As I lie completely still in the very close and very loud banging and pinging quarters of an MRI machine, I’m struck by two thoughts: First, that I’ll probably never lose the image of being stuffed inside an empty paper towel roll, and second, that I’m not nearly as claustrophobic as I thought I would be. Give me headphones and some good music and I can lie in a tube forever.
I’m in here for a battery of tests to determine once and for all the root of my almost daily headaches, vertigo, and short-term memory loss. All of these symptoms are explained by my history of migraines, but my doctor wants to make sure there’s nothing else going on—inner ear trouble, sinus problems gone awry, anything that could affect balance—before I start a daily migraine treatment. I’m looking forward to that treatment, I tell her, because the migraines have been debilitating in the six years I’ve been suffering from them, and because, now that I have children, I harbor a secret paranoia of being remembered by them—and described in passing by generations to come—like a “delicate” mom from the eighteenth century who was forever retiring to her quarters with her “spells.”
My other secret, however, is a little more perverse. I’m actually kind of, sort of, a little bit hoping there’s a brain tumor somewhere in there, or some disease—curable, of course—that would help to explain the last thirty years’ worth of bizarre behavior. Since I was a child, I’ve had often debilitating or paralyzing obsessive thoughts that I could not shake and rituals and compulsions that I’ve spent decades masking with both makeup and rationalizations, accompanied by the underlying fear that no one else has lived through what I have lived through in my head. I would certainly rest easier having a physical (as opposed to solely mental) basis for my perpetual need to self-destruct, and I’d bet on some level that my family would as well.
Then I remember. They’re not even aware of it.
MY STORY BEGINS IN A PILE OF SHIT.
Literally. That is my first real memory, and it really was a pile of shit.
I have a few earlier memories, but they’re sketchy, like Polaroid pictures whizzing through my brain. Seeing my first spider—a daddy longlegs, no less—in the bushes on the side of the house; the smell of the ironing my mom did on Sunday afternoons while my dad sat silently in his rocking chair watching football; the agony of laying my hand flat on the hot iron to determine if it was, in fact, hot; my mom piling us into the neighbor’s car one night and driving around looking for my dad. These are the fleeting memories of the early years, when everything in my life seemed perfectly normal because there was nothing to compare it to.
I start remembering my real life in that pile of shit. Of course, I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time because there was grass and such growing out of it, but that’s what it was. And it wasn’t so much a pile as a mountain, ten feet high and twenty feet wide. A mountain of manure. Dung. Cow pies. Whatever you call it where you come from, it’s all the same. Ours was a by-product of both horses and cows, since at the time both species inhabited the little slice of heaven on earth we called our backyard.
As far as my brothers and I were concerned, though, it was a real mountain, with plants and shrubs that served well as forests while our Tonka-truck-inspired imaginations did the rest.
The manure pile sat next to the barn, which was connected by a white wooden gate to a long building that housed a huge, open shed (big enough to store the hay baler in the winter); a garage with a sliding wooden door that never slid open wide enough to actually house a car; and a stable that housed the occasional cow but mostly just hay and . . . stuff—farm stuff. The shed was where we huddled to watch thunderstorms, the garage served as the backdrop to the basketball hoop (as well as home plate for my brother’s catcher-to-second-base throw-out practice), and the stable served no useful purpose that I could tell.
But the barn, that was the place to be. When you stepped into that barn, the air was so thick with the smell of hay and manure and horses that you almost believed you could slice through it with your finger. When you slid open the heavy wooden door and the first shaft of sunlight beamed in, you could actually see the air: a billion little particles of dust and hay and horse breath hovering and floating, trapped by the shaft of sun that didn’t let go until the door opened or closed completely.
We spent many an hour in those days walking up and down the hay baler that led up a forty-five-degree angle from the ground to the second floor of the barn. We spent many more hours on that second floor hanging from a hook, jumping off the top bale of hay, and swinging down onto the slippery, dusty, wooden floor below. For those unversed in summer farm fun, it goes like this: Once hay is baled, it is loaded onto the conveyor belt, which leads the bale to the second floor window of the barn where it is dumped off. The bales are then stacked against one side of the second floor of the barn, leaving the hook hanging down with which to retrieve the hay when needed.
