The OCD Diaries

March 8, 2010

Portable Recovery

Though addiction will follow the junkie anywhere in the world, the author has discovered that recovery is just as portable.

Mood Music for this post: “Turn the Page” — the Metallica version:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOibtqWo6z4&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

I’ve seen interview after interview where musicians describe their drug habits and how being on the road made them so much worse.

One of the best examples was Motley Crue on the Girls Girls Girls tour, where the four band members’ addictions were well past the point of manageability — not that an addiction is ever really manageable. That was the tour where Nikki Sixx kept a diary chronicling his increasing heroin use.

In fact, sit in front of the TV and watch a “Behind the Music” marathon and you’ll see most bands tell a similar story.

It’s a similar tale for any businessman who nurses an addiction while doing a lot of travel. Every city is flowing with whatever material feeds one’s vice, whether it’s drugs, alcohol or, in my case, binge eating.

I can tell you from experience that it’s true. During my travels to San Francisco, Washington DC, Chicago, Las Vegas and points in between, the opportunity to binge on free junk and alcohol is limitless.

But here’s what I’ve also learned: You can take your recovery everywhere, too.

In all of the cities I mentioned above, I’ve been able to hold firmly to my 12-Step program and related plan of eating. I know what I can eat, how much, and which ingredients are essentially my cocaine (flour and sugar).

There are 12-Step meetings in every city and town, whether it’s OA or AA, and there are phone meetings available around the clock.

And, if you’re like me, you’ve told enough people about your challenges that they’ll watch out for you. That was definitely the case for me in San Francisco last week.

It really comes down to what you want. If you want your junk, you’ll always be resourceful enough to find it.

If you want recovery, same deal.

I’ve found it also helps to read blogs from others in recovery when I’m on the road. One of my recent discoveries is a great blog called “Conquering Crazy” by Greg Dungan. Like my OCD Diaries, Greg’s blog is a recent start-up. He focuses like a laser beam on the core craziness as he experiences it. It reads more like an actual day-by-day diary, whereas mine is more a collection of longer narratives with a lot of focus on the byproducts of my affliction.

Like me, music is important to him, and he is also a seeker who is trying to find the core of his spirituality. I especially love his first entry, “OK, So I’m Crazy.” Here’s an excerpt:

“I have exhibited symptoms of OCD for as long as I can remember. Recently, these symptoms have intensified. What used to be the “things that make me unique” have become the “things that make me crazy”. This blog is about my struggle with this demon. This is where I will record my day to day thoughts and struggles – my defeats and my victories. I have two choices at this point in my life – roll over and die or fight my way out. I’ve never been one for rolling over and I’m not about to start now.

“You’re welcome to walk this valley with me. If you are living with OCD or if someone you love is, take heart. There are brighter days somewhere, and we will find them together.”

Brighter days ahead? You bet your ass there are.

I’ve experienced it. I’ve been to the valley and the mountaintop.

I started blogging about it after I had been on the journey for a few years. Greg is blogging his journey from the start. That’s courage.

And like addiction, depression, Faith and recovery, courage is portable, too.

February 20, 2010

Another Reason Addiction-Depression Stinks

I’ve mentioned before that one of the inspirations for this blog was a book called “The Heroin Diaries” by Nixxi Sixx, bass player and lyricist for Motley Crue. It’s a book of diary entries he wrote from late 1986 to late 1987, at the time the “Girls Girls Girls” album was recorded and the band toured the world to support it.

At the time, he was in the tight clutches of a heroin addiction that would nearly kill him by December 1987. He was in fact dead for a few minutes, but a needle to the heart brought him back to life.

Last night I was flipping through the book again and noticed that Sixx often went days without showering. If he took a shower, it was a good day.

His girlfriend at the time, Vanity, is also described as being a mess all the time because she was too high to notice.

As a former manager for Motley Crue put it, when you’re strung out the first thing to fall by the side of the road is personal hygene.

From my experiences with depression and addictive behavior, I can tell you there’s a lot of truth to that statement.

In my early 20s, when I was binge eating in the basement of the house in Revere, I would go days wearing the same gym pants and bath robe without taking a shower. I was so depressed I just didn’t care.

