“Roll your focus.”

In television, that’s what a director will tell a camera operator whose shot looks slightly unfocused.  (Of course, your typical television director will probably throw in a few other, more colorful words as a bonus, but that’s beside the point.)

Lately, I think focus is what has been missing.

Focus in my personal life, which I’m pretty much used to; focus in my spiritual life, which I’m not particularly used to; and in my professional life, which disturbs me greatly.

Some of you might stop me and say, “Oh, yes…this is nothing…this is absolutely normal at your age.  You’re catching that typical mid-life crisis thing or that on-the-verge-of-40 funk we’ve all heard about, even though 40 is supposed to be the new 20.

I can assure you that I don’t feel a year-and-a-half away from my 20th birthday.

Remember Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho?  There’s a great snippet of conversation between the rich homebuyer, Ted Cassidy, and Marion Crane, the restless secretary, right before she steals the money:

CASSIDY:  Are you unhappy?

MARION:  Not inordinately.

That’s a great line, because in saying almost nothing, it seems to say a great deal.  She’s neither satisfied nor miserable.  Just in between.  If it were a word, and wasn’t such an annoying non-word, I might even suggest meh.

Depression and anxiety can cause a lack of focus.  Other times, a lack of focus can cause anxiety and/or depression.  I’d like to be able to just roll my focus, but I’ve yet to find the damn focus ring.

I recently purchased a daily devotional called Solo.  It’s from the same people who put out The Message bible, which I like a lot.

It is based on a classic style of lectio divinia, which involves reading, thinking, praying and trying to prompt a real conversation with God rather than just scanning through pages hoping something will jump out at you.  I’ve never tried anything like that before — I only know what lectio divinia is because I read the introduction and got that explanation.

But it sounds like an interesting approach, so I’m trying to make more time to go through that and see what’s waiting.

If I come up with anything profound, I might write about it here.  Otherwise, I’ll just quietly go on and try to find a little sharper image of the world around me.

Maybe I’ll find that blasted focus ring sooner than I think.

A few weeks back, I spent several weeks in something of a funk.  That’s really nothing all that new if you know me personally.  But there was perhaps a higher undercurrent of general dissatisfaction than normal.

Part of it came from a brief episode of hypochondria.  It took two visits to the doctor, during which he assured me, at length, both times, that there was absolutely nothing to worry about.  Sure enough, now, the little problem I was so worried about being the start of some terrible condition is completely gone as if it never existed.  Guess it was a sinus-related thing after all.

Part of it came from work-related frustration.  There is always work-related frustration.  Anyone who works in local television has it.  Anyone who works in any form of media has it.  Hell, anyone who has a job of any kind has it.  The thing that was frustrating me most is a little pet peeve of mine that relates to malfunctioning things not being fixed fast enough.  But the problem is that I’m not always the most reasonable person:  if something goes awry, I want it fixed now.  Not tomorrow.  Not next week.  Not after I send an email.  Now.  Trouble is, there are fifty other people with their own short list of things they want fixed now.

There were some personal issues in the mix, too.  No need to talk about them here, because I couldn’t go into enough detail for them to make any real sense, anyway.

The result of all of these minor annoyances, and yes, I can admit that they’ve all been far too minor in the grand scheme of things, is that I have felt stressed out and burned out.  Generally disgusted.  Somewhat unmotivated.

I’ve written before about a teacher’s piece of advice that came completely out of the blue one day but has rang true many times in my life.  Sometimes, taking the advice is easy.  Lately, for me, it wasn’t.  I needed to be in control of these problems, I told myself.  Part of me actually didn’t want to let any of it go, because I liked being melancholy.   Those of you who have never suffered from any kind of depression won’t understand that, and I know it; you’ll just have to take my word for it that there are times when a depressed person feels more comfortable being depressed than content.

Two weeks ago, I was at church and I ran the lights for the service.  Afterwards, I approached my friend Archie, one of my pastors, and just asked him to add me to his prayer list for when he had time over the week.  Archie put his arm around me and said, “Let’s pray now.”  So we did.

