Curve Balls

As many of you already know I stopped working in December. I had a nervous breakdown in November which was long overdue. I had some commitments to follow through with regarding holiday parties so after an inpatient stay I attempted to muddle through a couple more days of bartending. It was blatantly obvious from that experience that I was no longer physically or mentally able to run a business any longer. 

Mental Illness had plagued me since the age of 16, I had tried everything I could think of to cope with it and keep it from being apparent to others. After over 33 years of hiding it (ineffectively) I once again sought treatment. For months I saw a counselor and was treated with medications. I found a once overambitious 49 yr old bedridden with overwhelming anxiety and depression. These however were just symptoms much like my manic work ethic, prior issues with alcohol, drugs and other mechanisms of avoidance.. I knew at that point I was no longer going to be able to run from my disease. Much to my own disservice I was not completely honest with my therapist and progress was not imminent. The initial thought was that I had Schizophrenia and I was treated accordingly. It wasn't until one day during therapy that I chose to be brutally honest at the insistence of my wife. It was then that I was diagnosed with severe OCD. 

I had no problem accepting the diagnosis as I had suspected it already. Unfortunately my type of OCD is particularly troubling and terrorizing. Many people associate OCD with the need to be orderly and clean. While this is true for some sufferers, it also takes on a myriad of other very unpleasant forms One of which is the inability to escape unwanted and paralyzing thoughts of doing harm to others or believing one has the urge or desire to do so. This is to some degree the category I fall into,  The other trap of OCD is that the thoughts themselves are virtually unstoppable. The thoughts do not reveal the character or initiative of the individual but are quite the opposite. So at age 16 when I began having troubling and uncontrollable thoughts, I picked up the bottle.