By order of my resident assistant, I made the appointment with the therapist following a fairly major war between me and my next-door neighbor in the dorm, an altercation involving her assertion that "Growing Pains" reigned supreme over all the eighties sitcoms of the land. I kicked her wall and put my foot through her prized possession, a Whopper banner swiped from the flagpole of a Burger King, because everybody knows that "Family Ties" just fuckin' rocked, at least until the extraordinarily slappable extra child Andy showed up.

I think I need help with stress management, I said, perched on the edge of a lavender chair crammed hard with foam and embroidery. It was aggressively comforting, this chair.

A manila file folder marked with my name was open on the psychologists lap. I see youve been in therapy before, she said.

That would be my freshman year of high school, when I first became strongly convinced that if I did not touch a doorknob with both hands upon entering or exiting a room, the world would implode in dramatic and fully horrible fashion.

Yes, I said. I had not told anyone that matters such as this were my chief concern most days, as I was fully aware that it was well within the realm of the fucking ridiculous.

Also, said the woman before me with my mental health history spread on her knees, you seem to have had certain excessive... anxieties... concerning use of the Internet?

That, I hadnt quite been able to hide. When you are fourteen and you make furtive attempts to double back to the pew your family had been sitting in so that you can scrub away the fingerprints, thus leaving no record of your active Catholicism because you are privately terrified that the Ku Klux Klan is after you, people tend to form the conclusion that There Is a Problem.

Activities such as these sprang from the day I posted a gentle rant to an electronic religious discussion group, in which Id announced to the whole entire Internet that I was Catholic and that, in my very humble opinion, liturgical dance was the worst thing ever ever and that it made me want to injure people with blunt and very heavy objects.

Making this pronouncement, it seemed with a terrifying and completely unwarranted urgency less than a week after I'd typed it, was not the brightest thing I had ever done. It was bottomlessly stupid: It was stupid, and it was going to get me killed. The Klan-- they hated Catholics, they killed Catholics, and where better to find Catholics than a public forum? Oh God, maybe they set up the discussion for the sole purpose of finding some! And there were other people; just who, I didnt know, but they were out there and they hated Catholics and they were going to kick my ass.

And the liturgical dancers... Oh God... I'd insulted the liturgical dancers of the earth. They were going to find me, me and my family. Right now they were taking a break from choreographing "Crown Him With Many Crowns" to call out a hit on me, their vaunted and very public enemy. Why didnt I just keep my mouth shut? Why hadn't I just endured their "Nearer My God To Thee" kicklines in silence? I had angered them, belittled their cherished way of life, and any second now a gauze-wrapped grenade was going to come sailing through the window. Oh God oh God oh God oh God.

I stayed away from the Internet after that, and not long after came the day when my mother walked into my room with some laundry to find me breaking open a floppy disk, slicing apart its filmy guts with a pair of desk scissors. She stared at me, a stack of bras in one hand, a pile of Umbro shorts in the other.

Isn't that, she said, where the computer stores all the stories and essays youve been writing?

I glanced down at the torn-away disk label marked with my name-- I was going to tear that up next, in very tiny bits, and scatter them in a variety of trash bags throughout the house, over a course of many trash collection days, so that no one could piece them together and trace me to it-- and looked back up at her, scissors poised.

She twisted her hands in one of my bra straps. "Why are you doing this?"

"I don't know," I said finally, unable to completely break her heart and let on that I had gone altogether round the bend and was terrified of the frantic electrons that were the Internet, where there was no way to tear up anything you wrote, where God and all His revenge-bent liturgical dancers could find you. And two days later I was in another version of where I am now-- in a therapist's office, in the grips of a chair decorated in Late American Hotel Lobby, where for the duration of my high school career I participated in circular conversations concerning whether or not I was breast-fed, the monotony of which was occasionally sprinkled with moments in which the therapist want to know, by the way and just out of simple curiosity, if I ever heard voices belonging to famous people or the devil or God instructing me to, say, shoot the President (No, and SHIT, no.)