I’ve had a harder time since that day getting back into that funk.  Which is both a really, really good thing, and a slightly bad thing.  I don’t want to be down about things in general at the moment, but as I said, there are times when that is my comfort zone.  In praying with Archie, I seemed to come away with some level of peace I wasn’t honestly expecting, and, perhaps, a slightly different perspective on how unimportant a lot of those frustrations had been.

So now, as part of me wants to just slip back into sulking mode, another part of me finds that very difficult to do.  I’ll admit that it’s a very odd way to come to the lesson, but I am reminded of an old saying:  “Be careful what you wish for!”

So I am trying my best to adopt a new attitude starting today.

I’ve been quite frustrated lately in a variety of directions. So I am making a concerted effort to just “get over it,” a trick that does not come easily to people who suffer from various anxiety disorders that make it something of a challenge to let go of things.

There has been a slight change — although I’ve not let it feel so slight much of the time — at the old workplace involving one of my responsibilities. It was one that I enjoyed, but one that was admittedly taking a little too much of my time. I feel silly saying this, but I think I actually experienced the five stages of grief when the task was reassigned. Maybe I didn’t hit all five; I don’t recall bargaining for anything other than to go on doing what I was doing without any change (which isn’t much of a negotiation, unless you’re George W. Bush). It’s entirely possible that I hit anger before denial. (And likely after as well.)

But I know that I have reached the final stage: acceptance. It’s okay. It’s less stress for me to have to deal with on a daily basis. That’s a good thing. (And no, I’m not just saying that to convince myself: I’m convinced already.)

I’ve also been dealing with other frustrations, including one of my biggest pet peeves: broken things that remain unfixed. Things change, I am often reminded. Old systems that are no longer efficient get replaced by newer systems that promise to be at least as efficient. Sometimes, newer technology isn’t so efficient because it means jumping through additional hoops to get the same things done.

I hate that. If it slows me down, it’s not better. It’s only slower.

But there comes a point at which the old systems become too expensive to fix. There are few things that get me more fired up than having the same problems continue because a problem everyone knows about just keeps right on going. Fix it! Now!

I’m trying to get over that, too.

Some things aren’t going to get fixed. They’ll be replaced. By things that aren’t as efficient in certain ways.  But by things that generally have a better chance of getting the task accomplished in the end.

And as much as I’d like to wallow in the aggravation, because we anxiety sufferers tend to find some perverse pleasure in wallowing in such things, I have to move forward. I have to learn to embrace something different. Even though it will certainly cause a new set of problems. (New things always do.) I have to accept the fact that some things won’t be able to be done as easily or quickly. So I will have to be the one to adapt. (Technology always makes us adapt to it rather than the other way around.)

My friend Archie, a pastor at my church, has recently started a blog, and his latest post is called “Here’s to new beginnings.” Archie and his wife, Rebekah, are moving to California later this year, and in that post, he talks about the thought of looking forward to making changes he wants to make and a move as an opportunity to make them:

“But then the thought hit me… If I’m not starting that stuff now, I’m probably not going do it out there; just because I’m in a new place doesn’t mean that I change on the inside. BUT on the other hand- why wait to start out there? God tells us in scripture that his mercies are new EVERY DAY. So here’s to a new beginning on life… today.”

Here, here.  I’m trying.

Today.

Across the nation, mental health organizations are offering free screening programs as part of National Depression Screening Day.

The screenings are designed to detect depression, bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.  The program also helps educate people on signs and symptoms of depression and suicide.

Click here to find local sites participating in National Depression Screening Day.  If you think you may need to participate, then please do so.  There’s no reason to feel ashamed or alone.

Panic attacks could be a predictor for heart attacks, according to an Associated Press report. In a study of 3,000 women, those who reported at least one panic attack in a six-month period were three times more likely to suffer a heart attack within five years.

The hypochondriac in me ought to be in overdrive right now, but curiously, it isn’t. I think I know why. Maybe it’s because I had my first panic attack about 33 years ago, and in six and a half “five years laters,” I still have managed to not have a heart attack or stroke despite the additional risk factor of being overweight.

My anxiety is better now than it used to be. My weight problem is better now than it used to be. While there’s still work to be done on both, I’m making progress in the right direction.

