I need to share with you a few thoughts about windsurfing, and the powerful lesson the sport has taught me about living life in general, and battling OCD in particular. It’s a lesson I learned, literally, back in the mid-1980s, when my every spare moment was spent on sailboarding adventures. I learned it metaphorically ten years later, when I found myself pining for the normalcy of those windsurfing years.
So simple, really: Sometimes, to move forward, you’ve got to fall back and trust.
I mean, there you are standing on your board on a windy day, lifting the mast-and-sail rig out of the water, and the only way to harness the wind is to lean back with the rig and all your weight—often until your head is just inches above the water—and wait that split second for a steady breeze to fill your sail and launch you ahead.
Such is a windsurfer’s leap of faith. And such, I came to learn in early 1998, is the requisite process for getting a handle on OCD.
I had spent much of January and February “leaning back” and throwing my full weight into maneuvers that demanded of me every ounce of my trust. First there was the annual Yosemite trip with our extended family, during which I forced myself to avoid asking Samantha a single OCD question for three interminable days, all the while fending off one of Doubt’s most vicious attacks in years. Then, a few days later, there was the half-hour KFBK tour I gave Nicole’s entire first-grade class, all of them banging into each other and our equipment at every step of the way. And then a couple weeks after that: the Comstock Club luncheon, where I broke my cardinal no-contact-while-eating rule when actor/director Rob Reiner handed me his wallet with pictures as we discussed our kids over lunch.
Lean back. Trust. Wait for the wind.
Splat!
And that’s the thing. Like the windsurfing novice who hasn’t yet mastered the falling-back technique, I kept coming up short, and very wet, again and again. Instead of launching myself forward, I wound up flat on my back. Instead of feeling empowered by my success in fighting off checking compulsions in Yosemite, I let Doubt play catch-up with me from the moment I got home, hounding poor Sam for days, worse than ever. Instead of riding the momentum of my station tour for the kids, I got myself so worked up toward the end that Nicole’s teacher later asked Sam if I was okay—He just seemed so nervous. And instead of relishing my luncheon chat with Rob Reiner, I let myself get caught in three OCD episodes before even leaving the parking lot afterward.
Splat. Splat. Splat.
Fortunately, as any sailboarder can attest to, at some point along the learning curve, you do begin getting the knack of harnessing the wind. You learn to control your faith-based fallback, to let this powerful unseen force scoop you up from the brink of impact and rocket you ahead at breakneck speed. You succeed at this sporadically at first, still spending a great deal of time in and just beneath the water. But then the whole process becomes second nature. Before you know it, you find yourself so caught up in the ride that you almost forget what it took to get you going on it.
That, I suppose, is where I was with things in mid-February, 100-plus days into my project. Sailing along and not even noticing. And perhaps that’s why I was so flabbergasted one night when I sat down to complete my “episodes card” for the day and came to appreciate the significance of what I’d just put down onto paper:
No OCD episodes the entire day. Nada. Zippo. Not a single one. This was a first for me, and it floored me to think that I never even realized it until that very moment.
I did have an episode to log the following night—in fact, three of them. And in the days after that, there were at least a half dozen I needed to record on my cards. A full week passed quickly, though, and at the end of it, I couldn’t help noting not one, but two, major milestones:
February 21. Today I am four months into
my project. One third of the way there. And
at long last, I can honestly say that I am
making progress, even if it’s so much less
than I would like it to be. Today also marks
another first: one week of sustained prog-
ress. For seven days now, I have topped
these cards on a positive note. I have been
disciplining myself like never before and
the payoff is clear. This whole believing
model works, if only I will let it.
Seven days of triumphs. Seven days of genuine sustained progress. Seven days of feeling strong. Unbelievable. I’d had “good days” here and there over the past many years, but never in my recent memory had I managed to string together a full week of them. This was really something. At long last, my project was really sailing along.
And therein lay my greatest fear, one that again had me thinking back on all my windsurfing years. I just couldn’t help remembering what would always happen when I’d get “in the groove” (as we’d say in those days), planing along at breakneck speed. I’d find myself getting scared every time. You’re riding above your skill level now; you know you can’t sustain this, some early ancestor of Doubt would always whisper. Any minute now, you’re going to crash and burn.
And inevitably I would.
Here in late February, I was on an entirely different kind of thrill ride. But the growing insecurity and fear were eerily reminiscent of my windsurfing days. The fall was about to come. I knew this in my bones, and the marrow never lies.
The fall did come, all right. And right on cue.
