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Turning Mental Disorder into a Superpower

Instead of fighting some mental disorders, such as OCD or ADHD, picture yourself accepting and even embracing them. Then learn to use your disorder to your advantage.

It’s kind of like Luke Skywalker learning to use and control the Force instead of it controlling him, or Superman learning to control his super-senses.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/KFr3ih6Xu_8?list=PLsa4SxpfFe_q8QcwjC3kru7fW9y8U0Rm1

This won’t work for every disorder, of course. Some are more serious than others, like PTSD and schizophrenia. But Edward (Ned) Hallowell, psychiatrist and co-author of Driven to Distraction and Delivered from Distraction, has advocated for years that some disorders can be an advantage, if approached correctly.

In my battle with my own demons, it’s an approach that works.

I’m not the only one. A few years back a friend told me,  “Dr. Hallowell shaped a lot of my perceptions about ADHD and how to live with it rather than fighting it.”

Hallowell has written about mental disorder being the stuff legends are made of. The thinking is that you have to be a bit crazy or off-balance to do the things that change who we are and how we live. He often uses ADHD as an example, but it’s also true of people with OCD, like Harrison Ford, Howie Mandel, and the late Joey Ramone.

Early on in my efforts to get control of my life, one of my biggest struggles was that I didn’t want to completely rid myself of the OCD. I knew that I owed some of my career successes to the disorder. It drove me hard to be better than average. I needed that kick in the ass because being smart didn’t come naturally to me. I had to work at it and do my homework.

There was a destructive dark side, of course. When stuck in overdrive, the OCD would leave me with anxiety attacks that raised my fear level and drove me deep into my addictive pursuits. That in turn left me on the couch all the time, a pile of waste.

My challenge became learning to develop what Hallowell calls a set of brakes to slow down my disorder when I needed to.

My deepening faith has helped considerably, along with the 12 Steps of Recovery, therapy, changes in diet and, finally, medication.

You could say those are the things my brakes are made of.

I still need a lot of work and the dark side of my OCD still fights constantly with the light, but I’ve come to see the OCD as a close friend. Like a lot of close friends, there are days I want to hug it and days I want to launch my boot between its legs.

But I am in a happier place than I used to be, so it’s a trade-off I’m willing to accept, even if gets me into trouble sometimes.

BiPolar by EddieTheYeti

“Bipolar” by EddieTheYeti

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Therapist Shopping

A few months ago my therapist retired and moved to warmer environs in the south. He said I was managing my OCD well and that I didn’t need therapy until the autumn.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/Ils9GXqU03c

That last appointment was in the spring, with the season’s increasingly long periods of daylight, the environment I function best in.

Now it’s late October, with shorter days, and the seasonal issues are starting to kick in. Sunday I started getting chest pains and Monday I was breaking out in a sweat for no good reason. I’m familiar with these symptoms. It usually starts as heartburn and then my OCD runs wild with thoughts that I might be having a heart attack. When that worry increases, the sweat appears.

It’s a classic anxiety attack.

I used to get them all the time, but in recent years they’re few and far between. When I get one, it usually means I’m experiencing some big stress in my life.

I thought about what might be causing it. All in all, life is good. My wife and children are healthy. I love my job. Most things are status quo, except that we’re still helping the kids adjust to life in a new school. But that’s been an ongoing processes and hasn’t kept me up at night. So what’s the deal?

Of course, that’s what therapists are for: helping you yank out the underlying issues you can’t see on the surface.

I’ve been shopping for a new therapist for a couple months now. It hasn’t been easy. I’ve called several that I researched online. Most haven’t called back. The rest weren’t the right fit.

Fortunately, I have great friends looking out for me. One friend, herself a mental health specialist, is working her contacts and getting me names. From that list, I may have found the therapist I’m looking for.

Wish me luck.

patient therapist

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Navy Yard Shootings: The Stigmatizer’s Wet Dream

With last week’s terrible Washington Navy Yard murders, politicians are preaching the importance of better mental health services. In the process, stigma building has reached disturbing heights.

