Let Me Tell You About My Dissertation: Why People With OCD Will Not Always Strike You As Being “OCD” About Things

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Academics, Anxiety, Disorders, dissertation, Health, Mental health, Obsessive Compulsive, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD, Support Groups

I am posting this as something of a public service announcement that, I hope, will help educate people about OCD. There are a variety of typical things we associate with OCD, and these usually involve obsessive cleanliness or neatness of some form – some people in fact incorrectly boast about how “OCD” they are about cleaning their house, at which point I want to ask these people, “Really? Does apparent messiness really send you into a state of panic and anxiety based on problems that do not exist and are dealt with via compulsive responses that will not help? If you were in fact “OCD” about it, you would be too exhausted to boast (and for that matter the feeling of messiness would never go away, no matter how clean things are).” To be sure, there are people whose obsessions and compulsions involve arranging things, or cleaning, or eliminating germs. But if this is the only thing you think of when you think of OCD, there are a significant number of us you are failing to see. What I want to tell you about here is how in fact someone with OCD can, in fact, look exactly like the opposite of what people stereotypically associate with OCD.

The thing to remember about OCD is that those with OCD only feel their particular obsessions and compulsions regarding certain areas of life – in other areas, they can be as cautious or rash as anyone else. And externally, in the areas that their OCD affects, they will usually appear to the casual observer as just overly cautious because most people with OCD are good at hiding it. The question of whether OCD in fact affects their actual results in their area of obsession is debatable. In some cases it will mean a house is spotless by any normal standards even while it appears filthy to the person with OCD, much as a person with anorexia will appear to themselves overweight even when they are not – and are often indeed underweight – by verifiable standards. But in some cases OCD in fact negatively affects the exact thing one is worried about. Let me tell you about my dissertation.

Back when I was preparing my dissertation, I was editing obsessively, reading words over and over again, looking for some tricky, hidden errors that might be missed by everyone else. Finally, in exhaustion, I submitted. But I read my dissertation again just before my defense, and found all kinds of embarrassing errors. Why did I catch them the second time, and not the first time?

Upon reflection, I think the reason is that what I was doing to deal with the anxiety in the first round was obsessing and compulsing rather than editing. I was whipping myself up into a state of frenzy and looking for that one tiny thread that could pull apart the dissertation entire. But when one is looking for apocalypse, one overlooks little things, like spelling and grammar etc. – there is just not enough energy to deal with these things AND that one mysterious thing you are looking for and trying to fix lest it undo everything. In fact, there is barely enough energy to think rationally and be able in fact to tell reasonably what such a gap might look like – one is too busy looking for it to bother defining it.

So what was different the second time? There were no stakes. I couldn’t change anything even if I wanted to. And so I could read more calmly and actually see my dissertation as it was rather than as an object of intense anxiety. The difference is that there was nothing I could do about it, so I was actually reading it rather than trying to save it with an exhausted OCD hero-complex. Paradoxically, though, it was exactly this intense obsession with fixing the dissertation that in fact kept me from seeing the places where it needed to be fixed.

So how does this pan out in the rest of my life? I think it pans out such that I sometimes appear to people as lazy, only approaching something with a half effort. This is because what for most people are just the basic standards of good work are in fact what comes last in my OCD brain. Spelling errors and grammatical errors can always be fixed. But that one elusive argument that might be there and might be one’s undoing – that is something more serious, and it must be found before moving on to more basic issues. So you will see how it is that, though I have pored over my work to a point of exhaustion, these errors will still be there, coming last in the process and undertaken under the shade of a huge crisis of stress. The problem of course is that other people are not obsessive-compulsives – or rather, it is certainly not a problem, but it comes into effect when they gauge my work. There are people who stop paying attention after a few grammatical or spelling errors.

But why, you say, don’t I get proofreaders? First, getting things to them on time is nearly impossible because I am editing and rearranging right up to the last exhausting minute; I never finish things, only cast them off wildly and in a flurry at the deadline. So what I send proofreaders is a draft, if I even have that ready, and even then it will be likely that I have changed a significant amount by the time they get back to me. And then there is the problem of bothering people generally. I do not like to put people out just because I have OCD, and even if I did, I can never figure out the appropriate way to approach or ask them (another OCD thing, having to feel “just right” before doing something, for me particularly when it involves interacting with people).

So why am I writing all this? Three reasons: One is in the hope of helping people realize that OCD is not synonymous with carefulness or preciseness – indeed, obsessions and compulsions may leave no energy for other “more normal” concerns, and so those with OCD can in these areas appear negligent or lazy whereas in fact they are just exhausted. Another is that I hope others with OCD might resonate with this story, and might in fact see that sometimes identifying the toll of OCD in one’s life involves making a distinction between something like real editing and what one thought was editing but was in fact really obsession. Thirdly, I want to end in appreciation of those who do not get credit precisely for this reason, that OCD causes others to judge them wrongly. I know the battlefield for myself, and I know that many of those who judge can’t even begin to understand how very courageous and resolute you are in simply retaining your patch of small and malnourished ground in the battlefield of life. Take a moment to recognize your accomplishments – and there are accomplishments if in fact you have survived long enough to read this – and then keep fighting, if not for yourself, then at least for the sake of others with OCD.