It came when I was soaring along. When I was at the peak of my game, feeling the exhilaration of having finally harnessed the forces of nature—all the powers of a friendly universe, right there for the asking but available only to the true believers of this world who, against all odds, have learned how to tap it.
It came on a Thursday morning in early March.
I am soaking in our backyard hot tub, basking in the spring sunshine and in the glory of all my recent success. I am feeling downright cocky for the first time in years, mulling over the last month or so in my head, taking inventory of how far I’ve come and how much I’ve managed to accomplish. What a ride, I can’t help thinking.
Psssst. Ever sort out that whole conversation you had with Dad a while back about firewalls?
Doubt is whispering to me. It loves the Dad topic, knows it’s always so charged with anxiety and fear.
Warning lights and sirens go off in my head. I close my eyes and try to ignore Doubt, try to think instead about anything and everything else. But it’s Dad’s face I see. Dad’s voice I hear. Before I can stop myself, I cue up a tape of that last conversation with him. We are talking about phone lines. I am asking Dad what he thinks would be involved in running an extra line to my den. I can hear him telling me that, well, that could be tough, since it might require we find a way to get around a firewall.
I pause the tape.
Have I ever negligently drilled through any firewalls in the past?
Frantically I begin reviewing every hole I have ever bored in every wall of every house I have ever owned or rented. I come up empty. Nothing. Not a single trouble scenario recorded on any of my tapes.
The TV cable line in San Bruno. Have a look at that one, Doubt suggests.
The TV cable line in San Bruno. Yeah, I remember that cable. I ran it between the basement and the living room of the house we were renting. There were no firewalls involved. I’m certain of that. Still, I dig out my tape of the installation just to be sure. The image is predictably fuzzy, but I can see myself drilling through something. It’s not a firewall, but it is something wooden. A heating duct. That’s what it is. An old-fashioned heating duct made out of plywood.
Shit!
But wait a minute. Didn’t I seal up that hole? With a special gasket and caulking, in fact? I’m certain that I did. I try to fast-forward to that part of my installation memory. I can’t find it, though; the tape is blurry. I reassure myself next that I’d gotten permission from the landlord beforehand, and had actually shown him after the fact how the line was run. Unfortunately, both of those scenes, too, are all but static on my virtual tapes.
Refocus, Jeff, I tell myself. Think about the believing pyramid. Think about Release. Self side, Surrender level. Release this whole thing. Do it now.
But I can’t.
The heat of the hot tub becomes unbearable. I know I’ve got to get out of here, go run and hide. But I can’t even move, I’m so paralyzed with fear.
This is the Fall, the one I’ve seen coming for weeks. No way to stop it now, not even a chance. At any second—this very one or the next—I’ll begin cart-wheeling head over heels at twenty miles per hour, paying the price for this exhilarating ride, as I’ve done so many times before on rivers and lakes. The only difference here is that this time I am already in the water. This time the rest of the world is closing in on me for the crash.
I call Sam at work and start firing off all the what-if’s Doubt is feeding me: What if the duct was, in fact, part of the whole firewall system? What if the cable itself is a fire hazard because of passing hot air? What if you didn’t properly seal your hole in the duct, and some deadly gases from the basement get into the heating system and hence the house?
Sam tells me everything is just fine. She is sure of that. But what does she know? I need an expert. Someone with a solid understanding of heating systems. Someone with an engineering degree. Someone with an insurance broker’s appreciation of fire hazards. Someone like … Dad. The problem is he is off on one of his sailing adventures, bobbing around somewhere in the middle of nowhere, gone for at least another three weeks. I know I can and will check with my father just as soon as he gets back, but in the meantime, I need a reassurance fix from somebody. So I corner my brother-in-law at a get-together a few days later.
Poor Uncle Mikey, as we all call my sister’s husband, Mike. A mechanic by trade, he’s one of the handiest, most mechanical guys I know—and because of that, he, like my father, is a prime resource for my checking. The difference is, Uncle Mikey is onto me. The two of us are like brothers, and have been for years. He knows all too well from our many conversations what a vicious cycle reassurance creates. So when I share with him my concerns, he narrows his eyes.
“You know we shouldn’t go there,” he says.
“But this one’s different,” I explain. “I really need to know. I’m hurting bad.”
Now what’s the poor guy supposed to do? He gives in. I win. Especially when he shakes his head and laughs, as he tells me how ludicrous my thinking on all this is.
Now I feel better.