Mood music:

This massacre, like Sandy Hook and Aurora, Colorado, before it, was perpetrated by a troubled soul with some degree of mental illness. Navy Yard killer Aaron Alexis had told authorities weeks before that he was hearing voices in his head. Aurora shooter James Holmes had colored his hair red and was dressed head to toe in black tactical gear when he murdered people. After he was arrested, he told police he was The Joker. Adam Lanza had a history of deep mental illness when he grabbed his mother’s guns, killed her and headed to Sandy Hook Elementary School.

As a result, the media is sinking its teeth into the crazy factor, the notion that if you’re mentally imbalanced, you might be the next mass murderer. The NRA, in an effort to deflect renewed calls for tougher gun control, suggests the problem is that too many homicidal maniacs are running loose. NRA Chief Wayne LaPierre went as far as suggesting more of the mentally ill need to be committed.

What LaPierre and others are saying is “If someone is mentally ill, they are a potential threat to public safety.”

Whether they they really believe that or not is debatable. It’s true that recent shooters were deeply disturbed emotionally and mentally. But the words LaPierre chose paints everyone with mental illness as a dangerous lunatic and they build an undeserved stigma.

My struggles with mental illness are well established. It’s the reason I started this blog. At my lowest lows, I never considered picking up a rifle and wiping out a school. I know many, many people who have struggles similar to mine. I don’t know of a violent soul among them. They include business leaders, cops, doctors, friends and family.

Suggesting these tragedies are about the need to register mentally ill citizens in a database and commit them if necessary is as stupid as suggesting that tougher gun control laws will prevent more mass shootings. It hasn’t worked in the past, and it won’t work now.

Recent shootings didn’t happen because we have an epidemic of crazies on the street. I don’t even think weak gun laws are to blame. They happened because somewhere in the sequence of events, someone didn’t do what they were supposed to do.

Lanza’s mother kept a lot of guns around the house, even though she knew how disturbed her son was. She could have kept the weapons locked up and out of sight. Instead, they were easily accessible at the moment her son snapped.

Alexis had called police a week before the shootings and told them he heard voices he feared were “sending vibrations through his body” and were out to hurt him. Police questioned him, and then notified the Navy police. Naval police sat on the information, and Alexis held on to his security clearance, ability to carry a weapon and access to the Washington Navy Yard.

Along the way, people with the authority failed to follow the most basic of security protocols.

Maybe it’s time to stop debating whether the problem is too many guns and too many crazies, and demand those responsible for security do their jobs better.

DC Shooting Suspect

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Let’s Talk About Mental Illness

An old friend and former workmate, Steve Repsys, has started a new community on Facebook called Let’s Talk About Mental Illness. If you have ever suffered from a mental disorder, I urge you to join and participate in the discussion.

Mood music:

I first met Steve nearly 16 years ago when I started my run as editor of the weekly newspaper The Billerica Minuteman. He had just started as a reporter. Neither of us knew at the time that we had mental illnesses — OCD for me and generalized anxiety disorder for him. It would be many years before either of us was diagnosed. In the meantime, we worked together in an office in Chelmsford, Mass. I was the boss and acted like it.

I was always stressed about getting the paper done by deadline. Quality didn’t really matter to me. OCD will do that to you: Getting the task done always takes priority over doing it right. Steve was the whipping boy, the sole reporter. I pushed him hard, nearly to the breaking point. He never let me down. But along the way, he would work so hard that his mind would go into loops. One loop involved a worry about finding an apartment. Another was about whether he would get a promotion. All normal things to worry about, except that he was clinically unable to stop it.

I carried on the same way about other things. Whenever the going got tough, we would both bitch about everyone who made it possible.

During the small windows of downtime, we would convene in my apartment a few steps away from the office and play Star Wars Trivial Pursuit. Star Wars was very important to us back then.

Steve eventually went on to another role in the company, and I went to The Eagle-Tribune. We both settled down and had kids. And in recent years, from different states, we’ve come to grips with our mental diseases.

Steve and I reconnected on Facebook a few years ago and it was clear to me that he was in the middle of a storm I had already passed through. He knew he had a problem and set about dealing with it. Because I write this blog, he has regularly sought me out for advice. I’ve seen the good and ugly of his struggle up close and watched a year ago as he hit bottom. He has since made awesome strides forward and went public about his experience in June. The response he received has been overwhelming and positive, much as I experienced at the birth of this blog.