Besides, it’s not like I was having much luck finding girlfriends when I was clean.

My friends were often just as bad, especially Sean Marley, who at the time was descending into his own little hell and was running sleep-deprivation experiments on himself.

The hang-ups weren’t unique. I’d obsess about finding a girlfriend, which I couldn’t do because I was trying too hard. I was also going through my parental hatred phase. In hindsight I was an ungrateful slob. After all, they did let me have the entire basement apartment as a bedroom and let be throw parties at will.

Later on, after I met the love of my life and started getting serious about my journalism career, I made more of an effort at personal hygene. I showered more often, anyway.

But my weight was piling on as I dove deep into binge eating. Marley had recently died and I was doing an editing job that was killing me because of the hours I was putting in. I showered so I wouldn’t offend anyone, but I would wear the same clothes days at a time. I figured if I wore the same pants every day nobody would notice because I’d change the shirts. I’m sure some people noticed.

The good news is that I got over this sort of behavior as I went to work on the root causes of my OCD and related addictions.

So don’t worry. I’ve had my shower and a fresh change of clothes.

But if you’re standing next to someone in the elevator and they just happen to reek, go easy on them. They’re probably just going through a rough time.

With any luck, it’ll pass.

February 17, 2010March 16, 2015

Addicted to Feeling Good: A Love-Hate Story

Every now and then, it’s useful to look back at who I used to be so I can appreciate who I am today.

I do it partly to laugh at how — in many ways, despite the progress I’ve made — I can still be as stupid in adulthood as I was 20-plus years ago.

As I write this we’re halfway through Lent — a time to sacrifice habits you love — or, in my case, habits you’re addicted to.

Giving something up always brings back acute memories of some of the dumber things I’ve done in the compulsive-obsessive drive to feel good.

Indulge me as I take inventory.

Mood music:

Age 18: I’m living off 8 cups of black coffee and a mug of Raisin Bran a day in an attempt to be rock-star thin. I discovered an after dinner drink — Haffenreffer Lager Beer. There were little puzzles on the underside of the bottle caps, and your ability to solve them would steadily decline — or increase — depending on how drunk you were. Being addicted to instant gratification, I’d suck down three bottles in quick succession so I could immediately enjoy feeling like I had just absorbed half a keg of lighter beer.

Age 21: I’m pacing up and down the driveway of the old Revere house in a blue-green polka-dotted bathrobe I used to own. I’m freaking out because I’ve just consumed two beers and an entire stick of marijuana by myself in the concrete storage room beneath the front patio.

The fellow who gave it to me was about 500 pounds and wore a black trenchcoat, even during the summer. He died Valentine’s Day 2009 of a heart attack. I lost touch with him as I became focused on career and learned after his death that he had led an admirable life of aiding the mentally disabled. Anyway, I was freaking out because, in the midst of lying on my bed enjoying the high, I suddenly got the idea that I just might have a heart attack. That’s one of my earlier memories of an anxiety attack.

We partied a lot in that basement. It was the scene of many impressive and entertaining mood swings.

I called my friend Danny Waters and asked him to come over. He did, and found me pacing up and down the driveway in my bathrobe. He took me down the street to Kelly’s Roast Beef and got me an order of chicken fingers to munch away the anxiety. Kelly’s was always a favorite place for me to binge eat away my troubles. It was as good as any drug or liquor store.

Age 29: I drop 100 pounds of fat I packed on while binge-eating my way through the middle 1990s. I’m inspired by the quadruple bypass surgery my father has recently had. I lose the weight by pigging out Thursday through Saturday and starving myself Sunday through Wednesday. The binge eating continues through the next few years but I manage to keep the weight down, fooling most people.

Age 33: Around this time, the binge eating gets a new playmate in the form of red wine, which I decide I can’t live without.

Age 39: No more binge eating — not today, anyway. No wine. I work the 12-step program of recovery.

Age 44: I’ve had my slips along the way, but I continue working to give up my bad habits for good.

February 14, 2010

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

The author goes to Church and comes away with a strange feeling.