I hope the hypochondria section of the old brain remembers that.

Here’s a fun little quiz, if somewhat embarrassing in its results. Do you dare?

There’s a 74% Chance That You Need Therapy

You almost certainly need therapy. And there’s nothing wrong with that.Lately life has not been easy for you. Why not let a therapist help you sort things out?

Do You Need Therapy?

A funny thing, cause and effect.

Sometimes you identify something that’s going on around you and you figure out exactly what’s causing it. Then you realize that that result wasn’t the end of one situation, it was simply the start of something else.
Curious.

I had a discussion with my weight loss counselor this afternoon, and we discussed why I thought I was backsliding a bit on the diet. (I’ve gained about six pounds from my lowest weight. Ugh.)

I mentioned a lot of the familiar excuses reasons, and we talked about a wide variety of things. I mentioned at one point that I wasn’t blogging as much as I typically do. I think the slowdown is because I haven’t felt as though I had a lot to say of late.

“Maybe,” he countered, “if you didn’t slow down on the venting, you’d have a lot more to say.”

I hate it when they’re right.

Many of us, at some point during our school “career,” encountered a bully. A handful of us might actually have been the bully the rest of us had to deal with. Despite the belief that bullies are just a normal part of life, parents should pay more attention, according to a new study on the subject. Continue reading “Bullying and Suicide”

I visited an online forum for sufferers of agoraphobia, panic attacks, and related conditions. I don’t have agoraphobia, the fear of going out in public, but I do have social anxiety, the fear of being in crowds of people. And I’ve definitely experienced my share of panic attacks; they’re never fun.

Anyway, one of the posters complained about a recent episode of a reality series in which a “viewer tips” segment answered a question about someone’s fear of leaving the house. When the writer asked what he should do, the response was that he should put a box over his head before leaving the house. I get the joke: if the person has the box over his head, he won’t realize that he’s out of the house. Of course, he won’t realize when he walks into traffic, either, so it doesn’t strike me as a particularly funny joke.

It struck the person who posted the mention of it even worse:

“I was offended by it! It’s like they were making fun of people like myself that can’t leave the house, I wonder if the person who wrote in actually is agoraphobic, I doubt, someone would want to be made fun of like that though! Anyway just wondering other peoples thoughts…..”

My first thought was that she used far too many periods in her ellipsis. There should only be three. If they end the sentence, there should be four. Never five. But that doesn’t answer her question, so I neglected to mention it.

I did read the four responses that were posted before mine. All of them unanimously supported her offense to the comment. Some feigned equal amounts of outrage over the insensitivity of the joke. Two of them threw in the point that I would make: that anyone who would make such a joke clearly doesn’t understand what it is like to experience such anxiety.

Here’s a portion of what I wrote in response:

“Am I offended? No. Not at all. I suspect that someone probably made up the question and the answer to go along with it. Or, if it was a genuine question, whoever answered it has obviously never gone through a panic attack.

“The point is, it’s clear that whoever made the remark just didn’t know what he was talking about. It’s not worth getting yourself so stressed out about. After all, stress only leads to more anxiety. Don’t let their uninformed words raise your blood pressure. Really, there are more important things to worry about. Just chalk this up to someone not thinking before they spoke.”

It seemed like a reasonable response to me. But maybe the original poster didn’t take it that way. Here’s what she had to say:

“I am not getting stressed out about it and I have the right to be offended by what was said, I just wanted to hear other people’s opinions! I don’t think the question was genuine, because the whole [segment] is meant to be stupid and a joke! But it’s not very funny to make fun of something like that and they shouldn’t of put that on TV!”

The right to be offended? Is that a right? I’ll have to check the Constitution on that one, but I don’t recall anything about Freedom of Hurt Feelings in the Bill of Rights.

I could have left it alone, but I decided not to. Besides questioning her on her assertion about having the “right” to be offended, I said this:

“I agree with you that it isn’t funny. I don’t see any humor in it at all. But there are people who laugh at things I think are just plain stupid, so sometimes I wonder whether I’m the one with no sense of humor.