We didn’t do any of this work, though, because we were not farmers. We were people renting a house from farmers. When the real farmers were done baling their hay, we saw nothing on that second floor but a big, hay-filled playpen and a dangerously fun ladder leading up to it.
Unbelievably, no one was ever impaled or “de-limbed” by the hook or the hay baler; not so unbelievably, there were many sprains, splinters, cuts, bumps, and bruises. I do recall hearing the term “tetanus shot” with some regularity.
One such cut on my skinny six-year-old leg began healing with a scab that was hard and crusty over the broken skin. As I ran my fingers over it one night, I suddenly felt the need to pick it off, and I did. The pain was momentarily excruciating, and then settled into a dull, stabbing ache where the wound began bleeding again. The part of me that was mortified at what I had done was soon stomped into submission by another part of me, a part that longed to reproduce that momentary excruciating pain again and again. I was slightly disturbed by this turn of events, and way too embarrassed to tell my mother. So I didn’t—for about forty years.
It was the first of many such secrets I learned to keep.
I HAVE A VERY GOOD LIFE THESE DAYS.
I’m in my fifties now, and—except for the fact that my breasts point due south, for which I blame my children—I don’t look a day over . . . well, late forties. I have two kids, a husband, a dog, and three cats, all of whom I adore and who, at least today, adore me. We live in the proverbial house in the suburbs—having fled the city when my first child was old enough to run into traffic—and when I sit out in my backyard at night I can actually catch fireflies (because there are so many of them, not because I’ve gotten really good at it).
My resume is also impressive, at least to the casual reader: master’s degree from a top journalism school, national award-winning columnist, professor, author, radio personality. As a writer, I have kind of a “big fish, little pond” thing going on where I live, and that’s just fine with me. For example, when we were kids and my younger brother started playing piano better than me, I quit playing. I’m not a big fan of competition with anyone but myself. I want to be the best at what I do, and if that means doing it in a place where no one else happens to be doing it, then so be it.
Oddly enough, I don’t consider myself a writer but rather a person whose only viable method of communicating is through writing. Through the years I’ve found redemption in admitting all of my flaws, mistakes, weaknesses, what have you—putting them on display, actually—and seeking absolution from the human race. Some such flaws are comical, and some aren’t, but all of them are real. “Writer” is a lot easier to define, though, and so that’s what I say I am.
At any rate, I’m in a very good place right now. As a young woman, my dreams were, in no particular order, to be a writer, to have a dog, to have a baby, and to have a cabin in Vermont. I’m three-for-four so far, and that’s okay; the day’s not over. Besides, I got the bonus husband in there, which, given my history of short-term commitments, wasn’t even in my top five. So I’ve learned to be a little more flexible with the list.
I come from what I always considered a stereotypical Irish Catholic family, meaning there were plenty of kids, cousins, aunts, and uncles, as well as the attendant guilt and alcohol. My mother, father, four brothers, and sister are all alive and well, and we’ve stayed reasonably close personally, if not geographically. My parents have been married more than fifty years, happily for many of them; my dad, like me, is a recovering alcoholic, and the marriage certainly improved when he stopped drinking. They are my best friends. I talk to them every couple of days and drive the three hours to visit them as often as schedules permit.
And I’m a decent mother, I think. I got married late and had kids late enough in life to circumvent the stupid mistakes I could have made in my youth. Oh, sure, there was the time I broke my daughter’s leg when she was six months old; those darn fluffy socks I wore should have come with a warning label: “Do not wear when walking down carpeted stairs with a child on your hip.” But the cast was certainly a conversation piece, and it wasn’t like she was going to remember it.
Aside from that little mishap, my family and I live a relatively pain-free existence. My kids have the benefit of grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, good friends, and good schools. I work from home, my husband owns his own business, and our kids are equally at ease with whichever of us is throwing the ball to them. We earn enough money to be comfortable but not so much that we’ve lost our sense of appreciation. The kids are healthy, smart, athletic, and often frighteningly sarcastic. They got the sarcasm from me, I suppose. Everything else probably came from their father.