Mood music for this post: “Faith.” The Limp Bizkit version:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpPM-5TJIZ0&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Yesterday at All Saints Parish Father Michael Harvey delivered one of those Homilies that sent my mind and soul all over the map.

I like Father Harvey. I wasn’t sure about him at first. He had the massive shoes of Father Mark Ballard to fill, so the deck was stacked against him from the start. He’s very conservative, and sometimes I wonder if his collar is stuck to his neck with thumb tacks. He tackles the most taboo of topics — politics — when he delivers a homily.

Truth be told, I like how he goes for the throat in his Homilies without fear of offending someone. One Sunday he gave a Homily about Natural Law, otherwise known as the “contraception is bad” talk. After Mass, we got in the car and Sean, the 8 year old, blurted out, “Gee, I guess Father Mike wasn’t expecting there to be any kids at Mass this morning.”

Being moderate in my political views, I get itchy when he’s up there trashing a politician I like or praising one I despise. Yesterday, without naming him, the Homily turned to the subject of Patrick Kennedy, who I defended in this blog yesterday for showing up for public life despite a withering battle with depression and addiction.

The larger message of the Homily was that the pursuit of power takes a person further and further from God, because when one is spending all his or her time groping for attention they’re too busy thinking about themselves to be thinking about God.

He then brought up “a politician from Rhode Island” who decided not to run for office anymore. “Oh, great, here it comes,” I mumbled to my wife.

He brought up the fact that the Bishop down there had asked Kennedy to stop taking Communion because of his pro-choice stance. The Bishop tried to handle it in private, but Kennedy took it public.

In the end, Father Harvey speculated aloud, Kennedy was probably coming around to the decision that it was time to leave public life because holding onto power had corrupted his soul. I’m not sure Kennedy would share that exact assessment, but I think he would agree that power isn’t worth having when it plunges the rest of your life into a dark, unhappy place.

So I walked away with mixed feelings. I am pro-life but get incensed when someone paints a pro-choice person as evil personified. I don’t think it’s so simple. I know a lot of people who hate abortion, but believe it’s between a woman, her doctor and God. They are pro-choice but NOT pro abortion. They are the types that vote for someone based on a wider range of issues than abortion alone. But they are told they’ve voted against God if they vote the wrong way. [See also: The Better Angels of My Nature]

I have a lot of trouble with that notion.

But in the larger picture, there’s no question that the pursuit of power is a tricky thing, and the longer one wields it the worse off they are.

I see myself in all this. As I’ve admitted before, I have a fairly big ego that comes with being a writer. The ego is frequently driven into overdrive by the OCD [See: The Ego OCD Built]. It’s painfully true that this ego carries a certain level of attention seeking. After all, it’s the writer’s goal to make sure people are reading their work, and that involves a lot of self promotion.

I’m guilty as charged.

It’s a double-edged blade, really. I don’t write with the idea of sticking the papers in a drawer for someone to find after I’m dead. I’m a journalist whose goal is for people to see what he’s writing today, not 30 years from now. Social networking makes it all the more dangerous. I’ll let this illustration drive home the point for me:

At the same time, I have a faith that has deepened with time, and my Religious beliefs often come into direct conflict with my profession. In the end, it doesn’t have to be that way. I just have to find my way on this twisted path.

That’s why I keep coming to Church. It’s ultimately about my relationship with God and how to strengthen it. People can get uptight about church politics and get angry because their beliefs have been challenged by the priest. But to me those things are distractions that are as big as any shiny object that distracts us from our core Faith. I think that’s why Confession is my favorite Sacrament. It forces me to come clean with God on a regular basis. It keeps the emotional trash from piling up and stinking too much.

In this particular case, the priest gave me something to think about. He zeroed in on an unpleasant truth.

And so, he did his job.

It’s up to me to ultimately reconcile it with how I live my life. I think I’ve come a long, long way. But I have a long way to go yet.

February 13, 2010

In Defense of Patrick Kennedy

The youngest son of Edward M. Kennedy has often been criticized as a lightweight Congressman who gets away with things other people would get arrested for. But the author salutes him anyway. Here’s why.

Patrick Kennedy, the youngest child of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, announced yesterday that he won’t be running for re-election to the Congressional seat he has held since 1995.

