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When Life Changes, So Do Your Coping Tools

I used to post in this blog at least once a day. Now I struggle to write a couple times a week. What’s going on?

Mood music:

When I started this blog, I was writing one or more posts a day, almost every day. Then it was four times a week. Then it was three. Lately, I have a hard time finding the motivation to write.

It’s odd, because writing has long been my most important coping tool for navigating life.

It’s not writer’s block or a lack of ideas. I have a backlog of topics I wrote down some time ago. I’m realizing that the problem — if it can be considered a problem — is that the contours of my life have changed, requiring me to rethink my coping tools and how best to use them.

I’ve experienced big changes in my life these last few months. Three people who were each a major force in my life passed on, and I found myself responsible for cleaning up and selling the family business. And in the last two years, the nature of my work has changed.

As a result, all my tools — the guitar playing, writing, breathing exercises, prayer, and so on — are in flux. I still use them, but the amount of each is changing.

Especially the writing.

My love for writing is as strong as it’s ever been. But as the busyness of my days has crowded out the time for it, I’ve realized that the world isn’t going to end when I don’t produce for this space. I don’t need to type a post every day for writing to be a critical tool.

It’s also true that a lot of my writing time has shifted to work projects. I’m working on the kind of research, intelligence gathering and report writing I’ve long wanted to do. But it’s a more demanding kind of writing, so I’ve shifted a lot of my strength and discipline there.

The family business stuff is something else entirely. It sucks up a lot of time and there are many moving parts. I’ve been learning a lot about the law, real estate, environmental remediation and insurance.

I also need to do my best for the family, and it’s become necessary to cut some of the writing time I used to have.

I don’t have a plan yet outlining the new order of things. My breathing exercises and praying is pretty much unchanged, I still see the therapist every other week and I take my meds on schedule. The guitar playing and personal blogging are moving targets. Some weeks I play a lot, other weeks hardly at all.
The writing has been even less predictable. For now, I’m scheduling posts for Monday, Wednesday and Friday each week.

All this will sort itself out and before long I’ll have a new tool-using structure that works for this new world I find myself in.

In the meantime, if you don’t see me posting, don’t worry. I’m fine — even better than fine.

I’m just busy living.

Spectre of the Past by EddieTheYeti

“Spectre of the Past” by EddieTheYeti
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Nana’s Desk

It’s been more than two years since Nana Ruth passed away. The other day, family went through her house, looking for possessions to be preserved. Like this desk:

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Nana Ruth did a ton of writing at this desk. She was a prolific diarist and churned out a lot of letters. I’m going to keep the tradition alive my doing a lot more writing here.

I’d like to think she’d be pleased about that.

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Emily Dickinson: Proof You Can Be a Happy Recluse?

Much has been written about the reclusive later years of poet Emily Dickinson. Eventually she rarely left her room, where she sat and wrote thousands of poems that didn’t see publication until years after her death.

Mood music:

https://youtu.be/bV-dWhYklqE

During a tour of her house last week, people in the group speculated on why she wouldn’t leave the house in those years. Did she suffer a mental affliction or phobia? Probably.

But whenever I look at her life, I’m struck by the fact that, despite the likelihood of mental illness, she stayed sharp, stayed creative and seemed happy.

No one will ever be able to tell us what went through her mind in those years. She shared herself in her poetry, to be sure. She wrote a lot about death, no doubt about that. One of her most famous lines was, after all, “Because I could not stop for Death — / He kindly stopped for me.”

But by most accounts, she wasn’t depressed or crazed. She didn’t live in darkness. The first thing that strikes you when seeing her room is that she had huge windows that bathe the room in light and offer spectacular views. In her day, before all the structures and foliage that’s there now, she had a view that likely stretched for miles.

She reveled in the nature right outside her windows. She wrote about adventures had by animals, birds and insects. Each blade of grass was a wilderness:

Fame is a bee.
It has a song—
It has a sting—
Ah, too, it has a wing.

I don’t profess to have any definitive answers on her state of mind. How would I know, anyway?

Reclusiveness is rarely seen as healthy. I know that if I don’t frequently see something of the world, I start to go bananas. I also know that there were times in my teens and 20s when I’d retreat to my room for long periods, and I was not in a good mental state.

But if the stuff that came off of Emily’s pen was any indication, home was all she needed.