"Well," I said by way of explanation, "you know."

She closed my file and nodded. I settled in and prepared to be casually asked whether or not I held regular conversations with the Lord of Darkness.

Instead the therapist was eyeing my hands.

You have dry skin, she said.

I wasnt breast-fed, I said, nodding.

Dry skin on your hands, and nowhere else, she pointed out. "They're chapped almost raw."

You know what? I said, rising. I have a class.

"It's almost as if," she continued, examining her ballpoint pen, "you've been washing them with some fairly strong soap. And often."

Oh shit.

It's okay if you do, she said.

Shit!

"Do you have a lot of unwanted thoughts and worries, Mary Beth?"

I'm having some right now. I bent down to retrieve my backpack.

"Are those fears over events you intellectually know aren't likely to happen, but you cant stop worrying anyway? And do you feel you need to check and arrange things a lot to relieve the worry-- not just leaving the curling iron on, but more out of the ordinary-- things like rereading pages in a book over and over, avoiding certain numbers--"

I sat down again. "Three!" I burst out. "And six!"

"It sounds like you might have obsessive-compulsive disorder."

"And I'm afraid that if I sit in a chair that a guy's been sitting in, I will become pregnant!"

"Let's make another appointment so I can administer a screening test."

"I'm afraid Ill catch the AIDS virus from library books!"

"Okay, well, maybe we can skip the screening test."


When one has obsessive-compulsive disorder, insufficient amounts of the neurotransmitter serotonin prevents proper communication between ones orbital cortex and basal ganglia, resulting in unwanted obsessive thoughts, even though the patient is fully cognizant of their inappropriate and nonsensical nature. To sum: the brain is on a constant short-circuit, and thus shits a brick. You don't die from OCD; you just wish you would.

Patients can tackle the symptoms of it-- the liturgical dancer panic, the frantic mental urgings to run for the bathroom sink-- with behavioral therapy, which involves extensive and intense work on re-training ones brain by forcing oneself to face, even encounter, those aspects of life that one most fears. When the therapist suggested this she encouraged me to, for instance, wear my boyfriends boxer shorts for a day without washing them first- I communicated that Id really rather not by way of doubling over in the lavender chair and dry heaving.

The other course of action is to ingest staggering amounts of government-regulated mind-altering substances. I was all for this.

The Luvox, the serotonin uptake inhibitor (they could have called it Warmed-Over String Bean Vomit, for all I cared, as long as it curbed the overwhelming urge to carry my own toilet paper into public restrooms because God only knew what kind of AIDS-riddled microbes lurked within the tire-sized rolls) tamed the OCD to a manageable if irritating mosquito whine. Life as a Luvox-sedated obsessive compulsive is like arising each morning with a slightly pulled calf muscle: You can run, walk, stretch and kick perfectly well, but not without an eternally twinging reminder, a tiny pinprick of fear, that there is sewage in the serotonin canal.

Most of the time-- for me, anyway-- there exists no connection between satisfying the whims of the OCD and specific catastrophic events; i.e., if I don't enter the grocery through THIS SPECIFIC DOOR, Brett Farve will die. It's more of a vague wash of unease, a chiggering sense of "Crappity crap crap, wish I hadn't done that, now what's gonna happen?"

Let's say youre walking through a public parking lot. There's a row of cars between you and the sidewalk you need to reach. There are seven spaces and six cars, parked like so:


Car 1 Car 2 Car 3 no car Car 4 Car 5 Car 6


Now: which cars do you walk past to reach the sidewalk?

The proper answer to the question is: What the hell kind of question is that? Which cars do you walk past? Oh my God!