US Representative Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island announced that he will not seek reelection, capping a 16-year career in politics. Patrick, the son of the late Senator Edward M. 'Ted' Kennedy, said his father's death caused him to do some soul-searching about his future. With Kennedy's departure, this will be the first time in more than six decades the Kennedy family will not have a member in Washington. Scroll through this gallery for a look at how the Kennedy lineage has impacted politics and public life.

Some will tell you it’s just as well. The Congressman, after all, hasn’t done much except for living off his family name and crashing cars into roadside barriers while high on narcotics. That’s often what I hear from my more conservative friends, who hate everything having to do with the Kennedy name.

Stew Milne/AP Photo

But as someone recovering from OCD, depression, a binge-eating disorder and other addictions, I have plenty of reason to defend this man.

In my view, this fellow has gotten some pretty unfair treatment. Let’s start with Laurence Leamer’s book, “Sons of Camelot.”

In this book, Patrick is described as a spoiled kid who has accomplished nothing in Congress other than repeatedly winning re-election. He’s described as someone who blindly follows the Democratic leadership.

Some of that may be true. But Patrick has done some courageous service for those who suffer from mental illness.

Kennedy has been open about his own struggles with bi-polar disorder and the addictions that go with it. He has been in and out of addiction treatment centers and once noted how his addictive behavior could latch onto anything from pain medication to something as simple as cough medicine.

What’s more, he did one of the hardest things people like us can do: He lived in the spotlight as a public servant, where critics can be cruel and a lot of people like to hate the Kennedys just for the hell of it.

Patrick has carried a lot of pressure being a Kennedy. There’s the pressure to match his father’s towering legislative record and live up to the legendary stature of his uncles.

Some would have dropped to the floor long ago, curled in a fetal position, over the pressure. Some would not have survived. One of Patrick’s cousins, David Kennedy, one of RFK’s sons, didn’t survive the battle with the demons. He died of a drug overdose in 1984.

RFK Jr. also struggled with addiction. So did Christopher Kennedy Lawford, who wrote an excellent book of his own on the subject: “Symptoms of Withdrawal: A Memoir of Snapshots and Redemption.”

I loved Lawford’s book for a variety of reasons. He recounted his sordid tale with humor and was brutally honest about something addicts are all to aware of: When you quit the thing you’re addicted to, it doesn’t automatically turn you into a good person.

In fact, recovering addicts often become big jerks before they find their footing. They’re learning how to behave in public without being drunk or high. A deep depression often sets in because years of abuse leaves the brain with deep chemical imbalances that hit you like a brick to the head once the booze, food or narcotics exit the picture.

Patrick has dealt with all of these realities and still carried on in public service.

He continued to show up for life when life was at its most unbearable.

It gave people like me a little inspiration when we needed it most. So as Patrick prepares to exit the public stage and embark on a new life, I thank him for his service and wish him the best.

It’s easy for people to pass judgment on him for his flaws.

But people who do so often forget about their own flaws.

None of us are truly without sin. But we like to cast the first stones anyway.

February 12, 2010

When Pain Drips from the Mind to the Body

The author on why it’s true that mental illness leads to physical sickness.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:24PttQAgkYLdpR4TOgdV4C]

I’ve heard a lot of people argue over whether this person’s or that person’s aches and pains were “all in their head.” You know the types: Never any real underlying disease, but they’re always calling out of work with a headache or some intestinal discomfort.

It’s all in their head, you say?

Well, yeah.

It’s called psychosomatic illness, when mental anguish leads to physical sickness.

I’ve been there. Migraines. Brutal back pain. A stomach turned inside-out.

But it wasn’t always clear that what ailed me was in my head. Childhood illness confused matters. A huge chunk of my digestive track was in flames and spewing blood because of Chron’s Disease. I’m told by my parents that the doctors came close to removing the colon more than once, though I don’t remember that myself; probably because the doctors had that conversation with the parents instead of the patient.

To throw it into remission, they used the maximum dose of a drug called Prednisone, which caused another kind of body blow in the form of migraines. You can read more about that in “The Bad Pill Kept me from the Good Pill,” but the bottom line is that these headaches came daily; always making me sick to my stomach.