Portrait of Emily Dickinson

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Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys

Being a metalhead, one would expect me to hate a group like The Beach Boys, yet I’ve played them nonstop for a month now.

Mood music:

I started taking an interest after seeing a preview for the film Love and Mercy, in which actors Paul Dano and John Cusack play Brian Wilson during two stages of his life — the 1960s and the 1980s. I started playing the whole Beach Boys catalog, particularly the album Pet Sounds, widely viewed as Wilson’s masterpiece.

That album was a commercial disappointment when it came out in the mid-1960s. People expected to hear more songs about girls and surfing, but instead they got a series of musical pieces in which Wilson exposed his vulnerable soul for all to see.

I’ve been listening to Smile a lot, too. That album was supposed to be the follow-up to Pet Sounds but was shelved as the band — and Wilson’s fragile mind — fell into chaos. Wilson ultimately finished the album a decade ago and toured behind it. (There’s a great documentary about Smile on YouTube.)

Now I’m reading Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson by Peter Ames Carlin, which chronicles his life from childhood through his many years of madness and finally to his 21st-century resurgence.

The attraction is that I can relate to Wilson’s struggles. I never heard voices in my head like he did, but I’ve suffered the kind of depression that kept me in bed, and I know what it’s like to overeat when depressed. His choice to explore his feelings on Pet Sounds was groundbreaking at the time and brave. It inspires me.

It’s also a great musical history lesson. Reading about the way Wilson wrote and recorded gives me a lot of insight into the techniques we’ve seen in more recent decades.

I won’t stop devouring heavy metal, but it’s fun to expand my musical horizons.

Love and Mercy Poster

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The Imperfect Art of Coming Out

As new readers find this blog, they often ask the question I’ve heard many times before: Why the hell did I out myself? Wasn’t I afraid people would blackball me at work? Don’t I worry that I’ll be defined by my struggle with OCD above all else?

It’s a fair question.

Mood music:

First, let’s get the notions of courage and bravery off the table. Some have used those words to describe what I’m doing, and I appreciate that. But I really don’t think it’s that. Like I’ve said before, my grandfather parachuting behind enemy lines at the start of the D-Day invasion was courage.

I’m  doing this more because the point arrived where, for the sake of my own sanity, I had to start being myself as openly and honestly as I can. Honesty can be tough for people who deal with mental illness and addiction. But I decided I had to do better.

Read more on this in “The Liar’s Disease.”

Admittedly, some of the motivation is selfish. We OCD types have overdeveloped egos and tend to go digging for attention. It’s hard to admit that, but it’s the truth. Being open about that forces me to keep myself in check. It’s also an invitation for those around me to call me out on acts of ego and selfishness.

The biggest reason for doing this, without question, is my faith. I realized some time ago that when you toss the skeletons from your closet into the daylight, they turn to dust. Big, sinister stigmas become very small indeed. Then you can move on.

I didn’t arrive at this viewpoint easily. It took years of dirty work.

With my faith comes a need to serve others. In this case, I accumulated experiences that might be of help to other sufferers. Sharing wasn’t exactly something I wanted to do; it was something I had to do.

We’re all in this together. Many good people have helped me along the way. Trying to help someone else is the very least I could do. In the final analysis, we all help each other.

Getting it all out of the head and into this blog has certainly been helpful, so thanks for indulging me.

Did I risk my career to do this? I don’t think so.

That said, I don’t think I’d be doing this if I still worked for The Eagle-Tribune. The newroom’s culture wouldn’t have allowed for it. I have no idea if the culture has changed, but I suspect not.

I’ve gotten a ton of support from those I work with. That was true when I started this five years ago, during another job, and it’s true today, in my current job.

Does that mean everyone should put their demons out in the open as I have?

It’s not going to be the right decision for everyone to make. There are a lot of honorable reasons for people to keep their demons private. In many cases, the veil is what you use to protect others as well as yourself. But my veil blew away in the storm that was my life. Walking forward without it was all I could do.

As the line in Mötley Crüe’s “Home Sweet Home” goes, “My life is an open book, for the whole world to read.”

For my own development as a human being, I think it’s best that way.

Close to My Heart by EddieTheYeti“Close to My Heart” by EddieTheYeti. Read more of my ongoing series with EddieTheYeti.

