I had an obsessive-compulsive episode one week ago tonight, on March 6th, C.E. 2014.
I didn’t recognize it at first; I thought it was just another day of modest self-disappointment caused by lack of focus and over-scheduling. Those days happen, and usually an hour or two of good focused exercise is enough to bring me back to my senses.
Not that day. That day, I couldn’t get my failure to finish the day’s self-imposed job training assignment out of my mind. It kept buzzing in my head through the late afternoon; it kept muttering during taekwondo class; it sent my brain spinning after practice. It felt like my brain was going round and round and round and round, racing down a spiral stair, chasing after that one detail that I had failed, I had not done my job, and now I was risking the loss of a place to live and work—all this despite the fact that my deadline was almost entirely self-imposed. It was so bad, I left my taekwondo studio nearly half an hour early despite having my black belt test two days later.
It wasn’t until I was leaving Yong Studios, around 19:55 at night, that I realized: I know this feeling. I experienced it on a regular basis between the ages of four and ten. This is the feeling of an obsession, and it was driving me toward a compulsion: namely, the compulsion to complete some part of the work I had failed to do earlier. In a very real sense, once I got home, I would be obsessively-compulsively working.
It’s hard to explain this to one who hasn’t experienced it. The running torture is a good analogy; it is a torture where the accused is made to run around a track without food, water, or rest until he or she either confesses or collapses. It is an insidious thing, because it does not seem like torture; there is no rack, no whip, no thumbscrew, only the repetitive, exhausting pounding.
An obsessive attack is like that: the brain runs itself in the same circle, around and around that focus point, over and over and over and over and over and over and over until the afflicted either surrenders to the compulsion or collapses from the effort of fighting. It makes no difference that the victim knows his obsession is unrealistic; the brain has its track, and the mind runs its course.
Terror.
That’s the best description I can give for my reaction. I’ve known my whole life that I suffered from OCD and that I am a high-strung person, but for years I believed that I finally had the demon beaten. For some of them, perhaps I did. Now I face the very real possibility that, rather than defeat the demon, I have simply redirected it; and that is a terrifying thought.
There are some advantages, I suppose. If nothing else, it provides a powerful motivation to meet my responsibilities. My brain, quite literally, will not allow me to escape those tasks I (it?) deems important. My job, hobbies, and friends need never fear neglect.
Yet there is a danger, and a very real one at that. To begin, my motivation is almost all negative; I work because I flog myself, not because I seek the result. More important, this represents a loss of autonomy. I cannot change my path at will, nor can I escape my past plans, even when those plans prove impossible. Flexibility is almost impossible, for how can I be flexible when my mind flagellates itself for even the slightest deviation from my plans?
The only solution I’ve found, thus far, is to categorize. Only when I dissect and outline and factualize, apart from any and all emotional baggage, do I feel able to grasp the issue without panic. Yet it seems I must go through the panic before undergoing the divorce, and any deviation requires some excuse.
It works. I can survive this way. But I do not want to spend the next ten years at war, dissecting all details, excusing each deviation, analyzing every choice. It is a stiff life that leaves, inflexible, cold. It would make Kant proud, I suppose: he and I would have got along splendidly. But that is not the life I want. I want to live, to laugh, to love, to cry, to grieve. I want to skip my workout without feeling an urge to skip bread at dinner, I want to leave work early when the doctor calls, I want to take the time to meet a friend or colleague or lover in the cafe without analyzing how it might affect my night. I want to live, not plan to live. I have made great strides towards that goal in the past four years, yet this last episode, and the week following it, showed how far I have yet to go.