Later in life, I developed severe back pain, the kind that would knock me onto the couch and keep me there for weeks.

All legitimate physical problems. But at some point my brain lost the ability to differentiate a real Chron’s flare-up or back spasm to an imagined one.

In the end, though, it doesn’t matter. It may as well have been one of those things. Because when the mind thinks it is, it has a habit of BECOMING real.

I found an article in About.com that describes the problem better than I ever could on my own:

Any illness that has physical symptoms, but has the mind and emotions as its origin is called a psychosomatic illness. Although you may be told that it’s “all in your head”, these illnesses are not imaginary. The aches and pains are very real, but because your doctor is looking for an actual physical cause, they are very tricky to diagnose and treat. The key is to look for a source of stress in the person’s life that the person is not coping with. By treating the underlying stress and depression, it may be possible to heal the physical problems as well.

For me, it was easy to separate the Chron’s episodes from the tricky stuff described above, since the disease was sitting there for the doctors to see. I was always told mental stress could trigger flare-ups and I guess they did, especially when my parents divorced 30 years ago and a lot of stress over custody ensued. I’m fairly sure the after-effects of my brother’s death set off the last real flare-up in 1986.

But the migraines and back problems seeped seamlessly into the things that were going wrong with me mentally.

Anxiety attacks felt essentially the same as a heart attack, complete with the pain shooting from the chest to the neck and down the arms. Migraines followed. Work stress often sparked migraines and back pain.

While it was difficult to separate other legitimate physical problems from those stemming from mental distress, I can tell you that dealing with my underlying OCD, depression and addiction made a lot of ailments go away.

I’m not sure I can credit it with ending the back problems. Though mental illness most likely enhanced the back pain, that problem was eventually diagnosed as three out-of-whack vertebrae the chiropractor knocks back into alignment every other week. No more imprisonment on the couch.

But these things have gone away — and have not returned — since I got a handle on the OCD and related binge-eating disorder:

–Puking up stomach acid in the middle of the night

–Numbing of the feet

–A strange poked-in-the-eye sensation that would hit me early mornings and leave me with blurred vision for a day or more.

–A dull ache in the left hand, which often got worse as my mind spun out of control with thoughts that it MIGHT be a heart-attack.

–Fatigue that would cause all my joints to ache unless I were to lie down and go to sleep.

–Heart palpatations.

All disappeared once I started to attack the core problem.

The ultimate take-away from all this is that something in your head can cause real, physical pain.

And when you deal with what’s in your head, the pain in the rest of your body can be eradicated.

February 9, 2010

OCD Diaries: The Office Mom

The author salutes Anne Saita, a former co-worker who showed me how to stand up to people and face down my fears — and whose blog is a must-read.

I’ve been reading the blog Run DMZ a lot lately.The main reason is that it’s chock full of excellent content on how to eat and exercise properly. The other reason is that the author is someone near and dear to me: Anne Saita, my former boss at SearchSecurity.com.

She’s an avid runner, an inspirational Mom to her two daughters and to people like me, and one of the best writers I’ve ever seen. [Side note: She sends Christmas cards each year featuring her daughters, and last time my six-year-old saw it he declared: “Wow. They’re really, really pretty.”] The boy is a flirt and knows what he’s talking about.

With her I’ve power-walked along Lake Michigan in Chicago and gallivanted with her on the rainy streets of San Francisco during security conferences.

She literally rescued me from a job that was killing me (because of the late-night hours and the still undiagnosed impact of OCD).

At SearchSecurity.com, she was a nurturing soul. She encouraged me to make time for family, something I wasn’t yet good at. She knew I feared travel at the time, but gently coaxed me into doing more of it. Now I love travel. She showed me what courage is by constantly standing up to the TechTarget/SearchSecurity brass when she felt the brand’s reputation was being compromised by stupid marketing ploys. At the time I often thought she was being stupid. But at the time I was also so obsessed with pleasing my masters that I didn’t know any better.

I always got a chuckle out of her gift for gab, especially when she was offering up explicit details on a medical procedure she was having.

