August, 2023.

I deal with mental illness. 

I spent a long time denying that. It wasn’t something that was really talked about among my peers, and I think that’s generational. As an 80s and 90s kid / young adult, the famous line from comedian Dennis Leary seemed to be the mantra: “Life sucks, get a helmet.” In other words, shut up, suck it up, and just get on with your life. And while sometimes, “just getting on with your life” is something that one needs to do, having that be applied to mental illness just doesn’t work.

I know. I have struggled all my life with anxiety and OCD, and until the last few years, struggled silently and independently. When I first went to therapy in 2012, I couldn’t even bring myself to tell my wife Kim at first; that’s how heavily the stigma of “needing help to deal with my issues” weighed on me. 

But this summer, things took a turn for the worse, and it made me renew my focus on trying to figure out my triggers. I know that a lot of this stems from my fear of death and dying. That fear isn’t just about the experience of death, although that is part of it. It’s more the idea that I have so many things that I want to do, as well as the big one—that I wouldn’t remain impactful on anyone’s life. That Kim would go on and remarry and would find herself so much happier with someone else. That anything I’ve accomplished would be insignificant and no longer matter.

None of those things make any sense. When I think rationally, like right now when I am writing this, I read back that last paragraph and it seems ridiculous. I love Kim with all my soul, and I know that feeling is returned. I would WANT Kim to remarry if something ever did happen to me, and I’d want her to be happy in that marriage—but just like I know my grandfather never lost any ounce of love he had for his first wife (who passed away in her late 40s / early 50s), she wouldn’t lose any for me. I have touched lots of young lives with my work in the classroom; students from 3 decades ago still keep in touch with me. I have made my mark as a broadcaster in many years as well; I hope that some of that is by encouraging younger broadcasters the way my mentors supported and encouraged me.

If I were to die tomorrow, it would suck, as like I said: there is a LOT of living I want to do….but I would leave a legacy I can be proud of. My logical mind knows and understand this.

And despite my faith, I fear the experience of death, though I am bound to do it. I believe in God, and though I do not attempt to influence anyone’s faith, I have had too many things in my life occur to convince me that God exists. I do believe that death is a process and not “the end”, though I know I can’t truly conceive of what the next part of the process will be, any more than I could really conceive the experience of being a 52 year old man at age 18 (or even 30). However, I believe most people have times of uncertainty—especially anxiety-ridden folks like me—when their thoughts come racing and trying too convince us of things that normally you would never believe to be real. 

I have always had anxiety and I believe I’ve always dealt with OCD as well. I know these have led to unfounded fears.  One of my earliest memories is playing as a child of 5 or 6 at a friends house—I even remember his name: Robby Brooks. He lived close to my neighborhood and I used to go there to play. One day when we were riding big wheels in his driveway, I spotted an insect on my thigh. I had seen insects: flies, ants, even spiders, and was not afraid of them. So I had no reason to fear this bug that had landed on me. I went to touch it and felt a pain I had never experienced to that point in my life. I don’t know if it was a wasp or a hornet—even today I can’t tell them apart—but I know it was one of them, and it terrified me. From that point on, I’ve had a massive fear of stinging insects (except for honey or bumblebees). If one is in the car with me, I’ll pull over at the first safe place and try to shoo it out. One time about a dozen years ago, it took me 30 minutes sitting in the parking lot of a local pizza place until I was sure it had flown away. I can’t sit in the screened porch at my house now if a hornet or wasp is in there—I hate killing insects (or anything else, in part due to my own feelings on death) but I often make a needless exception here. The fear just takes over.

I don’t know if it was before or after this that my fear of heights occurred, maybe the same way. The first time I remember being terrified of heights was around the same time as the hornet incident. I was at the Boston Museum of Science, and we were there with some family friends. We were on the third floor, which really isn’t all that high, but to me it seemed like the top of a high-rise. There was a glass window below a high railing—it would be impossible for anyone shorter than an NBA center to accidentally fall over it, and even he may have a hard time. But I could see down, and for some reason, it freaked me out to the point that the same view today—even at 3 stories—causes mild discomfort. I know that I had an incident at the Smithsonian with my parents that went the same way, but I don’t remember if that was before or after. In any case, that fear has remained. I know that the fear is irrational: the window at the top of the Prudential isn’t going to break and I’m not going to tumble 60 stories through it. The elevator doors won’t open with no elevator, or suddenly crash down: I’m pretty sure they can’t do that these days. I won’t stand next to a railing on a balcony on the cruise ship I was just on last week and all of a sudden tumble to the ocean below. I know these things CAN NOT AND DO NOT HAPPEN. But I still stand at the back of a glass elevator, didn’t approach the 12 foot high fence at the top of the Space Needle on our honeymoon, and so many other things. Even seeing videos or pictures of people doing bridge or ledge walks at the top of high places, decked out in tons of safety equipment, gives me the sweats. I played a video game about 15 years ago when the main character has to walk across a large pipe 10 stories above a factory floor—I almost couldn’t do that! These are all irrational fears, but they all hit me hard. (For some reason, I have no fear of flying—in fact I enjoy it. I think it’s because for some reason, my mind understand the overall safety of airplane travel, and my first experience as a young boy on a plane I recall as being a good one. For that reason, the sensation I have of flying or even of zip-lining is never the same as the sensation as the elevator doors opening on a high observation deck and walking out).