But this is a scenario that could leaves me psychologically rooted to the blacktop, trying to determine the path which will least piss off the OCD, which strongly dislikes the numbers three and six and is the sickest, most exacting child in the world. If neurons could talk, this is what you would hear:

ME: There's a row of cars up ahead.
OCD: Oh shit, better count them.
ME: Fuck off. Im not counting anything.
OCD: Count them count them!
ME: Fine, there are six, you SICK FUCK, are you happy now?
OCD: Oh dear. Six. I dont like that.
ME: It doesn't matter. Just walk.
OCD: Wait wait, you have to figure out how to walk through the cars first.
ME: All right, fine, well walk through Car Two and Car Three.
OCD: Oh, well-- you just go ahead and walk past the third car. I hope youre ready to deal with the consequences.
ME: All right, all right, fine. Between Car One and Car Two then.
OCD: You stupid bitch, Car One is as bad as Car Three. What if you count them from left to right? Which number is it then? Car Six. You feel like walking past a Car Six?
ME: Okay, we'll walk between Car Four and Car Five then.
OCD: I hope you're kidding.
ME: Shut up, shut up! There's no way around this one! I have to walk past something! Lookit, theres a car coming....people are going to know that this conversation is even taking place. I'm walking through the empty space.
OCD: OH GOD, now youre between TWO cars that could possibly be Number Three Cars!

This all takes place within a manner of nanoseconds; not long enough to irretrievably ensnarl my day in an OCD-blocked traffic jam, not even long enough to perceptibly slow my steps, but pause sufficient to reflect that a grown woman of twenty-four with two degrees and her own checking account is counting her life away, car by car.


"So a base of Maslow's pyramid model, one of the primary characteristics a person or society must enjoy before becoming fully self-actualized, is a feeling of safety and security," said my high school history teacher, tapping a chalk-dust triangle that stretched from the ledge to the classroom clock. "If that's not present, the other levels social needs, self-respect, creative outlet will have nothing to build on."

I drew the fat first two levels and stopped, staring: that was enough, that was too much to grapple for; when the gentle grade of security is itself a goal, who stood a chance with the social needs and creative outlets? Why couldn't I just have a dysfunctional family, like the other girls?


Everyday life is a soapy film coating a sea of panic and second-guessing. We seek constant reassurance from those without OCD that our fears are groundless, thus unwittingly sweeping friends and family members into the sticky, clawing net.

And I'm one of the lucky ones. Some OCD patients, unresponsive to treatment or just plain unaware that there exists a name and a lot of slanty Latin words for what theyre feeling and thinking and doing, spend hours before the mirror, parting their hair just... exactly... right. Others feel compelled to hoard mail, sit on every single piece of it, hundreds and hundreds of little Ed McMahons smiling out from beneath the kitchen table, in between piles of 1987 Peoples, peering up from behind the television set. There are those compelled to count objects windowpanes, words, songs on the radio to a certain number for a certain number of times. Some can't stop tearing out their own hair. Sometimes an OCD patient cannot leave a room without holding a certain word or phrase in their heads, until everything feels just right. Mothers double over at the fear they will somehow harm their children; children erase holes in their math homework, frantic that they've not printed out their numbers in precisely the proper fashion.

Psycho.

Me, I just spend an inordinate amount of time worrying that, virgin status notwithstanding, I will come down either pregnant or HIV-positive. So: a McLaughlin Group session between me and my serotonin; holding myself a delicate distance from a gentlemans crotch these are simple things, really.

Try telling that, however, to the gentleman. The experts have informed me that such fears are really quite prevalent among OCD patients who have grown up steeped in Catholicism, a religion that kind of frowns upon premarital sex; but I say if thats the case we would have popped up with a St. Simon of the Anti-Bacterial Soap a long, long time ago.

So there were questions, as I began dating more and more and the Luvox-pumped serotonin levels went up and up, as to whether I felt uncomfortable with the non-sex I was having due to the obsessing and compulsing in my head or the Blessed Virgin statue on my windowsill. On dates I would toss my hair and lean forward with wide eyes and laugh delightedly at bad Bob Davie jokes; then I'd return to the dorm, stare up at the stained ceiling and anxiously await my period.