Because of her motherly disposition, I was able to come clean with her in late 2004, when I was inches from a nervous breakdown and realizing for the first time that I needed some serious help. The morning after I had my first appointment with a therapist, I told her about it, along with the rest of my warped behavior. She didn’t flinch. She urged me on, and in the coming months, when I was pushing up against depression and emotional breakdowns, she gave me the room to fall apart and then pick up the pieces.

When I started to react to the pain of therapy and digging deep into a sordid past by embarking on the most vicious binge eating stretch of my life, she saw that the weight was piling on but didn’t shame me over it. I was feeling shame in her presence anyway, because she had once told me that when checking my references before hiring me, the deal was sealed when a former CNC co-worker told her about my singular determination to lose 100 pounds in the late 1990s.

That kind of toughness impressed her, and there I was, losing that toughness as I packed on each pound.

Unfortunately, I only started to gain the upper hand on my demons after she left SearchSecurity.com for another job.

But thanks to the Internet and our two blogs, we still keep in touch regularly.

She’s gone through a lot herself, with physical injuries that kept her from running, blinding headaches that came and went without explanation, and the loss of a job she loved last year, as the Great Recession gunned down millions of jobs.

But she always comes back. Stronger than before.

In the photo above: Anne at the right, with Dennis Fisher, another former [and good] boss and avid runner, after a run in San Diego.

If she didn’t know before how much her friendship means to me, I think she’ll understand after reading this post.

She may also yell at me for revealing a bit too much about her. But then I always did enjoy the motherly rebuke that only she can provide.

February 3, 2010

Helter Skelter

The author admits that his OCD behavior includes an obsession with the Manson Case. Here’s why.

Ever since I was a kid and I first saw the 1976 TV movie on the Manson Murders, I’ve been fascinated. I’ve read “Helter Skelter,” the book by Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, dozens of times.

I own the 1976 and 2004 versions of the film on DVD, along with a documentary called “The Six Degrees of Helter Skelter,” where host Scott Michaels, keeper of the popular Findadeath.com site, takes the viewer on a tour of places connected to the case, including Cielo Drive, scene of the Tate murders:

Why the fascination with such an awful tragedy?

Not because of the brutal nature of the murders. I’ve seen the crime scene forensic photos, and they made me sick to my stomach.

It’s really part of my fascination with history. Like it or not, this is a piece of American history. It’s a snapshot of everything that went wrong in the 1960s, where a counterculture born of good intentions — a craving for peace in Vietnam and at home — lost it’s way because there were no rules, no discipline and there was no sobriety. I agree with those who believe the promise of the 1960s died abruptly in the summer of 1969.

I’m also fascinated because it shows how easily seemingly stable people can be brainwashed and controlled to the point where they would willingly heed orders to commit the worst of sins.

I’ve learned from my own struggles with mental disorder that when a person is at their lowest and they’re looking for purpose, even the sweetest among us can fall prey to a monster like Charles Manson.

It shows the dark path someone can take without help from the right people.

That’s not to say I see myself in these people. I don’t. I could never embrace what they embraced, even when I was at my lowest.

But the bottom line is that these people were controlled, that a defect of the mind allowed this kind of programming to happen.

It has nothing to do with my own struggles with OCD. But since that struggle has forced me to do a lot of homework on the brain and what makes it tick, I can’t help but be drawn to these cases.

This one is a lesson in history and mental disorder all wrapped into one.

How could I resist?

I just hope others who are fascinated by this case are sucked in for similar reasons and not because they glorify what happened.

Unfortunately, the latter certainly exists in society.

February 2, 2010

Rest Re-defined

The author finds that he gets the most relaxation from the things he once feared the most.

Mood music

A strange thing happened to me on the way to recovery: I started finding peace and relaxation in the very things that used to fill me with fear and spark anxiety attacks. [See Fear Factor]

It used to be that relaxing meant holing myself up in the bedroom watching endless episodes of Star Trek. I watched a lot of the news, too, which instead of relaxing me would send my brain into an endless spin of worry about things happening at the far corners of the world.

Lying on the couch all weekend — sleeping for a lot of it — was relaxation.