But only for an hour or two. Our conversation is not enough to stop my tapes. So I read up on heating systems. I hold an old scrap of coaxial cable above a heating vent to see how hot it gets. I come up with all kinds of clever experiments.
Still, I can’t stop myself from playing back my fuzzy images of the installation and my conversation with our landlord.
In a rare moment of clear thinking, I realize I need to talk to Jackie. I make arrangements for a special phone session, and at the appointed hour we begin tackling another exposure together. Step by excruciating step, Jackie leads me through the worst of my fears surrounding the whole cable issue. For a full forty minutes I imagine out loud every hypothetical disaster that Doubt can come up with. Nothing is too far-fetched for this little exercise, and with Jackie’s coaxing, I blab on and on about God-awful catastrophes, all the while watching my anxiety and heart rate climb off the charts.
And then something happens. I suddenly get very tired of hearing myself talk. I become almost bored with the entire process. Somehow, it’s as if I’ve managed to wring out every last drop of anxiety from each of the once highly charged words I’ve been using to describe my very worst nightmares. “Fire,” “flames,” “suffocation,” and so many other of Doubt’s vocabulary favorites could now just as easily be flavors of ice cream; they have lost all their emotional meaning to me.
“Great, Jeff!” Jackie exclaims when I concede this to her. “That’s the flooding effect we’re looking for. Outstanding.”
I’ve made a good decision, calling Jackie for this exercise. I know this was a good investment, in the lexicon of my believing pyramid. I can almost feel some unseen force stopping my fall, if only temporarily. But I have a new problem, one that becomes more clear to me with each passing hour: My physical anxiety—the tightness in my chest, the knot in my gut, the incessant pressure behind my eyes—it’s still all right there, right where it was before Jackie’s exposure. The only difference now is that it doesn’t seem to be “attached” to the cable obsession anymore. It’s just there, trapped in my body.
I once read that free-floating anxiety is the most intolerable sensation a human being can experience, and that OCD might, in fact, be a defense mechanism of sorts designed to confront it. The theory goes that OCs “assign” their biochemical anxiety to particular fears (obsessions) so that they can then take ritualistic actions (compulsions) to feel as if they’re at least doing something constructive.
I don’t know about all that, but I do know I keep catching myself working backwards from my tied-up gut, trying to make sense of all my cable anxiety and transferring the whole bundle of it to whatever triggers just happen to come up. A tire tread. A lane change. A passing ambulance. A handshake with a guy at work who’s still recovering from surgery. Trigger by trigger, I keep my bundle of anxiety alive and always attached to something, passing it ever forward, like a baton in a marathon relay race. The process becomes exhausting and takes a huge toll on my ability to focus. Kitty and I host an awards program, and I fumble my way through my lines, obsessing over my sneeze earlier in the night and Doubt’s insistence that I got everyone sick.
I am exhausted. Bitter. Aching inside and out. And I am falling ever downward, arms and legs flailing like some poor stiff in an action flick who’s just been sent flying with a punch through a penthouse window.
March 22. This project and life are slipping
away from me. I have lost my balance
and fallen, and now I can’t seem to get back on
my feet. OCD’s twin pillars of fear and
doubt are square in my path and seem-
ingly immovable. Again I find myself on
the verge of quitting, wanting desperately
to roll over, defeated on my path, and let
life trample me as it might.
Is this even constructive, putting such wretched thoughts down on index cards, day after day? What’s the point? Clearly my project is going nowhere, and quickly.
March 25. Day 156. I am curled up under my sheets in our empty house after having called in sick an hour ago. I can’t be at work today. I can’t even fathom getting myself out of this bed. My fear, my anxiety, my paranoia—all have reached levels that frighten me in ways I can’t even begin to understand. I feel more empty inside than ever before. Everything around me is dark and fuzzy around the edges. Clearly, this is the worst bout of depression I’ve ever had to deal with, and Samantha is fed up with my stubborn insistence on relying solely on my project to get myself through it. Jackie too is suggesting that my current approach, even with her supplemental coaching and treatment, is hardly working. The two of them, my wife and my therapist, keep bringing up meds. I myself am so hopelessly lost that I’m questioning everything: all my core beliefs, all my believing words on my ridiculous pyramid, and all my collective hours of quiet time under the stars.
Who am I fooling?
Day 156. As I put down tonight on a journal index card—one I’m fairly certain will be the last I ever waste my time on—I can only pray this particular day will someday prove to be “the bottom.”
I can only pray this day will somehow mark the end of the Fall.