Every time I fumbled through a darkened dorm room in search of my underwire, I had to sort it out like dirty laundry: Were there cascades of unease after I sat up on the couch because I was afraid that HIV had somehow magically leapt into my bloodstream, or was it because if an anvil came crashing down upon me through the ceiling, it meant big-time hell for me?

By the end of my college career, I had it pretty well figured: when I felt like a slut as I was dropped me off, it was the Catholicism; when I merely felt like shooting up a horse tranquilizer, it was the OCD. On a good night I only felt one or the other.


I've been through four boyfriends and two therapists since I was diagnosed, and the only people not currently eyeing me from a distance of at least four states are the therapists.

The first boyfriend, to his everlasting credit, broke up with me because he was an idiot and a child and was feeling, quote, "trapped" because I insisted that he remove the pictures of his ex-girlfriend from his walls. Obsessive-compulsive disorder, whatever.... just don't come between him and the woman who'd asked for a restraining order.

The second boyfriend, a little worse. When I explained the condition to him he had no problem with it as long as his wang was satisfyingly chunged, and when I told him I felt uncomfortable or frightened or whatever he tended to become very, very concerned with how frustrating all this was for him, personally. "I just... I just need some time to come to terms with this," he said once after I asked him to stop with tears spilling down my face, and then turned his face towards the wall.

I sent that one packing after he shipped me an anniversary present-- we celebrated it in late February-- containing a card reading "Happy Anniversary To a Great Couple!" and a bag of Valentines Day candy with the 50% off tag still dangling.

The last one lasted all of seven months; he did his best, God bless him, came to a therapy session with me, looked up the Obsessive-Compulsive Foundation on the Internet, but the problem with him, however, wasn't so much the number of women hed been with before he began dating me (nine) or the fact that as a non-Catholic hed never experienced the faith-based restrictions I faced; (nine!) it was more that hed never had been in a relationship with a heavily medicated lady before even though, to be honest, the only OCD skin off his nose, other than the fact that one of us had to have her underwear on at all times and was afraid to sit on certain spots of the bed, was to periodically endure the offhand question "So you did test negative, right? right?" (Nine!!) And so all of a sudden here was this poor fellow in a relationship with a woman who drew her knees to her chest in paroxysms of panic every now and again (NINE!) after definitely not having sex, fearful that she should become pregnant; so I should not have been too horribly shocked when the word came via email one early morning: "I've come to the conclusion, he wrote, that OCD is not something I could spend the rest of my life with."

After I read this I sat on the floor and cried a whole lot, and then I took myself for a wee small hours drive, at the end of which, the odometer, I could not help but notice, stood at 33,033 miles.

Nine... God... excuse me, I need to go wash my hands.



For all this, however, for all the Luvox and the neurons and the occasional field trips to the fetal position, most people dont know that I have OCD until I tell them about it; for, as I have said, one of the main symptoms of OCD is that its patients rarely exhibit any of them. We know that AIDS cannot be transmitted via Blockbuster rentals; we are fully aware that no misfortune shall befall us should we become the sixth person in line rather than the forth or seventh or twenty-eighth; and for the most part the dishes get washed and the TPS report gets faxed without anyone knowing that our neurons fear otherwise. Much as the fears loom and snarl on the inside, nearly as bad is the fear that somebody else will know they are there.

I could be sitting right smack next to you in a movie theater, in the pincers of an OCD attack, terrified more than anyone has ever been, and the only sound you will hear, the only sight you will see, is Tom Hanks before you delivering a soliloquy to a volleyball, a thing bad enough all on its own.

We too are actors, consummate and professional actors, we members of the OCD Guild. There should be a separate Oscar ceremony, each and every year, specifically for obsessive-compulsives. And the award for Best Excuse Upon Getting Caught Backing In and Out of a Doorway Seventeen Times goes to... The nominees, for Outstanding Adeptness at Covering Up the Fact That One Is Counting the Number of Syllables in the Sentence One Is Currently Speaking, are...