Then Sunday night would arrive and I’d go into a deep depression about the tasks that awaited me the next day at work.

Writing — the very thing I earned a living from (and still do) — filled me with dread. Oh, I loved being a journalist even back then, but I was always in fear of not getting a story perfect. I would sit on a story for hours; writing, re-writing, polishing and reading it aloud multiple times to make sure it “sounded” perfect.

It drove my co-workers nuts. [See The Crazy-Ass Guy in the Newsroom]

If I had to make a business trip, the heart would pound. I’d obsess about the travel itself and whether I would actually make it there alive. Conferences filled me with dread. What if I didn’t manage to cover every piece of news coming from the event?

Oh, and when writing, it had to be absolutely silent around me. Noise would interrupt the gears in my mind — except for the sound of my voice when reading my articles aloud.

I would go crazy about getting the kids to bed by 7:30 so I could lie comatose in front of the TV. If my wife wanted to talk instead, rage would build inside, though I would try not to show it. I sucked at hiding it, though, and in my own passive-aggressive way, she knew she wasn’t getting through. And yet she stuck around anyway. (See: The Freak and the Redhead: A Love Story]

I’m not sure when things changed. But here’s what relaxation and peace mean to me now:

–Family time. Of course, I’ve always craved being with my wife and children more than anything else. But it used to be that I wanted us all sitting around the house doing nothing. Now I love experiencing things together. Trips with Erin to Campobello Island off New Brunswick, Canada, the mountains of New Hampshire or Newport, R.I. for the Newport Folk Festival. Trips with kids in tow to Battleship Cove, Old Sturbridge Village, The N.E. Aquarium, The Museum of Science. I always cherished my time with them. Now I cherish it more. A lot more.

— Writing. For the life of me, I can’t figure out the reason for this, but writing is relaxing now. Other than when I’m with my wife and kids, writing is when I’m happiest. And I no longer re-read my stuff over and over again. I decided that’s what editors are for. Sure, I’m an editor. But every editor needs an editor. And no, I don’t read ’em back to myself anymore.

–Writing WITH music. In another bizarre twist, I went from needing quiet while writing to needing music. The louder the better. Henry Rollins. Motley Crue. Metallica. Thin Lizzy. Cheap Trick. All perfect writing music.

–Travel. Instead of fearing travel, I now relish it, though I don’t like being away from my family for too long. I start to miss them the second I hit the road. They’re on my mind the whole time I’m away. But I love to go places, see things, experience cities outside my own comfortable Bostonian walls. Last year alone, I visited Chicago twice, Washington DC twice, and went to San Francisco, Nevada, Arizona and New York.

One of the DC trips was in an RV with a group of IT security guys. That was the trip back from the Shmoocon security conference. It’s a 12-hour ride and it’s cramped. But I get to hang out with some of the smartest people in my industry.

Thursday, I leave on the RV for the trip down to DC for Shmoocon 2010. I’ll do a lot of writing for work this weekend. But I’m going to have a blast doing it. I’ll get impatient to be home by Sunday afternoon. I’ll miss my family. But I’ll be a better journalist for making the trip.

Wherever I go, I always try to carve out time to see things, especially items of historical significance. Especially in DC.

I’m determined to take the family to DC this year. There are logistics and financial realities to work out, but it’s going to happen.

I don’t spend much time wondering how I came to enjoy what I once feared. I know the answers.

Erin and the boys teach me something every day about living, whether it’s Erin showing me courage by quitting a steady job to try and make her own business work or Duncan, the youngest son, convincing his older, more skittish brother to go with him on a camping trip with the grandparents because “It’ll be fun, Seaney!” That was a couple years ago. Since then, Sean, who has overcome a lot of fears himself and made his Dad proud, relishes those trips as much as Duncan does.

But above all — and the family examples are a huge part of this — I think the transformation came with my conversion to the Catholic Faith. My bringing God into my life, everything has changed for the better. That includes my concept of rest.

To me, rest is not about lying down and shutting off. It’s about living to the best of your ability. When that living gets scary, I put my trust in God. And that makes everything come together.

Make no mistake: I still have a lot of work to do on these things. But I’m glad to be making the journey.