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Quoted in Forbes Again

For the second time this year, I’m quoted in a Forbes article. Cheryl Snapp Conner and Tom Lowery have been too kind. 🙂

The earlier story was about how mental illness can actually make people stronger in their jobs.

The latest is an article called “Fifty Shades of Effort: The Writer’s Life, and Why We Choose It.” In it, I talk about why I started writing the OCD Diaries, and what, in general, continues to fuel my passion for writing.

timthumb

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Love in the Grammar Trenches

Since Erin and I are both writers-editors, there’s almost a Valentine’s-Day quality to this National Grammar Day. It can be a dangerous thing putting two wordsmiths together in holy matrimony, and yet we’ve managed to keep it going.

How, you ask? I’ve been thinking about that.

A basic truth about people who work with grammar for a living: Put more than one in the same room for long periods and someone gets roughed up. People like us are brutally opinionated when it comes to words, sentence structure and punctuation. Our honesty over said opinions makes us abrasive, harsh, volatile, picky, critical and just about every other unpleasant word you can think of.

The danger is especially palpable when one person is doing the writing and the other is doing the editing.

In talking with newspaper reporters and editors, we all tend to agree that newsrooms are like viper pits. We all slither around looking for someone to bite while trying not to get bitten back. When you get bitten, the venom stings like no other pain known to human beings.

I’m a product of newsrooms. I’m especially difficult, because I also grew up in Revere, a city notorious for mispronouncing the English language. Erin comes from office environments that are more reserved and quiet, but no less volatile. We’re English majors who met at Salem State College (now University), but she edited the literary magazine on campus and I wrote for the newspaper. Though both were on the same small campus, they inhabited two different worlds.

The college paper is in the basement of the student union. Today there’s a nice TV and carpeting in there. But in my day it was dirty and smelly, thanks to a leaking grease pipe in the ceiling (a cafeteria was above us). We swore a lot in that room, and we yelled at each other quite a bit. Across campus, the literary magazine met in the library, a quieter environment, for sure. The newspaper worked in prose. The literary magazine worked in poetry.

In those environments, so different and yet so similar, Erin and I met and started dating.

Twenty years later, we still have our differences in the grammar department. I have no qualms about dropping cuss words into my copy. You won’t find Erin doing that anytime soon. She’s meticulous in her planning, using outlines and heavily polishing. I just dive in with my two typing fingers and go to town, without a filter. That’s gotten me into some trouble.

Also see: “Marital Differences in Style,” Part 1 and Part 2.

Now we’re partners on The OCD Diaries. I write the posts and she edits them. We both plan strategy and design, and she manages a lot of the marketing and back-end tasks my brain can’t always comprehend. We have our share of arguments on the direction of this thing. But taken whole, it works. The resources section and cleaner, more elegant design? Her ideas. The use of sidebars and more sophisticated use of photos? I give her credit for that, too. She also keeps me honest in the writing, calling bullshit when she thinks I’ve written something that doesn’t ring true.

Meanwhile, I push her to try things that are often less focused and rougher around the edges than she’d prefer. I also ensure that she’s listening to more of my heavy metal music. She checks the mood music to make sure the Spotify player is working properly, and I’m amused when Facebook announces that Erin Brenner is listening to Dead Kennedys, King Diamond or Iron Maiden on Spotify.

I think what works is that she’s always accepted my crudeness and I’ve always accepted her critical sensibilities.

In the world of grammar, writing and editing, as in the rest of our marriage, we fill in each others’ gaps.

copyedits

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A Revere Kid Celebrates National Grammar Day. Punk-uation, Anyone?

Tomorrow is National Grammar Day. For writers and copyeditors (my wife is both), this is kind of like St. Patrick’s Day and Easter rolled into one. Erin plans to stay glued to her desk all day, weighing in on all the conversation that comes rolling off the Twitter tongue. Given her job, she has no choice, really.

Mood music:

Being a writer and editor myself, I should be just as excited. But I’m from Revere, Mass., where destroying grammar is a rite of passage. And since I write more often than edit, I’ve developed a rather cantankerous relationship with the copyeditors I work with. Sure, I love ’em and all, but sometimes I can’t help but slip in deliberately bad grammar for fun.

Split infinitives? Love ’em. One-line paragraphs? Love ’em. Saying “love ’em” instead of “I love them”? Love that, too.