But back to death, as that fear has impacted me more on a daily basis, and I think is the foundation for my mental health struggles. I remember quite vividly the first time I experienced death in a personal way. My paternal grandmother passed away from a stroke/aneurysm right about this time of year in 1979. I had returned home from spending time with my maternal grandparents at Camp Wulamat in New Hampshire, somewhere they rented each year (and a place that would become an important part of my life). My parents sat me (and maybe Brian my younger brother as well, I forget) and told me that Grammy had passed away. It wasn’t something I could really understand at that age; that wasn’t the part I remember. What I recall is my dad’s grief; he was sobbing in a way that I had never heard him or anyone cry before. I knew what it sounded like when I cried, and when my brother cried—but never my dad. And his sobs were painful; I could discern that even age (almost) 9. I remember relating to that the first time I heard myself make the same sounds a dozen years later—which I’ll get to.

I think that set the tone for me that life was in 3 ways unsafe—wasps, heights and death. And of those, the one that scarred me the most was death, no doubt. (I want to make sure I include here that I don’t think my parents handled sharing the news of Grammy’s death was done badly in any way. They had no way of knowing the impact it would have—how could they? I wasn’t wearing a sign that said “I have been born with tendencies in my brain of anxiety and OCD. Hell,  until recently, I don’t think I have understood it myself, outside of the basic “this hurts and I want to avoid it” level.)

I remember other deaths after that. I remember a swim teammate being murdered with his family by his uncle when I was about 11. I recall a high school classmate killed in a car accident delivering flowers during our senior year. I remember when I got the news that a floor mate of mine at St. Michael’s College died in a car accident after my freshman or sophomore year.  I used to think that those didn’t impact me much at the time, and I’m not sure they did. But I am not as willing as I used to be to say unequivocally that they didn’t, either—I still remember their names: Doug Austin, Richie Roberts and Dennis Hebert. Neither were close to me, but I knew them and I remember.

But I remember well the one that sent me into this long, slow spiral that has lasted 3 decades, most of it with me being oblivious to the cumulative effect that stress and anxiety has had on me. That was the death of Tammi Stokes, my friend from St. Mike’s, in late 1992.  I could write a lot on Tammi, but I am not going to do that here—I’ll keep it short, I hope. Saying Tammi was a “friend” is ridiculous: she was my first true love. We never were an official couple and we never were intimate sexually, mostly due to the fact that I was dating someone else and was unable to break that relationship off though I knew I wanted and needed to. I am convinced my anxiety had a lot to do with me staying in the relationship both before and after Tammi’s death. But for about a year, Tammi and I were inseparable at home and school. Whenever anything happened, good or bad, I told her first. I remember when and how we net, I remember what her rooms looked like (both college rooms and the one at her home in Yarmouth). We talked daily; even when I worked late nights that summer, she wanted me to call her at 1 AM and talk if we hadn’t spoken yet that day, and I usually did. They weren’t long conversations—they didn’t need to be—but they did often end with “I love you”.  Tammi knew I loved her, and believed, as I do in retrospect, that a relationship was inevitable: we expressed as much the last time we were together after doing some Christmas shopping a few nights before she died. I didn’t tell her outright, but my plan was to drive to New Hampshire a couple days after Christmas and break up with my girlfriend—sometime between the holiday and her birthday. I knew the timing was heartless, but I also finally understood that it was something I needed to do.

Tammi died on December 19, 1992 in a car accident driving home from school with her parents. I had left the day before, and would have taken her home as well, but I had a small car and she was NOT a light packer! There just wasn’t space. I know I have wondered “what if” sometimes, but thankfully not often: one thing I don’t believe I have done is hold myself responsible for Tammi’s death. But the loss was unbearable, and I found myself making those same sounds my dad had made, time and again, for months afterwards.