When I met him, my mom gently warned me about my sarcasm, suggesting it might drive him away. She really liked him, and, in fact, one time when we broke up, toyed with the idea of taking his side. She offered the same advice when I had children, suggesting I might drive them away, despite the fact that they’re essentially dependent on me until they learn to make toast, which, as far as I can tell, is not anytime in the next decade. And I try to temper the sarcasm; God help me, I do. But short of a lobotomy, there isn’t much I can do. Sarcasm is my one survival tool that does not cause bodily injury, and, darn it, I’m keeping it. And besides, if that’s the worst thing I pass on to them, then they should be okay.
I SIGNED UP FOR KARATE TWO WEEKS BEFORE I TURNED THIRTY.
I was single and had been in recovery one year. I had not yet discovered antidepressants and was convinced my uncontrollable mood swings and anxiety were just really bad PMS, even though I knew many women with PMS and didn’t know any who did what I did. I plucked out my eyelashes and eyebrows and picked at my face if no hair was available. An attending physician at the local psychiatric hospital had recently scolded me for an ineffective attempted suicide, apparently because my attempt had gotten him out of bed. I planned my meals around the belief that if I could just get down to skin and bones, I could start over. When I put on my karate uniform for the first time, I weighed ninety-nine pounds. One of the other women in class laughed because she couldn’t pull my size zero skirt up over her thigh. My body was the most recent in a lifetime of changing and often unbearable obsessions.
From my first conscious memory, I was a perpetual outsider: a living, breathing, exposed nerve, destined through some twisted karma to feel unworthy of living at every turn. It wasn’t—isn’t—simply a function of feeling sorry for myself; it’s a matter of truly, madly, deeply feeling that absolutely everyone else is better than me. Defining “better” gets a little tricky, particularly since by accepted standards I’m intelligent, well-educated, and often successful, but in my life, “better” has generally meant “more deserving of life.”
I’d spent the vast majority of my life feeling like a freak because there couldn’t possibly be anybody else on earth who did to herself what I did to myself. There couldn’t be another human being who felt about herself the way I felt about myself. How someone who was so smart could feel that way, act that way, and do those things without being able to stop, I could never understand. How could I intellectually rationalize pulling out my own eyelashes? I couldn’t. But if I couldn’t rationalize it, then why couldn’t I stop? Instead, I spent my first two decades of life searching for the solution to the indefinable void where my sense of self should have been, and the next decade pretending I didn’t need it.
I’ve since found out, of course, that the void is no longer indefinable.
But until I found out what it was, at the embarrassingly late age of fifty-two, after taking my daughter to therapy for three years for some of the exact same manifestations, I was always looking for something to blame. If I could find it, then maybe I could fix it. Was it my childhood? If it was, how come none of my siblings did what I did? Was it self-esteem? Was it the red hair? I’d felt like an outsider since I was old enough to know what an outsider was, and I needed to know why. All the things I did—plucking out my eyelashes; picking at scabs and, later, my skin; avoiding cracks in the sidewalk when I was a kid; counting in my head until I got to a certain number, over and over again; panicking if I didn’t know what time we were leaving a function, even as an adult—all of these behaviors were so random that I didn’t even know where to begin to find a common thread. And so for almost forty years I thought I was simply a melting pot for crazy.
But I wasn’t. Almost all of my “bizarre” behaviors were explained by one section in the latest comprehensive Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. What I have falls under the heading of obsessive-compulsive disorders. One term. One concept. OCD. Throw in anxiety and addiction—in my case, alcoholism—and it all falls into place. Back then, though—as a kid, through adolescence, puberty, teens, twenties, thirties—all I knew was this: I was a freak, and I was alone.
NOW I KNOW DIFFERENTLY.
There are words for all of it, I now know. And there are enough years between the worst of it and now to be able to say them out loud. Most of them, anyway.