Sure, you have a right to your opinion, and no one — myself included — said otherwise. You also asked for other people’s opinions. I gave you mine. You said you wanted other people’s opinions, yet you seem to be arguing with me as if I’m wrong and you’re right.

The point is, while I agree with you that it wasn’t funny, I don’t know why I’d waste my time being offended. It was stupid, it was a dumb joke. But not all jokes are funny to all people. With all due respect, I don’t know why you would let yourself get so offended that you’re still willing to argue the point with someone who doesn’t see it as being as big a deal as you do. I just don’t see what that accomplishes.

To me — and you said you wanted to hear what others thought — I have a long list of things I worry about and get upset about on a daily basis. I don’t need a one-time joke on some television show to add to that list: I have quite enough to get anxious about as it is.

That’s my opinion.”

It seems to me that what offends us is really up to us. The first step in becoming offended by something is allowing yourself to be offended by whatever it is.

There are some people who seem to want to offend as many others as possible. I’m not one of them. Still, in the more than three years of blogging, I’ve managed to offend a few people here and there when it wasn’t my intention to do so.

Don Imus said something stupid, incredibly stupid, on the radio. It’s probably a safe bet that those who are most likely to have been offended by Imus’s style probably weren’t listening the day that he called that girls’ basketball team a bunch of “nappy-headed hos.” I wonder whether any of the same people would have been offended if they had heard comedian Chris Rock joke that there is “nothing a white man with a penny hates more than a n—– with a nickel.”

Is one funny and the other insulting? Or vice versa? If it depends solely on who is saying it, then it’s not the words that you really have a problem with. Offensive should be offensive; a comment that is inappropriate should be inappropriate no matter what the color, or mental condition or size of the speaker. When you reduce it to the written word, that equalizes things a bit: you have to look at the words themselves, not the speaker.

But even so, you have to decide whether you are “offended” or not by those words.

I’m a fat guy. True, I’ve managed to lose about 48 pounds or so on this diet program I’m on, but I know I’m still fat. When I lose another 45 or so, to get under 200, which is my goal, I’ll probably still be overweight. I can choose to be sensitive to every fat joke there is, or I can check to see whether the person who makes the fat joke is fat or skinny and then decide.

I’ve battled depression and anxiety for years. I can either be insulted by any joke that in some way makes light of mental illness, or I can wait to see whether or not the person making the joke happens to battle the same conditions I do, and then wear the appropriate amount of insult and hurt feelings like some sort of badge of honor.

Or, I can learn to loosen up a bit and stop wasting a lot of time with all that “processing” for every comment I hear. We either value free speech or we don’t.

On the most recent Patrick’s Place Poll, I asked about a double standard with regard to potentially-offensive language in the entertainment industry. The results were somewhat interesting:

Should black entertainers who use racially-charged language be held accountable the way “shock jock” Don Imus was?

48% - Yes. They are at least as responsible as people like Imus, because they are perpetuating the stereotypes that others feed on.

16% - Yes. They’re more guilty of contributing to prejudice than people like Imus.

12% - No. They’re just trying to “reclaim” words.

12% - Yes. They’re part of the same problem.

8% - No. It’s the same as what Imus did, but he shouldn’t have been punished so harshly.

4% - No. If you have ever been a victim of prejudice, you should have an extra excuse to say whatever you want and not be held accountable.

It is somewhat disturbing to see that there is still that tired old “reclaiming words” argument. Let’s face reality: blacks have been using such words for years in an effort to “reclaim” them. If it was going to work, it would have by now and no one would even raise an eyebrow when someone uses such words.

It’s also a little disturbing to see that the option suggesting that anyone who has been a victim of discrimination should be able to have extra license to say whatever they want. I think the Rutgers team targeted by Imus showed considerable grace and strength of character by not attacking Imus in similar fashion. I hope those ladies sent a message to that four percent.

I think that if we’re going to go on some kind of moral witch hunt, then everyone — no matter who they are — who is guilty of the same “offense” should get the same punishment. Prejudice is prejudice, no matter who commits it. But more importantly, I think we as a society need to learn that sometimes, rather than trying to dictate what we can or cannot say, we need to learn to get over ourselves and stop wasting so much time being offended by what others say out of ignorance.