Think of the most scared you've ever been, I'll say to people who ask me about it, it feels like that, only all the time, every single second of every single day, and people will cock their heads and conjure up the top of the roller coaster or the day the Dad found out about the dent on the Wrangler. There are moments when I'd prefer to possess a challenge of the physical sort: if youre missing a leg, people get that, its right there, they're not going to ask you to help move the couch. Where OCD is concerned, where the absurd meets cover-ups of Watergate dimensions, it's not so self-explanatory. Go ahead, give it a shot: I'd love to play tennis, Walter, but I cant serve game point because I have a strong aversion to the number three.

It's simpler with women, with friends, with men who repulse me sexually, because once the bottle of wine is half-gone and the other party has slipped me a secret of their own, it's not a far leap to slur, "Did I ever tell you that I cant let myshelf inhale if someones talking about AIDS, that Ill, like, hold my breath for, like, ever because I toooooootaly freak out that if I breathe in while someones even talking about it, then I'm afraid that means I'll get it? Iddn't that fucked UP?" I have no problem broaching the subject under these circumstances, for if the other party freaks and bolts, I can watch him walk away without wondering whether I have just truthed myself right out of a potential groom.

At what point does one inform a budding love interest that one has qualms turning a page in a magazine if the last word of the last paragraph is death or baby or positive or wrong? First date? Second? After hes seen you without makeup? Before or after the check? Ill have the surf and turf, and by the way, in the rare event this evening that should your pubic area should brush mine and I run shrieking for the shower, don't take it personally. I feel an obligation to run some sort of public service disclaimer, a PG-13 warning that Shes Got Issues; and I feel I need to lay it all out for each potential suitor before he starts building up feelings of the For-Life variety. It would not be sporting of me to allow the Serotonin Express mow him sideways after he has been so foolish.


Sometimes, with OCD, there is only fear and the fetal position, no washing or checking or counting, just plain old ordinary terror that comes and goes as it damn well pleases. Here, Ill use an example we can all recognize:

Hello, I'm anthrax, and Ill be your OCD trigger today. Worried yet? worried yet? worried yet? No? What about that box you opened the other day, with the address labels you ordered from New Jersey, you really aren't sure which post office that came through, are you? How about now? No white powder, but then again there doesnt necessarily have to be any, you know... Oh, there you go! thats a lovely panic attack, right in the middle of the Cheers rerun, very nice. Good girl! Good girl: get up, look at the labels, think about tossing them out, wash your hands, can't be too careful! Lookit, Ill allow you to watch the first twenty minutes of "All In the Family" in relative peace, then I'll come back and check on you, okay? Ill see ya. In the meantime: oh dear, is that a headache coming on? Sore throat? Oh, doesnt matter, you know that by the time the symptoms come on, its too late anyway, youre dead. Don't forget to wash your hands!"

This happens every now and again, when real-life worries and normal-people stresses ooze out of the basil ganglia in the form of some truly fer-weird kind of shit.

It sucks, when this comes to pass, because the OCD its does this on purpose, digs way deep down into your psyche, submarines down through Christmas cookie recipes and the brand of socks I wear and how Colorado smells in the morning; and then it roots out the diamonds, the good stuff, the things that mean the most, and it clamps on and it contaminates.

Months ago, as my thesis deadline closed in, I began to quail and look over my shoulder every time I prayed the Rosary, suddenly and for no reason at all fearing an apparition from the Virgin Mary, somehow convinced that such an appearance would signal the end of the world. (The OCD is overfond of fretting about the apocalypse, apparently unaware that its arrival would neatly counteract all of the other calamities it usually worries about.)