There’s the addiction; I already knew that one. There are the anorexia and bulimia; I knew those as well. As far as I know these are not considered obsessive-compulsive behaviors, although it could be argued there is an element of obsessive thought running through all of them. But under the OCD heading, besides the crack avoidance and frustrating need to count, there’s also something called trichotillomania (plucking out your own hair, including eyelashes and eyebrows), or TTM, to those in the know, and something else called excoriation (compulsive skin picking, formerly known as dermatillomania—I happen to like the shorter name). They all have names. And if they have names, then I cannot possibly be the only person to have experienced them.
Yet, for almost forty years, I thought I was.
It’s amazing to me that I had never previously thought to investigate why I do what I do to myself. I’ve always been an intelligent, resourceful woman with information at my disposal. I think the reasons are twofold: First, the obsessive thoughts and behaviors started when I was so young, and I was so ashamed of them, that I accepted them as a part of my life that I would need to hide forever; and second, I’m neither a germaphobe nor particularly organized—arguably the two most recognizable behaviors associated with OCD. Some of my compulsions were and are so distinctive as to be only recently recognized and classified as OCD. In the meantime, between the OCD and the anxiety-driven thoughts and fears, I simply thought I was a lightning rod for bizarre behavior. And I’m guessing there are still many, many people—both kids and adults—who are thinking the same thing right now and feeling very alone because of it.
That feeling of isolation has affected every aspect of my life, from work to family to marriage to children. Everything I’ve ever done was either impacted or driven by these obsessive thoughts and behaviors, these secrets, and the crippling insecurity of believing I wasn’t normal. It was easy to become anorexic, for example, because of my tendency toward obsessive thoughts. One day I decided I was overweight because my best friend weighed less, and—bam!—the OCD took care of the rest. Anorexia may not be an obsessive-compulsive disorder, but the tendency sure paves the way. OCD is a devious condition that makes you do something you don’t want to do for reasons you can’t understand. You try and fail repeatedly to stop and are left with the sense that you are so deeply flawed as to not be worthy of love. Or, sometimes, life.
I’ve always wanted to go back to find out at exactly what point in my childhood this might have kicked in. There’s an overwhelming hereditary component, so I know I was born with it. Does that mean I was having the thoughts and behaviors from infancy? I sucked my thumb until I was too old to suck my thumb; I had a “crack-in-the-sidewalk” fixation at age four or five, panicking for my mother’s health if by chance I couldn’t avoid one. So it must have started at a reasonably young age. Unfortunately, I didn’t put any of the manifestations together until I was much older, for many reasons, not the least of which was the unavailability of the Internet, invented three decades later. It’s hard to research something using encyclopedias when you don’t even know where to begin. It’s like trying to use a dictionary to find the spelling of a word you can’t spell; if you could spell it, you wouldn’t need the dictionary.
I remember when one of my brothers discovered the Adult Children of Alcoholics’ program and sent us all a copy of the ACOA handbook. He was thrilled to have found some validation about the impact of an alcoholic parent and wanted to make sure we all knew that our childhood experiences could be affecting our adult lives. And all I could do was look at my hairless, scarred face and starving body and think, Oh, how nice for him.
I was envious; he’d found his demon, and maybe now he could move on from there. Having an alcoholic parent could have been one of my demons, but it certainly wasn’t the only one. I used to think that perhaps, if I discovered the origins of my self-loathing and was able to somehow come to terms with the circumstances that created it, the realization that I’d spent the majority of my life unnecessarily looking for ways to die might be hard to take; maybe not knowing wasn’t so bad after all. Now that advances in the medical communities have revealed the OCD connection, I find I’m actually somewhat relieved.
Before that connection, however, all I could do was try to envision possible explanations for what I thought were coping mechanisms. Lack of self-esteem was the go-to excuse; I assumed that was the driving force because of the void I’d always felt, the sense of having no armor. And because I couldn’t understand the underlying process, the obsessive thoughts and paralyzing anxiety, I focused instead on the results of it: anger, self-loathing, shame, fear. I also learned to internalize it all because I did not want to be a freak show in public; it’s hard enough in private.