I’d always cry alone. I don’t know why that was, exactly, but I think it was to look strong in the face of adversity to my friends and even my family. I know now this was bullshit: I was hurting badly, and I had a great support group in both areas, but I was never one who wanted to ask for help or admit weakness in any area. But not only did I not reach out, I pretended everything was fine. Worse than that, I did not break up with my girlfriend, but instead latched on to her. We developed a co-dependency that resulted in our marriage and later, our unsurprising divorce. I carry some guilt and shame over that, though not as much as I once did after reshaping and reframing it all through therapy. But even today it is a regret I have—not the divorce, mind you, but being married at all, since I entered that union under false pretenses. I didn’t do it on purpose—I had no intent to hurt anyone, but because I was swimming in grief and co-dependency, I ended up really devastating someone I may not have fully loved, but did (and do) care about.

During that time, I masked my pain in a lot of ways. I threw myself into teaching, which I was good at and made me feel valued. I started to broadcast high school sports, and through excellent mentorship and opportunities, became good at that: as good as I am as a teacher, and it’s made me feel equally valued.  There were other less healthy ways I coped as well: nothing overly self-destructive, but at the same time, nothing that moved me any closer to understanding the root causes of my issues nor any ways to properly deal with them.

The point I’m trying to make here, maybe in a too-verbose way, is that my anxiety/grief combo went either unchecked or badly checked for 2 decades, My coping mechanisms, if that’s even what they can be called, did not work. I suffered with severe anxiety and OCD that helped to demolish a numerous post-marriage relationships—not entirely on my own, but certainly I and my issues played a significant role in their end.  And throughout that time, I didn’t realize that the cumulative effect not dealing with any of my trauma was piling up—by the time I got around to taking control of it, it was like snow after a Nor’easter.

I started in therapy in 2012 because I was feeling anxiety symptoms that made me feel like I was having a heart attack. I believe that was triggered by school stress—that was one of my worst years as a teacher—because the rest of my life was going well. I was married, in love and happy, or so I thought, so why was this happening to me? In hindsight, I know this was intensified the next year when a former girlfriend, Renae, died of colon cancer. She had hidden the extent of her disease so well that while I knew she was being treated, I did not know the extent of her illness until she was re-hospitalized and quickly entered hospice care. I visited her several times; she was always upbeat and acted like this was no big deal, like she’d be out and back home in a few days. That was until the last time I saw her, gasping for air, courageously but vainly fighting for her life. I wasn’t there when she died, but I know I had been watching her die, and I think that’s where my health anxiety moved to the next level.

I became terrified of any new feeling or sensation and often believed that these were the start of a terminal illness. I became concerned when anything unexpected happened with my health or body. A hemorrhoid? Gotta be colon cancer. Lost some weight? Gained some? Cancer for sure. A lipoma I developed? It’s cancer, and even an ultrasound and doctors telling me it’s a lipoma didn’t deter me. Even when I had the lipoma surgically removed, I told myself it was for cosmetic reasons and it somewhat was, but I also know it was to get me to quit fixating on it. (The surgeon who removed it confirmed that it was a harmless lipoma, and I later learned I have a family history of them, but not disclosing it to many people kept me ignorant to that)

All of those started my compulsion to look up my symptoms online, which is a TERRIBLE idea. Technology is great, but in this case, all roads would always lead to cancer and an early death based on the symptoms I was feeling. But I could not stop. By 2020, I had many classic symptoms of hypochondriasis:
  

-frequent and repeated body scanning
-looking symptoms up online-always believing I had a serious illness, even with NO symptoms to base that on
-looking for health reassurance from friends, family, especially my counselor. I tried to do that subtly with my friends and family, but I did it.
-MAJOR sleep issues: I took THC to help me sleep that I know that was masking the problem by making me sleepy, not dealing with why I wasn’t sleeping.
-as mentioned, not accepting multiple doctors’ reassurances
-seeing a doctor for things I didn’t need to see a doctor for: a slow-healing rash was caused by shaving; I thought it could be skin cancer. That was what started me talking more specifically about health anxiety in therapy.

The anxiety that I was treating clearly involved OCD, but I didn’t know that. I thought OCD was limited to washing your hands a lot, or germaphobia, or freaking out over a bad test score or the idea that a door was unlocked (that last one I do as well). I have come to realize that it is way more than that, manifesting in many different ways.

