemed like most teachers were always complaining that Generation X would never make it, that we were far to self-absorbed, spoiled and weak to carry the future. The teachers were right that we were a generation unprepared for the big challenges ahead. But many of us grew up. We got stronger. We learned to love people other than ourselves.

Now some of our children are going to that school, and they seem to be doing great. Generation X turned out fine, and our kids are going to do even better.

A few flames and a damaged building won’t prevent that.

Northeast_Metro_Regional_Vocational_School,_Wakefield_MA

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Sandy Hook Lesson: Be the Change, One Soul at a Time

Like most of you, I’ve spent a good part of the weekend thinking about the lives lost at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. We all want specific solutions that will prevent more of these tragedies, but what we’re dealing with is too big and too gray for that.

 

A lot of people are debating gun control. Some people think the world would be safer if every law-abiding citizen had a firearm. Others say they support the Second Amendment but that there’s no reason for anyone other than police and soldiers to have access to weapons that can fill a body with scores of bullets in the blink of an eye.

A lot of people are also debating what this tragedy says about how we should treat the mentally ill. Some people think the mentally ill should be locked away. Others cry out for better services and educational tactics to drive disturbed individuals away from the the path Adam Lanza took when he grabbed his mother’s guns, killed her and headed to Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he stole the lives of 20 precious children and six heroic adults who died saving the children who made it out alive.

Would stricter gun control prevent future massacres like this? I doubt it. Would giving every school principal a gun prevent it? I doubt that, too. I believe in the right of citizens to bear arms, but I don’t see how that makes it OK for people who aren’t soldiers or cops to carry handheld weapons of mass destruction. A hunting rifle for hunting and a handgun for self-defense when a home is invaded is one thing. High-powered rifles are something else entirely.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that on the subject of mental illness, I agreed with those who said we need better treatment and counseling to reach troubled youths before they become murderers.

Maybe I’m biased because I was one of those troubled kids. People made fun of me in school and I could never seem to get the hang of sports and other things that might have made me more socially acceptable. There were times in my youth when I’d occasionally think of how sweet it would be to grab a rifle or a knife and tear into the bodies of those I felt were oppressing me. Luckily for me, there were enough positive influences in my life to make the difference.

I know one kid who has a lot of emotional issues and has been through every kind of therapy and drug treatment known to man. He’s doing well, but a paper-thin line separates the sweet side of his soul from the side that could send him on a rampage. The more positive influences he has now, the better.

As for those who suggest we simply lock up the mentally disturbed: who do you think qualifies for the cage? You’ll likely point to the troubled guy who walks down the street shouting obscenities at everyone he crosses paths with, but that doesn’t mesh well with the profiles of those who went on to shoot up schools and movie theaters. This latest gunman had no criminal record and was described as a fairly docile person by family and neighbors. Charles Manson’s most blood-thirsty followers were model students and athletes in high school.

At some point their minds became twisted and sick, but outward appearances wouldn’t have indicated that they should be locked up. That’s something else I have firsthand experience with. During some of the worst periods of mental illness in my life, I was able to put on a smile and calm exterior. I could function in society, but inside I was a time bomb.

You want an easy fix for this problem? You can’t have one. It doesn’t exist.

The answer is much more difficult but worth the effort: If you know a young man or woman who goes through periods of depression, rage or self-imposed isolation, someone who struggles to fit in, try to spend time with them. Show them love and kindness. Mentor them.

Doing so has a better chance of preventing the next school massacre than more or fewer guns. We can’t catch every troubled soul and turn them around. The task is simply too big for any of us to handle.

But if we can guide one or two of them, that’s huge.

Sandy