In public, I was a different person. Though privately I was desperately shy, socially awkward, and seeking to fill the void in my heart by constantly looking for love, publicly I was outgoing and discerningly dating until I found the right one. Privately, I went from apartment to apartment, job to job, career to career, searching for the place in life that would make me feel whole and normal. Publicly, I was driven: a high achiever, always seeking advancement. Even in my darkest periods I rarely went backwards in life. My sense of self-preservation always propelled me toward a better life, no matter how badly my inner turmoil tried to hold me back. I learned to pass, not unlike a gay person posing as straight, to avoid discrimination. I learned to pose—to pass—as normal.
Now I know, however. Knowledge changes many things, although not everything. For instance, while I know there are many different manifestations of OCD, I don’t know when an individual’s symptoms are established or even determined. Many of the obsessive-compulsive behaviors that plague me actually physically hurt, and it makes me wonder if hurting myself fulfills some kind of need. Whether it’s a temporary distraction, an expression of anger, the need for physical pain to remind myself I’m alive, or a desire for punishment because I don’t think I deserve to be alive, I do it for reasons that are valid only to me and are so secret that even I don’t know what they are. And in fact, OCD doesn’t need a reason.
Maybe my particular obsessive thoughts and behaviors are a way of coping with rage, whereas someone else’s may help her cope with, for example, anxiety. I’m not good at expressing anger. I never have been, although with practice and patience I’m better at it today than I was forty years ago. In my family we were not encouraged to show anger as children. It was in our best interests to keep it inside and pretend that life was normal. I was very good at that, and yet I remember being so angry sometimes that I thought my head would explode—at my baby brother and sister for crying in the middle of the night when I had to get up for school in the morning; at my dad for drinking and yelling so loudly; at my mom for not making our lives better. I was angry at them, and then guilty for feeling so angry at the people I loved most, and afraid that if they knew how angry I was they wouldn’t love me.
Ever since I realized I could express my feelings much more coherently with a pencil and paper I knew I would be a writer. Back then I wrote things down so my head wouldn’t explode. I wrote because it gave me time to craft my emotions into acceptable, non-threatening, non-hurtful letter-form for my mother to digest.
I wrote because I was afraid that if I spoke instead, I would say things that couldn’t be taken back. Writing provides the benefit of editing, and the benefit of time-induced healing before unloading one’s heart. It allows us to coat our raw emotions so that they’re not quite so bloody when someone else reads it.
It allowed me, again, to “pass.”
So what makes people like me different from other people? I’m sure that distinction is as individual as mental disorders themselves. What I know, and I know this because I have at times experienced a fleeting normalcy and can therefore compare it to my usual state, is that I not only don’t have a thick skin, it’s as if I have no skin at all; I am completely exposed. Where normal people have a kind of metaphorical acrylic shell that both encases them in their own confidence and shields them from the judgment of others, I don’t.
People like me have no shield, no body armor. Therefore, any negativity directed at us—real or perceived—cuts us to the bone. Every emotion is magnified, every hurt feeling amplified. And when you have no self-esteem—another casualty in the obsessive thought versus reality war—then most of the feelings we have are hurt ones. The positives can be just as powerful, but in our minds there aren’t nearly as many, they’re not nearly as lasting, and, on some level, they’re not nearly as valid as the hurt.
Maybe this is because we don’t know what to do with positive feelings, or how to hold onto them. They’re not a part of the OCD cycle, which, without treatment, rules our lives. We don’t have the tools to stay focused on the positive; there simply isn’t room when the negative takes up all the extra space in our brains. For example, in my very first column in the local Sunday paper, I pondered whether there was a statute of limitation on eggs. The copy editor thought that didn’t make sense and changed my wording to “statue of limitations,” which, of course, is wrong. My very first column brought me a derisive letter from a reader asking what exactly a “statue of limitations” was and where he might find one.
After reading that letter, I couldn’t get out of bed for two days.
The hundreds of glowing letters I would receive over the years that followed stayed with me for a while, but that first mean one has stayed with me for life.
HERE’S A THEORY FOR YOU.