Now to the present—in July, I started feeling a not-constant, but frequent need to urinate. I have always had what I called a nervous bladder, coming from being a bed-wetter as a child. I know wetting the bed embarrassed me, even at a young age, and I was determined to stop it. So I trained myself to notice the absolute first sign of a need to urinate, so when I felt it, I’d wake up and get to the bathroom. That impacted me in waking hours, but only somewhat; if I was involved in something, I wouldn’t notice it. Unless my bladder is truly full, for example, I never need to urinate during a hockey game EXCEPT between periods, when the game has stopped. Suddenly, I will feel an urge and relieve myself while the Zamboni is out there. I won’t feel another urge until the next period ends. I have been able to drive long distances, teach several hours in a row, sit for hours for shows, sporting events and plane rides without any issues. But if I feel it, my mind reverts to 7 year old bed-wetting Rob: “GET TO THE BATHROOM”.

This hasn’t caused me much inconvenience save for the rare times I’ve been full and couldn’t find one. But starting in late July, I began to notice that I felt the need to urinate not long after I left the bathroom. I said “felt the need” as I didn’t actually need to: often times there would be very little urine in my bladder to empty—my excretory system had just begun to refill so there was little to nothing there. But I felt it. The funny thing is that it came and went over the course of the day: if I was on the road in my delivery truck, I often didn’t feel it. Standing and talking to someone also put it out of my mind. But the second there was a lull in my interest, there it would be: the phantom need to go. This had been my on and off issue—usually on—throughout July.

At first, I reverted to my body-scanning ways. You know the expression “Try not to think of an elephant”? It almost always results in one thinking of an elephant. It’s the same with “try not to worry about that urination sensation feeling”; it just makes it worse, and I’m noticing something that doesn’t really exist. That’s what I have realized about OCD: it’s cumulative, and it can fool your brain into sending out physical symptoms for no reason other than the stress it’s under. I know that’s what’s happening to me, as I was tested just in case for a UTI—twice—and both doctors said that the urine showed I was in perfect health. No blood, no infections, nothing. There is no physical reason I should have had the symptoms, but it was there—and I know now it’s not uncommon for people who deal with the mental health issues I have dealt with to have the same malady.

Here’s what I think may have triggered it: In mid-July, I attended the funeral for a young woman who had died far too early. I knew her, though not well: she was the wife of my principal who I consider a good work friend and colleague. Seeing the grief took me back to both Tammi and Renae. Combine that with the approach of school, where the last 4-5 years I have had more apprehensive of returning as they haven’t been as positive ones for me as many others, brought out those new, cumulative symptoms.

My medication was recently changed to Zoloft, and I am refocusing on cognitive behavior theory, which I now understand a lot better, and is not just “talking through problems”. I know I need to work hard along with the medication, which I have great confidence in and have felt positive effects, despite some difficult initial side effects, for me to beat this invisible monster. I have not been scanning or looking up symptoms, and my phantom urinary urge has all but disappeared. I find myself beginning to swat obtrusive negative thoughts away: I lost a few pounds, for example, as my appetite has been suppressed. I have looked up enough WebMD entries in the past to know that “unexplained weight loss” is a common early sign of cancer. I got that thought a few times, and could dismiss it with “That though is irrational: this weight loss is fully explained as I haven’t been eating, taking a new medication, had a recent physical exam,  prostate screening and urine test where my doctors confirmed I was in excellent health.” And the thought went away.   It tries to come back, especially at night, and it had impacted my sleep for a while—not uncommon when adjusting to a new medication—but I have been good at dismissing it.

I’ve also renewed my focus on my therapy. It’s taken me a while to realize exactly where we’ve been going sometimes in some of our sessions, but I see very clearly why I need to approach my #1 fear in a much more head on way. I am not afraid of doing that; I am looking forward to it.

This was not easy to write, yet it was SO fulfilling to write. I cried, sometimes hard, reliving some of the parts I wrote about. But the more I wrote, the more I was smiling through those tears, feeling triumphant. It’s taken me the better part of a decade, but FINALLY I think I’m on the right track to truly dealing with what has been a lifelong issue. I’m confident in my medication and the cognitive behavioral therapy of which I now have a clearer understanding. Maybe for the first time ever, with God’s grace I am ready to start healing.  I truly hope that if anyone else is in a similar situation, they are also able to shake the stigma. You are NOT alone, and you can get help and hopefully start feeling the way you should feel—and not with the constant hum of anxiety in your mind.

For anyone who took the time to read this, I thank you.

Rob

For an update written a year after I wrote this, please click here: Update: A year later (August, 2024)