That inspired him to start his Facebook page. I’m proud of him for doing the work to get well and for wanting to help others.

“I had signs of mental illness five years ago after the birth of my second daughter,” Steve wrote on Let’s Talk About Mental Illness. “Finally things became so bleak that I was forced to come to terms that I was suffering from a mental illness and I wanted to be around for my wife and two daughters. Admitting to myself I had a problem was the hardest, but the best thing I could have done.”

“This page is meant to give others hope and realize that they are not alone,” he continues. “If there is one thing I have learned is that by opening up and talking about our inner demons, the less scary they become.”

Let's Talk About Mental Illness

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Control Freak-Out

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

Mood music:

[spotify:track:44sz0rNbTA687rs9CYi0IN]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wanted to punch him.

I saw red.

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

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

So what’s my problem now?

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

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

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

I’m working on it.

I handle it better than I used to.

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

If I wait an hour, it’ll change.

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Another ‘Crazy Mike’ Facebook Page? Jerks.

Last year, I found a disgusting Facebook page making fun of someone with a serious mental illness. The site was taken down, but now there’s a new page dedicated to the man locals call Crazy Mike.

I want the creator and those who like the page to know something. By embracing such a page, you are making a much broader statement: either that you don’t understand the suffering a person experiences from mental illness or that you do understand but think it’s perfectly fine to tear down a human being who is seemingly weaker than you are.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:55OkffR8hBBf3QnqJAU2gY]

A couple weeks ago, I got an email from someone calling me a scumbag for defending Mike. He scares women and children and should be off the street, the writer told me. What really disgusted him, though, was the idea that Mike is a Vietnam veteran who is sick because of what he experienced there.

More recently, I heard from someone claiming to me Mike’s brother. I have no reason to disbelieve him, but since I haven’t been able to verify it yet, I’ll keep him anonymous. He actually alerted me to the new Facebook page and verified that Mike is a vet.

“Mike is indeed a Vietnam War Vet, serving as a field medic during his tour,” the man wrote. “He was born in May 1950, putting him squarely in that unfortunate group that was drafted or enlisted during the height of the war.”

Now that I’ve captured two different sides, I’ll say this:

  • Whatever his past, the fact is that he’s a human being who suffers from severe mental illness. I tend to believe that he was in Vietnam based on information I’ve received over time from multiple sources. But the reason for his illness isn’t what matters to me. It’s that he is sick and suffering and that people find it OK to make fun of him. It’s not OK.
  • Many people have chimed in about their own run-ins with the man, and I have noticed that some folks feel genuine affection for him. As stupid and sad as it was for people to latch on to a page that simply made fun of Mike (some of the comments on the page are nasty and pathetic), I think most people are decent, have good hearts and mean no harm.
  • I’m no saint. I’ve made my share of fun of people like this, and in the rearview mirror, looking back at my own struggle with mental illness, it makes me feel ashamed. It makes me the last guy on Earth who would be fit to judge others for poking fun at someone less fortunate.

We can do better than this.

True, to those who don’t know him, it can be disconcerting to walk into a store with Mike hanging around outside the door yelling at people. Sometimes, fear is justified. Part of my motivation for this post is to make more of you aware that he’s harmless.

To those who want to haggle over whether Mike was in Vietnam, I’d suggest you stop getting sidetracked and remember that no matter what makes a person sick, they deserve compassion and help, not this bullshit.

The jackass who created the new Facebook page should shut it down. And the hundreds of people who liked it should feel some shame.

Crazy Mike

This post is an update of an early post, “A Final Word on Crazy Mike.”

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Out of My Head

Like anyone with a mental disorder like OCD, I spend a lot of time locked in my head. My thoughts will be on what I’m doing the next day or a year out. Or they’re in the past, replaying scenes from long ago. Last night I began the mission to get out of there.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:7yqO8vYeyf8ahnLj9vOZ4G]

It was the first night of my Stress Reduction and Mindfulness class. The instructor is my therapist, though the other students don’t know that. He tells me this is the first class to include one of his patients. I entered a room full of yoga mats, cushions and funny little benches that look like the kneelers they put in front of the coffin at wakes.

“Fuck,” I thought to myself. “Right out of the gate we’re doing yoga.” I’ve resisted doing yoga forever. I don’t have a good reason for that. I guess I think it will just bore me.