Maybe people like me are examples of a kind of perpetual “Stockholm syndrome.” Sometimes we’re our own captors, sometimes it’s someone else, but in order to survive we learn to bond with the people who hurt us the most. We learn to embrace our rituals and our compulsions, and to normalize them—in our own heads, at least; that way, we don’t seem to hurt as much. It’s kind of a stretch, yes, but sometimes that’s how it feels: like captivity. It might also explain why it’s so hard to seek out help sometimes; we’ve managed to convince ourselves that what happens is somehow completely normal. Sure, it’s a kind of normal that we’re too terrified to mention to any other living being, but it’s a type of normal nevertheless.
I also like that little philosophical gem because it helps me understand one of the more consistent obsessive thoughts I’ve endured throughout my life: the belief that if I got angry, if I showed any negative emotion, if I did something that could on any level be perceived as wrong, someone would get mad at me and I would not be loved. It is paralyzing, this thought of someone being angry with me, and probably complicated—if not outright caused—by low self-esteem for which I blame the OCD. To this day, I struggle with telling someone I’m upset. I avoid confrontation and conflict like other people avoid open manholes.
And that’s draining. People like me learn to hide all things negative so that others think we’re fine, because fine is what other people are and we need those other people to not be mad at us.
I was a good girl and a smart girl and a nice girl, and in my head I believed I was loved for those things. All of those are good things to be, but when you feel like you have to be them, that your very sanity depends on it, that’s a lot of pressure. On some level, I was afraid that I would not be loved for being an angry girl, a confused girl, a frightened girl, or a girl who got less than straight A’s. So in the early years, I struggled to find other, socially acceptable ways to express all of those anxieties, usually through writing—journals, diaries, a column in the college newspaper. But when life became too complicated with family and school and starving and plucking, I stopped writing; it was just too hard. Instead, I took those emotions and stored them in whatever part of my brain was designed for such storage, and when it got full, well, something had to give.
Obsessive thoughts, anxiety, self-destructive behavior, abusive relationships, depression, anorexia, addiction—all are available at the fingertips of the OCD sufferer.
I only took one psychology class, so I’m guessing here about the triggers for my behaviors. But when, for example, I’m anxious, I pluck my eyebrows, and when I’m angry, I don’t eat. If I have a looming public event, I pick at my skin, and if I think someone is angry with me, I am paralyzed.
And there are thousands, if not millions, of people like me who pick, pluck, use, puke, and otherwise hurt themselves in private in order to survive in public.
I KNOW THAT WHAT I’VE DONE TO MY BODY MAY HAVE REPERCUSSIONS IN THE FUTURE.
I’ll never be able to drink again, for sure. I also have to watch for bone loss problems because of the anorexia. I hope that my eyebrows and lashes continue to grow back despite my omnipresent need to pluck them, but I don’t know if they will. I’m reasonably sure I’ll be on anti-anxiety medications for the rest of my life, and I’ll probably struggle with weight issues throughout as well. Pregnancy was a challenge, for example, and I insisted on being weighed on a certain scale in the OB/GYN’s office because I was convinced it read three pounds lighter than another. If someone else was using it, I would wait. If it was across the building from my exam room, I would waddle over there.
Many self-abusing behaviors are symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which can drive us to see things in the mirror that aren’t there, imagine someone’s anger that’s not there, and handle anxiety in ways that are not healthy or anxiety-reducing. There are so many different manifestations of OCD that it’s challenging sometimes to decipher one from another, or what leads to what, or what compels what. When combined with anxiety, it’s almost impossible. Somewhere along the line I learned to look outside of myself for self-worth because, with the issues going on in my head, I couldn’t give it to myself. I sought out men who made me feel safe and loved, then left them because of their ability to do so—a paradox it took me years to understand; I knew I wanted those feelings but could not let myself be content and satisfied with them. I didn’t believe I deserved them, and so I’d start looking again. The cycle went like this: Break it off with a wonderful man under the guise of feeling smothered; meet someone else who makes me feel safe and loved; be happy for a few months, until I feel smothered; start again.
I was never happy on Christmas either, each magical morning met with a profound disappointment, to this day. And that cycle is remarkably similar: I want the perfect gift, the one that will make me feel whole, complete, but if I don’t know what it is, then I can’t ask for it and so I’ll never get it—and so the cycle repeats.