As Henry Rollins once sang:

No such thing as free time. No such thing as downtime. There’s only lifetime. It’s time to shine.

January 17, 2010

Strong Arm Of The Log

The author admits he stole the title for this entry from an old North Shore Sunday article because, well, he thought it was cool.

See the bald guy at the front of the picture above? That’s Mike Strong, an old friend of mine from the college days. I look up to him today. But there was a time when I hated his guts.

I met Mike back in 1993 at Salem State College. We were both writing for the college paper, “The Log.” We got along swimmingly at the start, as we had things in common. I was from Revere. He was from neighboring Lynn. We both spoke the same salty language.

But something strange happened that first year.

The editor-in-chief position at the paper was filled by election. Mike was running. So was a guy named Mike Murphy, a young-Republican type who was a member of the Student Government Association.

At the time, I was making friends in both camps. But the two camps were distrustful of each other. The path to disaster was paved.

On election day, I voted for Murphy. Truth be told, I did it because I was chummy with him and my brain was conflicted. I regretted the choice from the moment I put the vote in the ballot box. No disrespect for Murphy. I just realized I voted based on friendship and not who was best qualified.

My vote put Murphy ahead. The then-editor-in-chief had the brilliant idea of opening the ballot box mid-day to see how the vote was going. Murphy was ahead. The editor-in-chief decided Murphy would be a disaster and decided to rig the election in Strong’s favor.

He got caught, of course. Another election was held, and this time Strong came out on top. I voted for him this time. But by then, most of the staff were suspicious of my first vote, especially Strong. I guess that meant my being elected managing editor was a laughable thing. There was no way Strong was going to trust me as his managing editor. I didn’t blame him.

The next semester started out as rocky as I expected it would. Truth be told, I was slacking. I was enjoying that I held the position. But I was doing nothing to earn it. Mike eventually called me on it. I resigned and decided to focus full-throttle on writing and reporting.

At that moment, the relationship changed. Over the course of the year, our friendship deepened.

He was a harsh editor. He would toss stories back at you and tell you it needed work. That’s where the North Shore Sunday reporter who wrote about The Log came up with the “Strong Arm of the Law” headline. I don’t thing Strong liked the headline very much. I thought it was excellent.

The article described a revolving door of students who would come in wanting to write, only to flee in frustration soon after because they couldn’t handle the Strong treatment.

I thought it was funny, in part because I knew it was exaggerated. Sure, a lot of students couldn’t handle it, but a lot of students could and did. And they became attached to the Log office and Strong himself.

It’s funny we would be so attached to that office. The place was filthy and constantly smelled horrific because of a leaking grease pipe in the ceiling above that ran from the campus cafeteria.

As a reporter, I dug deep into Student Government affairs in search of corruption. I poured over financial records and made much of a couple junkets members had gone on. Strong kept on me during that story, settling for nothing but ironclad reporting. In the space of 2 weeks, I gained 15 pounds and was waking up in the middle of the night with flop sweat.

You might say that was an early sign of one of my OCD quirks — making myself rabid in the effort to be a people pleaser. I’m glad I got over that habit.

After graduation, Strong and I were in and out of touch. In the last couple years we have been in constant contact, thanks to the miracle of Facebook.

Mike has gone on to do wonderful things. He’s the director of Par Fore the Cure, an organization that, according to its website, does the following:

We honor the lives of those who have succumbed to brain tumors (and, by extension, all cancers) and offer hope to those still affected by cancer. We raise awareness and fund research through contributions to the Jimmy Fund. We run our events efficiently, ensuring our annual donations increase while our guest costs remain affordable. To date we have donated more than $265,000 for brain tumor research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Research in Boston.

Strong’s tireless drive keeps this machine humming smoothly along, and in the process lives are being made better.

We also have Faith in common. Both of us have become devout Catholics, and share stories of our Faith frequently.

I’m not sure I have a point for this tale. I guess he was on my mind because we’ve been talking a lot in recent days about the special Senate election to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat. He’s pushing hard for Scott Brown.

Friends like him give me the inspiration to press on when I’m feeling down. As a result, I’m feeling Up much more often.