In the end, we used the mats for a lie-down exercise designed to make us aware of our bodies and what they’re doing and feeling. A couple people fell asleep.

We practiced eating mindfully, taking a single raisin and staring at it, rolling it in out hands and keeping it in our mouths for a while before swallowing.

We left with homework. Among other things, I have to eat an entire meal mindfully instead of scarfing it down per usual. I also have to take an activity I do almost daily and do it mindfully, taking note of every aspect of the activity as I proceed. For fun, I think I’ll try this while shaving my head.

I can stare at the razor and look at its detail, stop every time I cut myself and study the pattern of the blood dripping from my scalp before washing it off. I’ll take note of how the water feels when rinsing off the cut. I can note the difference between the feel of a clean razor and one that’s getting clogged with my stubble.

I could also practice my guitar mindfully, noting the feel of the strings and the sounds I get as I randomly launch chords from up and down the neck. I’ve already discovered that you can’t really play the guitar without being mindful of every step. I can’t, anyway.

The ultimate goal is to be able to pay attention to every detail when I’m talking to someone or doing any number of other daily tasks where my mind tends to drift.

This should be interesting.

Mindfulness

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Is Humor Reinforcing the OCD Stigma?

I got an interesting response to some older posts about OCD gag gifts — particularly one about OCD hand sanitizer. The reader was worried these gifts and other brands of OCD humor would only reinforce the stigma monster that keeps people like us in the shadows.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:2TJRQj7XJvGBY4ZzIue2ei]

Here’s the comment, from Arthur Lawrence:

I can laugh at it, and so can you. We both have OCD. And laughing at the OCD “monster” does indeed weaken it. This is a therapeutic application. What bothers me are the millions who have no idea what OCD really is.

For them, products like this continue to trivialize OCD and help keep those millions uninformed about this disease.

Should we now have “Tourette itch powder”? It would be about as appropriate as this product. Again, I don’t dispute what you say about laughing at one’s own “mental defects.” But I do know that OCD research and treatment are still in the dark ages, relatively speaking. And products like this, out in the general public, aren’t going to get people to believe that OCD can be as debilitating as cancer. It needs to be taken as seriously as cancer.

Mocking it will almost certainly not help that to happen.

Arthur makes an important point.

I still firmly believe that humor is an important coping tool for someone learning to manage depressive mental disorders. Abraham Lincoln, a chronically depressed man for much of his adult life, relied on it during the darkest days of the Civil War. He reveled in telling jokes and amusing stories. It helped get him through the pain, long before antidepressants were created.

But the stigma around OCD is still alive and well. I see people all the time talking about “their OCD” when they’re really talking about their Type-A personalities. That doesn’t bother me much, but I know other OCD cases that get wounded by such talk. OCD behavior is still the stuff of ridicule and belittling. People will still make fun of a person’s quirks, which embarrasses and hurts that person when they inevitably find out they’re being made fun of.

Would people find the gags funny if they were about cancer or Tourettes? The truth is that we think differently about physical diseases than mental diseases. We understand the ramifications of physical diseases better and they’re more socially acceptable in that regard. And when a physical disease is a lethal one, we have much less tolerance for jokes about it. Yet people will make jokes about all manner of things for all kinds of reasons.

In the final analysis, I think most health issues need to be addressed with a combination of sober education and humor. People need to know the suffering real OCD brings about, just as people need to know the anguish a cancer patient experiences.

But we need to laugh at our conditions once in a while, too, because the laughter makes the disease appear smaller, even if it’s only for a few moments.

THE OCD CHEF

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Oh, The Guilt

I’ve always been driven by guilt. I used to hide it because with guilt comes shame and with shame comes deceit. In more recent years, however, I’ve tried to use it to become a better man. Results are mixed.

 

My inability to process guilt started at an early age. Growing up Jewish, I’d get Hanukkah gelt (Yiddish for “money”) during the Festival of Lights. Not understanding Yiddish, I thought it was called Hanukkah guilt. “Why the fuck am I being handed guilt as a present?” I’d ask myself. Only in adulthood would I realize how a simple misunderstanding of language would shape my thinking.

Since then, guilt has been the gift that keeps on giving.

