Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Cognitive Demons

*If you feel like it, please recommend Incompatible and share, subscribe, etc. (You know what to do.) This post is paywalled so you’ll have to start a paid subscription to read the full piece. Please consider going paid! For more cultural/political material (as well as personal essays, fiction, art commentary), etc, check out my other stack, Sincere American Writing.)

Photo by Nastya Dulhiier on Unsplash

***

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Cognitive Demons

Since early summer, 2015, when my then-girlfriend and I were searching for a house to buy in the Bay Area (with a limited budget), I’ve struggled with O.C.D. Also known as: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Thinking back, I remember some strange, obsessive routines I followed when I was in my pre-teen years, back in the mid-1990s. Given that my mom has strong O.C.D. tendencies, and that alcoholism runs deep in my family DNA, none of this seems surprising to me now.

The first sign of the disorder occurred when I was editing a manuscript one morning. Like I said, it was 2015. I was 32 years old. At the time—this was around June—I lived in a second-floor studio in Lake Merritt, Oakland, California. My girlfriend and I’d been together two years by then. I was editing books more or less fulltime (those were the days!) and writing as much as I could. Trump had made his early appearance on the political scene but Obama was still in power.

I remember distinctly making marks (using tracked changes on a Word.doc) across a particular sentence on a client’s manuscript. That was my job, of course. Normal. What wasn’t normal, however, was that I suddenly, for the first time, found myself feeling a compulsion to reread the sentence, not once more, but several more times.

This soon mushroomed into a real “cognitive distortion” as they call it in CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). It didn’t remain solely with editing, either. Reading for pleasure became harder. I’d have to reread sentences over and over again, ad infinitum, sometimes getting harshly stuck on a single word or line for minutes at a time. A cognitive mechanism clicked into place in my brain wherein I now felt forced, against my will, to have to deconstruct the words/language/sentences as I slowly trudged through the story. It was brutal, especially for a literary-minded person like myself. A writer. A book editor. A voracious, hungry reader.

We bought our house (north of Berkeley near Richmond, Ca) in early July, 2015. We were beyond thrilled. Overjoyed doesn’t even get close to describing it. In a time when most of our generation didn’t stand a chance, we felt profoundly, stupidly lucky and privileged. (And we were: My parents helped.)

Things were great at first. The O.C.D. seemed to have evaporated. But this turned out to be temporary. It came back, and with a vengeance. Reading was slow and taxing. Editing felt like wading through thick sludge, waist deep, trying desperately to complete a few pages a day. It finally morphed beyond the literary realm, into my Real World. When my girlfriend said something I often ruminated on it for a long time, my mind circling and circling and circling, like water slowly chugging down a drain, only the water never seemed to fully, completely ever drain all the way.

The worst was when we fought. I’d go over the fight, and my emotions, round and round and round. I couldn’t focus. I’d go on long, meandering walks in the middle of the day, trying to solve the mental puzzle. It produced a nasty, grotesque scenario: The more I tried to solve the puzzle, the more the cognitive swirls spun. And the more they spun, the harder I tried to resolve them. It was a hardcore, brutal positive feedback loop. Kind of like political extremism on the left and the right: They endlessly feed each other, ceaselessly continuing the spiral round and round and round.

And a new thing was injected into the score: My past. Now, whenever we fought, even over the silliest thing, my whole ardent, troubled alcoholic past, my pre-sober life, zoomed up and started to take control of my brain. For a decade (from 17-27) I’d been a wild, anarchic blackout drunk: Angry, violent, cruel, broken. In 2010 I hit bottom, thank God, and, living in San Francisco at the time, got sober. I never looked back. I got involved with AA. Started going to therapy. Exercised. Discovered Vipassana Buddhist meditation. My life started, slowly, to change.

And yet, even in 2015—sober five years—this old stuff crept back into my life. The sordid stuff. I won’t go into details about the specific things, but let’s just say I’m not proud of that version of myself. (Though I am very proud of getting sober, doing all 12 steps, making amends with many, many people, and becoming the man I am today, weaknesses, quirks and flaws included.) Every time my girlfriend and I fought, my mind now moved into a sort of self-loathing position. I’d walk and try to “solve the equation,” and the past would bloom up around me like a sordid sickness, and I’d try harder and the swirls would circle faster and soon I’d be overwhelmed by fear, guilt, shame, mental exhaustion.

There were times, I must confess, when the O.C.D. felt so overwhelming, so exhausting, that I sometimes thought, If I could just get a gun, place it to my head, and pull the trigger, this madness would all stop.

*

Fast-forward to late 2019. About three months before the Covid lockdowns. I’m now living in Manhattan. East Harlem, to be precise. 130^th and 5^th Avenue. About nine months prior I’d left the Bay Area for The Big Apple, determined to make it as a serious writer in New York City. I’d read too many Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac and Don DeLillo novels. Every writer, I’d been convinced, eventually goes to the diamond-tough island of the east coast. As they say: If you can make it in New York you can make it anywhere. I was a soft, sensitive yet driven Southern California boy who’d moved north for a decade. I was ambitious, hungry and determined.

My ex and I had broken up on the first day of 2018, the day after my 35^th birthday and the day after we’d returned from a cold, snowy Christmas visit to Chicago. The moment it was official I knew I’d go to Manhattan.

At first being in NYC took care of the O.C.D. I was gloriously distracted, in the beginning staying in two different Air BnBs until I found an apartment. I took subway trains everywhere. Walked around endlessly for hours. Stood dumbly and gazed up at the Empire State Building, at the gorgeous architecture of the 42^nd Street subway stop in Times Square, ogled the many rooms filled with books in the New York Public Library, sat for hours in cafes like Café Reggio on MacDougal Street in the Village, trudged around Wall Street and Battery Park, stood looking at the Statue of Liberty thinking about previous trips to the city in my drunken twenties, and about America.

But then I found an apartment. The East Harlem one. It was in a semi-rough area but it seemed fine—everyone claimed it was “beyond gentrified” nowadays, not like the “real” Harlem of the 70s and 80s—and the price was right: $1,900/mo for a spacious two-bedroom apartment, with a nice, large bathroom. A third-floor walkup. A basketball court across the street. Cars racing south along 5^th. The 2/3 train was a five, six minute walk down on Lenox and 125 on the west side, and the 4/5/6 on the east side at Lenox and 125.

But, as before, the obsession came back. I was single again, but I dated around. Online dating in NYC was fascinating (maybe this should be a post for next time) because of the diversity of people, but, that, plus being one of the minority of white people in the area (which didn’t bother me since I’d lived in various parts of Oakland for years) made me feel just a tiny bit tense. Coming home late on the train seemed a little sketchy. People sometimes eyed me, usually young black locals. I didn’t always like the vibe they sent out. I felt like an intruder. And in many ways I was. This was their turf. I was an upper middleclass white boy from California. What was I doing here?

Anyway, the point is: It came back. Fear. My past. The vibe. The negative energy. Race. Class. Literally down the block there was a place for mental patients, in the middle of 129^th; once, when I was 26, in 2009, strangely, I’d stayed in that very same building when it was a cheap hostel. It gave me the willies. I often walked to a trendy hipster coffee shop down the block from it.