As best I can figure, I have logged some eight thousand hours behind a studio microphone: not an unusual stat, really, for someone who has anchored radio news programs for well over a decade. What might be construed as a little odd—okay, downright weird—is this: unlike any other news anchor I know, I have recorded nearly every one of my on-air hours and have played back countless segments for myself. Why? To understand that is to understand the complexities of a cross-wired brain that would also have me check and recheck doors, appliances, facts and figures of all kinds, wobbly chairs and other serious hazards and, well, everything I have ever seen, heard, said, or done.
I myself don’t even pretend to understand those brain complexities. I’ve read all about the myriad theories offered up by the world’s top neuroscientists, who, despite their fascination with people like me, have yet to agree on an explanation for our many bizarre challenges. Faulty neurotransmitters? Frontal lobe abnormalities? Issues with our caudate nuclei? Beats me. I know nothing about neurology. Nothing about behavioral psychology. Very little, really, about the science behind obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the diagnosis affixed to “checkers” like myself and an assortment of others battling hiccupping brains. My expertise is in doubt—which I suppose is the perfect double-claim for a pathological doubter. On the one hand, I can say with great confidence that I’ve lived a life more steeped in uncertainty than anyone I’ve ever run across, and along the way have compiled a virtual compendium of each and every one of its debilitating components. On the other hand, who am I not to doubt this very expertise? I mean, how can I be sure I really know anything about doubt? Or for that matter, about anything at all?
Reporters are taught to question everything, and perhaps this explains how and why I wound up in the news business. My biological predisposition to distrust and challenge has served me well in my professional life and has helped me get to the bottom of many a story. For this I am thankful, but not nearly so much as I am for the far greater gift my disorder has offered: endless lessons in the mechanics of be lieving. It’s the ultimate paradox, yet somehow it also seems to add up—in much the same way, I imagine, that the deaf and the blind learn to hone their remaining senses.
I have all five of my senses, but tend not to trust any of them. Take touch and sight in their most basic functions. At my worst, I can be holding a parking brake in my hand, seeing it fully secure and feeling it locked and immovable; yet the moment I let go or look away, I lose all comprehension of its fixed condition. I can rattle, re-rattle, and re-re-rattle the handle, double back to my car a dozen times; and still there is no convincing myself, no means of storing my sensory input or warding off later doubt-driven urges to “replay” the whole sequence in my head, again and again. And so it is with far too many day-to-day challenges. Out of sheer necessity, I suppose, I have learned to believe beyond the limitations of my brain’s flawed processing, to trust in the certainty of something much bigger than myself.
What follows is my story: one of some four to six million OCD stories unfolding right now in the United States. Like most, it’s a tale of fear and torment and agony and shame. But unlike far too many, it is also a story of triumphs, breakthroughs, miracles, and hope, and for this I can thank what I’ve come to call my “crash course in believing” and the remarkable “faculty” of professionals, friends, and unseen strangers who rescued me from the depths of my own looping hell.
Funny, but for a guy who’s made a career of reporting on everything from floods and fires to he roes and crooks, I must confess that telling this story—my story—has challenged me like none other. In the end, I’ve decided there’s only one way to share it, and that’s by replaying on paper those well-worn segments of virtual audio and video I keep archived in my head, “tapes” much like my cassette recordings—“airchecks,” as we in radio call them—of the eight thousand hours I’ve logged behind a studio microphone.