Guilt over not talking to my mom for six years. I have it in spades. Not because she’s blameless, but because I know that some of what’s gone wrong is my fault. And while I’ve written about things in childhood that made me unhappy, I haven’t given her credit for what she did right. But that’s a subject for another post.

Guilt over binge eating and other addictive behaviors. There’s been plenty of that over the years. After spending $30 at McDonald’s and another $20 at Dunkin’ Donuts on what used to be a typical binge on the drive home from work, I’d stuff the empty bags under the seats. Erin called them guilt bags, and she would eventually find them. (For more on that, see “The Most Uncool Addiction” and “Anatomy of a Binge.”)

Guilt over being a bad pet owner. In my early 20s, I had two pet rats. They were very loving and gentle. I went on a trip to California and forgot to ask someone to look after them. When I got back, I found them both dead. To this day I feel horrible about that. One lesson I learned from that: Don’t leave the tank you keep your pets in on the floor of your closet, because you could forget they’re in there.

Guilt over money. Guilt has also weighed me down when I’ve mishandled money (math was never one of my stronger traits) or lied to my wife over things I was ashamed of.

Guilt from letting some relationships languish over the years. In some cases, people are difficult and I need to keep my distance for self-preservation. Other times, though, I’m just too lazy to pick up the phone.

Parenthood guilt. I always try to be the parent who’s always gentle, listens carefully to my children’s every word and helps them deal with life’s big issues. I sometimes fail because I’m too tired or too lost behind a computer screen.

They say guilt is a useless emotion, that it causes you to waste all your time worrying about things you can’t control or change. That’s true to a point. But I’ve learned the value of guilt over the years as a tool to make me a better man.

For example, these days I’m trying to spend less time online and more time playing Monopoly and other games with the kids. It’s only a start, but it’s something.

Remembering food guilt has definitely kept me from further binges. And while my money-management skills still leave much to be desired, I don’t spend like I used to.

As for the stuff about my mother, another attempt at reconciling is not out of the question.

In its proper place, guilt is a good awareness tool.

Definition of guilt

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The Freak in the Newsroom

A tale of terror in newsrooms across the state of Massachusetts.

I love my job. I love the subject matter (IT and physical security, emergency preparedness, regulatory compliance). I love the people I work with, many of whom I’ve worked with at other points in my nearly 19 years in journalism. And I love my daily dealings with some of the smartest, passionate security professionals on the planet.

But it wasn’t always this way. Work used to be something to dread, binge eat and get sick over. And I had no one to blame but myself.

For me, one of the main triggers for obsessive-compulsive behavior was work. I was driven to the brink by a desire to be the golden boy, the guy who worked the most hours, wrote the most stories, handled the most shit work and pleased the most managers.

Golden Boy

I got my first reporting job at Community Newspaper Company, covering the school system in Swampscott, Mass. It was part time, but I put in more than 40 hours a week. Not terrible. I liked the people I worked with and felt pretty dang good about having the job even though I was still one course shy of earning my degree. But I spent much of the time in fear that I wouldn’t measure up. My head would spin at 3 a.m. as I tried to come up with things to write about and prove my worth. My weight soared from 230 pounds — already too much — to 260.

Sullen Boy

The next job was full-time as reporter for the Stoneham Sun. I pretty much worked around the clock, trying to show the editor, managing editor and editor-in-chief (all friends to this day, BTW) that I was THE MAN. Late in my tenure on this beat, my best friend killed himself and I binged as much on work as on food to bury my rage. It didn’t work. I gained another 20 pounds and wrote a column about my friend’s suicide, naming names and describing the method of death in way too much detail. To this day, his parents and sister won’t have anything to do with me, and I can’t say I blame them.

Lynn Sunday Post and Peter Sugarman

This was a bad year. My best friend had just died and I was given the task of editing The Lynn Sunday Post, a newspaper that was on its deathbed. You could say I was chosen to be its pallbearer. There was barely a staff. Few people read it anymore. My only day off was Monday. And my only reporter was an eccentric guy with a cheezy mustache: Peter Sugarman.

He infuriated me from the start, writing epic stories dripping with his personal passion and political agenda instead of the objective writing I was taught to follow in college journalism classes (Peter would call it my J-School side, and it wasn’t a compliment).