Coming from Revere, I usually speak without the use of the letter r at the end of a word when it’s supposed to be there. I also use things like killa and pissa at random.

There was a time when I tried to conform. Once I realized I wanted to write, I chose English as a major and communications as a minor. I buried myself in the art and law of sentence structure, punctuation and even speech. I took a public speaking class specifically to work on saying the r at the end of the right words.

You could say I was turning my back on my Revere heritage.

As I hit middle age, my rebellious streak re-asserted itself.

All that said, I am grateful for the editors in my life, especially my wife, for trying to keep me on the write path. (You see what I did there?)

Happy National Grammar Day, y’all.

SuperGrammar_NationalGrammarDay_01

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How I Spent My Writing Blackout

While prepping this new site, I decided to take a break from writing fresh posts. I didn’t want to live between two sites. Doing this and writing a security blog in my day job can be confusing enough. During this break, I’ve learned some important things about myself.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:4VMAmxsxncyRhZGsT1IQep]

Breaking wasn’t easy for me. Daily writing has been a vital tool for me for a long time now, and while I continued to keep a private journal, I worried about the lack of public communication. The give and take that often results from a post has been immensely helpful to me. Trust me, I learn more from you than you do from me.

I was also getting obsessed with posting a lot of repeat content, because I’ve always had this fear that everyone will forget me if I go away for too long. Call it an OCD quirk or the mark of a narcissist. Both descriptions are accurate.

Though I’ve resumed the repeat posts this week, I did almost no re-posting for a couple weeks.

During that time, we celebrated Mother’s Day and Duncan’s First Communion. I went to California for a security event and spent a lot of time in San Diego and Los Angeles and then spent a very intense but awesome day and a half at my company offsite meeting.

Did I miss the daily dose of posting OCD DIARIES content? Not as much as I thought I would.

A beautiful thing happened: I found that I could go away and abstain from all promotion and not go into a painful withdrawal. Despite little to no promotion, the old version of the blog got just as much daily traffic as it did before. My audience, which has grown from a few dozen to several hundred a day, stuck around, digging through old posts, commenting on several and sharing them with others on their Twitter and Facebook pages. That was reassuring, to say the least.

I also enjoyed some more relaxed mornings.

Writing the daily OCD DIARIES post is usually the first thing I do every morning. During the blackout, I eased into work with a bit more serenity. It was especially nice during the California trip, where I filled the usual writing time with more adventures. I still worked the information security beat hard, writing a bunch of posts in my security blog while there. But I also found some spare time to walk the beach at Torrey Pines in San Diego with former co-worker Anne Saita. I spent the first night in the spare room of her home and got to know her husband, Gilbert, who I’ve heard about for years but had never met.

The drive back to L.A. was long but I didn’t mind. Avis gave me a brand-new Ford Edge SUV to drive, and I hated having to give it back. It was a smooth ride and was loaded with such modern technology as a GPS, a view screen that lets you see what’s behind you while backing up and multiple USB ports for charging the phone and iPod.

Once back in L.A., I walked up and down the Sunset Strip for a bit and went back to work. I spent that night sleeping on an air mattress on the kitchen floor of my friend Mike D. Mike is from Lynn, Mass., and was part of the circle of friends that included Sean Marley back in the day. For the last 23 years he’s been living in North Hollywood. We got some good quality time this trip, and I drove him around the Hollywood Hills to gawk at the homes of famous people and infamous murders, not telling him where we were headed as we drove around.

I was burnt when I got back home and spent much of the first day back crashed on the couch. That’s the sort of thing I don’t do easily, because I have trouble leaving the laptop closed.

Truth be told, I wanted to launch the new blog far sooner, but Erin made me wait. The email needed fixing and she didn’t want it launched until that was fixed.

There was another lesson: to be part of a team effort I need more patience than I currently have. We’re both control freaks in our own ways, and we knew it going in. Now the fun begins.

It was a good break and I’m glad I did it. I learned that I can in fact go away without being rendered irrelevant. I was never irrelevant, mind you, but my brain doesn’t work like most people’s.

I also remembered how important it is to take breaks. That’s something I easily forget in the heat of life.

All that said, I’m glad to be back in action. Now to see if I can use the lessons of the past two weeks to moderate my behavior.