We know who we are. We know what we are capable of. We should stop trying to define ourselves by what others think we are. How would they really know what’s on the inside of anyone but themselves? How would any of us?

President Franklin D. Roosevelt faced a Depression-weary nation in 1933 and said that the only thing to fear was fear itself.

It turns out that for many people, fear itself is quite enough!

A recent article at CNN.com talks about the fear of fear putting people’s health in jeopardy. People who are more sensitive to physical symptoms of fear and anxiety may be more susceptible to anxiety disorders. I’ve talked about my own anxiety before, and what it’s like to have a panic attack. You are convinced, as it’s happening, that your life is about to end. Your heart races, you feel dizzy, you break out in a cold sweat, get chills, and you feel like you are literally going to drop dead at any second. The room begins to spin. You want to pull yourself away from anyone for fear of someone noticing that something is wrong.

This study has a second component: to determine ways to help patients who are particularly sensitive to anxiety symptoms get over those fears, and with them, their higher risks for anxiety disorders.

I sure hope that they’re able to do so; I wouldn’t wish an anxiety disorder on anyone.

I’ve been feeling under the weather lately, and I decided to go to the local “doc-in-a-box” during my lunch hour. They asked me about my symptoms, and I gave them the laundry list: congestion in my head and chest, coughing, sore throat, slight fever at times, some general aches and pains and fatigue.

They made me get on the scale, a step I was hoping to avoid on this particular visit…no such luck. Yes, I need to get on a diet. Having given up a gym in my move back to South Carolina has cost me a lot of lost pounds. All of them in fact. I’m actually in the red now. Damn!

Then they took my blood pressure: 120/72. Considering I was under a lot of stress, because it’s sweeps, we were having several critical pieces of equipment malfunctioning at the station, and I was in a doctor’s office, that’s nearly a miracle. I’m lucky I take after my mom in the blood pressure department.

My temperature was 98.8, but for me, that’s a little high. My average is more like 98.0-98.2.

Then nurse comes at me with a one-sided Q-tip and tells me to open wide. I’ve never
had a throat swab before, and it’s not pleasant, thanks to the gag reflex. But whatever they were testing with that little procedure came back negative. Then she sent in another nurse to draw blood.

“Draw blood?” I asked, undoubtedly with a raised eyebrow. “Draw blood for what?”

“I want to test your white cell count.”

Oh. I guess that’ll tell them something. A high count is bad, right? Or is it a low count that’s bad?

As I pondered that, another nurse came in to draw blood. She tried the right arm first, got the needle in the vein and found that the vein wasn’t willing to hand over a drop. So then she apologized and came around to the left arm. I warned her about my ulnar nerve repositioning surgery because that nerve that used to be going down the back of my arm around my elbow was moved around to the inside of that arm. She didn’t hit the nerve, thank goodness, but still didn’t get a drop of blood from that arm.

“I’m sure I have some blood in here somewhere,” I observed.

She then got a little spring-loaded lancet to prick my finger. It made a hell of a noise, sort of like a potato gun going off. But she got her blood — make that my blood — finally.

After about an hour — literally — the doctor comes in and tells me that my white cell count is high, which means I have an infection.

“That’s all,” I thought, but did not say. “I knew that when I came in.”

He listened to my lungs and said my chest sounded completely clear. That’s a relief, at least, while the clock is ticking. My lunch hour is taking two-and-a-half hours today.

He gave me some antibiotics and a decongestant/expectorant/cough supressor and then assured me that I was not going back to work.

“Yes I am. I work in television, it’s sweeps, we’ve got equipment on the fritz, and I’m going back to work. I won’t stay long, but there are a few things I have to do.”

He didn’t seem happy, but there are some things that are out of my control, and sweeps is one of them. If I could control it, my station would always be number one, even if we aired nothing but color bars and I’d just stay home in bed and not worry about it.

He gave me a prescription for more antibiotics, then told me to drink a lot of fluid and get lots of rest. No problem.

That’s what the weekend is for, isn’t it?