It was only natural that he would become my new best friend, another older brother who was always tring to get me to see the light (his way of doing things).

He and his wife Regina were a constant presence from that time until he choked to death in May 2004, three weeks after I started my SearchSecurity job. But while he was around, I learned a lot about using my writing as an agent of change, a force for good, and about thinking about the readers instead of the higher ups I had been trying so desperately to please.

Another person put in the right place at the right time by God.

Interlude

Much of the same behavior while editor of The Billerica Minuteman, though there was some level of stability during this period.

Deep Slide

During this period I was night editor at The Eagle-Tribune.

Before I go further, I should mention that what follows is HOW I SAW THINGS AT THE TIME, NOT NECESSARILY HOW THINGS ACTUALLY WERE.

For a year and a half of that I was assistant editor of the New Hampshire edition. It started off well enough. But this was a tougher environment than I had experienced before. Editors were tougher to please and often at cross purposes with each other. Part of the task I was handed was to be the bad cop that called reporters late at night to rip them over one perceived injustice or another. I sucked at it. I mostly came off as an asshole, and it never made a difference for the better.

The most insidious, bitter part of the experience was during my time on the New Hampshire staff. The managing editor I worked for directly seemed to relish cracking down on reporters, putting them down and ripping their work to shreds. And he expected me to do it the same way, exactly as he did it.

To be fair, the guy wasn’t without a soul. He tried to do the right thing most of the time and genuinely cared about the people under him. But he was also consumed with the idea that all the other editors on staff were out to get us and undermine our efforts. Everyone was a back-stabber. Whenever I had the impulse to collaborate with editors from other sections or let some things slide, he came down hard.

More than ever, I was being the editor he wanted me to be and not who I really was. I called reporters at all hours. I put them down. I fought with other editors and hovered over the page designers on deadline.

I also came as close as I had to an emotional breakdown at that point. I started calling in sick A lot. I’d wake up with the urge to throw up. By mid-afternoon, the urge switched to binge eating.

That managing editor eventually moved on and I returned to the night desk. By then, I was burning out, a shell of the man I once was. By the time I left there, everyone on staff was evil in my eyes; the cause of everything that had gone wrong.

I was wrong for the most part. Fortunately for me, most of my co-workers from the period looked past my insanity and today many of them are among my dearest friends.

Working a Dream Job But Trapped in the Mental House of Horrors

For the next four years I wrote for SearchSecurity.com, part of the TechTarget company. The job was everything I could have hoped for. Excellent colleagues, a ton of creative freedom and plenty of success came my way.

It also coincided with another emotional meltdown as I started to wake up to the mental illness and the fact that I needed to do something about it.

I think I hid it from my colleagues pretty well, except for my direct editor, Ann Saita, who became something of a mom to me, a nurturing soul I could spill my guts to. I’m pretty sure God put her in the right place at the right time, knowing my time of reckoning was at hand. During this period, I untangled all the mental wiring, started taking Prozac (See “The Bad Pill Kept Me from the Good Pill“), officially became a devout Catholic (more on that later) and finally started to feel whole.

Managing Editor, CSO Magazine and beyond

My current job is truly the best I’ve had. I get to work with people like Derek Slater, Joan Goodchild and Jim Malone, who was my editor-in-chief during my first reporting jobs at CNC and one of the folks I went out of my mind trying to please. A side note that amuses me greatly: Peter Sugarman used to drive him nuts, too.

The most noteworthy thing about the last year and a half is that a personal focus has been to get a handle on the eating. In 2008 I discovered OA and started to regain the upper hand. I quit flour and sugar and started putting all my food on a little scale. My mind cleared.

Here’s the best part about my present situation: From Day 1 at CSO, I have not once worried about being a people pleaser. I’ve just focused on the projects I believed in and my bosses have been content to let me have at it.

I don’t work much more than 40 hours a week, and the funny thing is that I’m more prolific now than I ever was before.

Business travel I used to dread has become a joy. Speaking in front of people has gone from something to fear to something to do more of.

Now, five years into my stint at CSO, I’m headed for a new challenge, focusing all my writing and editing skills on the security data at Akamai Technologies.  I feel no dread, only happiness and glee.

And to think — All I had to do was get out of my own way.
Eagle-Tribune staffers