That kind of pervasive self-doubt, the need for outside approval so that simple functionality is possible, is both exhausting and self-perpetuating. When every fiber of one’s being is held together by the fine threads of other people’s love and approval, it only takes one small tug to unravel the whole kit and caboodle. For some of us, one small tug can be the result of a glance misread, a phone call unreturned, a letter not received. And then the unraveling begins.
There is something about all of this—the OCD cycle of anxiety or obsessive thought, resultant compulsion, concerted effort to stop the behavior, inability to do so, resultant embarrassment and confusion, leading back to anxiety—that is so steeped in shame that I never told a soul about my issues until I was a mother and concerned for my baby. This is where public perception comes in; OCD is not just being afraid of germs and needing your cupboards organized alphabetically. The obsessive thoughts can range from intrusive to torturous, and the compulsions can be physically painful, humiliating, and dangerous. Not a lot of “cute” and “amusing” to be had in this arena, despite the Hollywood portrayals.
Sometimes it seems like we’re hamsters on that little wheel. Our lack of self-worth, coupled with an overwhelming and obsessive sense of pain and futility, compels us to hurt ourselves with the compulsion du jour, the shame and humiliation of which simply confirms why hating ourselves is the absolutely correct thing to do, which, in turn, makes us angry, compelling us again to hurt ourselves in the compulsion du jour, which provides the necessary, yet painfully temporary, relief we need. The shame and humiliation of what we do in our anger again confirms our belief in our utter lack of self-worth, and the cycle continues. The obsessive-compulsive component ensures that it does.
To calm the fears of loved ones everywhere, simply reading or talking about these things—OCD, addiction, anxiety, mental illness—doesn’t typically make people do something they otherwise would not do. For instance, when I first read about cutting, which I don’t do, I remember thinking, Yikes. Ouch. That’s pretty harsh, don’t you think? It did not inspire me to cut. I’m many things, but I’m not a cutter. Do you see how this works? Self-abusers don’t go searching for ways to self-abuse, any more than people with addiction choose what to be addicted to. I’m addicted to alcohol. I was exposed many times to drugs and had no interest in them. It’s like a hard drive was installed in us when we were too young to choose our preferences.
Whatever obsessions and/or compulsions I have, I didn’t choose. There are many different forms—the stereotyped organizer and germaphobe, for example. There are also hoarders, and counters, and people who have to lock and unlock their doors multiple times. There are those who repeat phrases under their breath, and people who have to go over thresholds a certain way. There are obsessive thoughts that involve hurting people we love, starting fires, horrible creatures following us. And not every obsessive thought has a corresponding compulsion; sometimes we’re faced with debilitating thoughts for which there is no relief.
Obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors are not a conscious choice, like picking your outfit for the day would be. A closer comparison would be sleeping positions; you don’t really think about sleeping on your side or your back, you just do it. Even if you try to sleep differently one night, when you wake up you’re in the same position in which you usually wake up. I have never consciously thought about the things I do; I just do them. I have been drawn to them. I drew myself to them, maybe. Whatever. But I think I can put this widely-held fear to rest: Discussing OCD behaviors isn’t what makes people do them any more than giving a drink to someone makes her an alcoholic. Addiction has a different basis than OCD, of course, but I feel pretty safe in saying neither is caused by knowledge.
Also, not unlike addiction, the cycle of OCD continues in solitude and isolation because it is often simply not talked about. Even in therapy, it never occurred to me to talk about plucking out my eyelashes and eyebrows, not even with the one person in my world who might have understood. Not once did I bring it up; not once did it occur to me bring it up, the shame was so deep and ingrained. Fortunately, over the years, addiction has gotten more and more screen time and does not carry quite the cloak of shame it once did. You won’t necessarily find many of us in recovery shouting it from the rooftops, but then again there are even support groups in many high schools these days. Hopefully, OCD will one day find a similar degree of understanding among the general population because that acceptance and dialogue are what we need, not necessarily to break the cycle of repetitive behavior, since sometimes we can and sometimes we can’t, but to break the cycle of shame. Because I can tell you from experience, the shame is a killer.