Here was a powerful religious figure whom I normally enjoyed hanging out with, prayer-wise, and the fear spread to going to Communion and then Mass itself. I swept every Mary statue in the house into a box and hid them behind the Christmas decorations, the gold-painted haloes and the tiny white hands clinking together as I fled from room to room, beside myself at my feebleness in the face of such illogic; because, like the boyfriend who sent me on my way once he realized that his discomfort with the OCD was greater than his love for me, I'd shoved away someone I loved and leaned on because I was afraid.

At such times I wish very hard that I had done less learning, more drinking in college, that I had developed the ability to drain large amounts liquor without having to toss it up right back at the bar. Nights, wandering the blazing house in fear of the Virgin Mary (I felt quieter with the lights on somehow, protected by the blazing glow of the GE bulbs) I would pause before my father's liquor cabinet, arrested by the rows of see-through brandy and dark engulfing Jack, square and sturdy in the bottle. The thick phantom sensations of the two times I have been full-blown drunk slide into my bloodstream and extremities. Anesthetized, dead: It would be so very nice, I tell myself, running a palm over the decanter lids, to be numb, and hurling. But the Luvox doesnt work as well with alcohol in the system, makes you sleepy, and so I'd keep pacing, next room, next worry-go-round.

These phases never last very long, though; they level out, once medications are adjusted and exercise is attended to, and I sink back into the blissful state of normality to bitch, without impunity, about the mere existence of Rosie O'Donnell! The sublime joy of going to my dead-end job every morning! The sweet, heady relief of mocking Bud Selig and wishing general destruction upon the head of the obnoxious Diane Sawyer! Normal is lovely; the grind is a salve. We live for the days, those of us with OCD, when the counting is merely unconscious and the flashes of discomfort exist as a mere itch on the anklebone; when the battery-acid fear is far off on the horizon somewhere, and the house may be exited without tossing all the matchbooks in the bathtub first.

That is why, in the aftermath of September 11th, I watched with equal parts amusement and pity as the nation had a bout of the serotonin grippers. What's this... don't you feel safe in everyday life anymore? Do you fear that the calm Delta print of the seatback in front of you is the last sight you'll ever see? Slathering yourself with anti-bacterial gel every time you page through the L.L. Bean catalogue? Longing to go about your day worried only that your Tivo commands were set correctly? Pull up a chair, and have a Luvox: youve just taken your first step into a freakier world, young Skywalker.

Normal people, people in Nebraska and Delaware and Utah with no prescriptions to fill, were forced to redefine bravery as they beheld cranes lifting entire fire engines from the hole in the concrete that was once the World Trade Center. To me, a person whose most frightening, thick-scariest task was to log onto the Internet so I could close my online account during my Liturgical Dancer phase, anyone who ran at danger, on purpose, was a god. Army guys and fire chiefs and police officers... my God, imagine the bad guys who must hate them. How did they get up in the morning? Terrorists... death threats... smallpox... poison in the water supply... that was small potatoes, that was amateur hour. I panicked over microorganisms in my juice box way before Tom Brokaw ever did, man, eons and ages before Newsweek deemed it fashionable to fling oneself hysterical over baby powder on the bathroom floor.

So the whole Mary thing, how'd that turn out?

Well, the Our Lady of Lourdes statue and the Rosaries, they continue to reside with the Tinkerbelle Christmas stocking and the "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" CD, if that's what youre wondering. I go to Mass but I'm typing this quickly, nervous clicks on the keyboard, because the very topic gives me the DTs. We continue in a nodding, proper Protestant relationship, the Virgin and I, and probably will until the next fun topic screams down the down the brain pike.

And... thats it?

That's never it; thats OCD: the nice ribbons and sharp paper edges are gone, frayed out of existence by fear and flinching and sorrow.

But what if...

And how about....

....that is how OCD goes, and that is what the life is like: the endless march, the daytime drama with no final episode, on and on and on with predictable camera angles and ridiculous plots and new actresses taking over the same character as the rest of the townsfolk pretend not to notice. Fear, adjust, fear again: the needle skips, the gramophone gets a kick, and the dance it goes on never as a waltz, though in that dance, you count by threes.