In Season and Out of Season

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Ash Wednesday, C.S. Lewis, God, Lewis, Macklemore, Mere Christianity, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, Yelawolf

When I was young, I was the sort of kid who very much wanted to hear the voice of God. Growing up Evangelical, one hears all kinds of stories about this – how God speaks to us personally, and how we need to obey even when we would rather not – and I took this very seriously. I recall one moment as a child, when I was out in the backyard and thought I heard someone calling me. Knowing well the story of Samuel hearing God in the temple, I wondered if it was God calling me in the same way. Nothing ever came of that, but it is a story that illustrates the kind of child I was – for me, the borders between physics and metaphysics felt much thinner than they must for most people in late modernity.

This I suppose is what many people seem to long for and think of wistfully when they want to go back to a more “enchanted” world that has not had its soul ripped out of it. This is fair, but such people often fail to consider some of the downsides of such a fused vision of reality; the problem for me became manifest, and harshly, through my OCD. Normal children, it seems to me, might be naturally protected by an immediate concern for material things that does not place the weight of thick theological and spiritual concerns on their shoulders. I was not. I was constantly looking to hear the voice of God, and my OCD played to that; my faith told me that, figuratively speaking, God and His will might be hiding behind any and every bush, no matter how unlikely – so I checked, again and again, and constantly worried that I would miss something.

Eventually, I learned to distinguish, at least pragmatically if not emotionally, between the voice of God and the voice of OCD. This came about largely through the recognition that, at least for someone like me with a set of broken internal impulses, the way to know God’s will was not by “feel” or “personal experience”  – telling me to do this would be like telling a blind person to see. But those who are blind use other senses and depend on other people, and this is what I did. I turned to the Bible, and when the Bible itself became an object of my OCD – the constant anxiety of worrying about how to interpret a passage – I turned to the communion of saints around me, those living and dead whom I knew to have seen God. I may have been personally blind and directionless, but I could watch their lead and follow them.

The downside of this, though, was abstraction – leaning on others and other senses such as reason was necessary, but it left a hollowness in my heart. The blind still sometimes wish they could see. My method of managing OCD meant that I became reluctant to explore areas of experience and emotion in my faith. I was happy to surround myself with others who could know God in this way, so long as they didn’t compel me to know God after that fashion. And I still insist that this was and often remains necessary for me as I keep working through issues surrounding faith and OCD. But it was not without cost; it meant the death of the child who once thought he heard the voice of God in his backyard.

Fast forward to a scenario two years ago. Fast forward to me, embittered, and angry, and just barely clinging to God. Fast forward to me tormented on the horns of the Anglican dilemma, caught between a church that was so militantly low that it would not even provide ashes on Ash Wednesday, and a church with all the trappings and smells and bells but no fences – one was given perfect freedom to be holy, but also perfect freedom to be whatever else one wanted. And then there was the court case, in which pastoral care was sacrificed on the alter of “proclaiming the gospel” by undertaking huge legal fights over buildings. And then there were the politics in the Christian campus groups that struck a death blow to my endeavors in Christian leadership. And then worst of all there was the death of a close friend, who had been part of our family for the past year, and also part of the close knit liturgical Bible-study refuge that was in many ways one of the few things between me and the abyss.

In the midst of this, I found myself on a plane on the way back from visiting my friend’s parents. I was set to fly into Seattle, drive to Vancouver, and then get on a plane to go to an on-campus interview where I would tell them how many wonderful things I had done in my dissertation exploring suffering and faith. But really all I could think of was that A was dead, and what are any of my accomplishments next to that? I could go and pretend. But a dissertation does not raise the dead.

And then there was the odd moment in the plane when the person I was next to turned to me and wanted to talk about God, and the only thing I could think of was, “How very like God.” I had waited for such random conversations as a child, fervently and in the hope that they would end in the salvation of another, and they never happened. All that had died in me. But here I was embittered and having difficulty justifying my own life let alone my worth as a professor – here I was, huddled up in my seat trying as hard as possible to get others to ignore me – and my seatmate wanted to talk. I still don’t know how he knew I was a Christian. He said he just knew, which is odd because a surly and standoffish person huddled up in the corner of a plane seat and watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on his computer does not scream “Christian” to me. But there it was. He had found me out. And all I could think of was “in season and out of season” – but this felt like stretching the “out of season” thing a little bit too far. Conversations like this are not supposed to feel like an intrusion, a curse. But there I was. And so we talked about God.

Nothing terribly dramatic happened. He did not fall on his knees and pray the sinner’s prayer. He did not break down crying as I shared inspirational stories with him. But we did talk. He had just come back from a rehab centre, and part of the treatment involved the twelve step program; one of the steps, I learned later, involves surrendering oneself to a higher power, and it was this he wanted to talk about. I do not remember many of the details. I was tired, and I had to talk about the God who might as well have sent Job on a missions trip halfway through the book, for all the good I expected to do. What I do remember thinking is that he was part of the way there with the “higher power” thing, but that it was not quite enough. He needed Christology, and more importantly, Christ. And so I recommended C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. He in turn suggested (as we had also been talking about music) that I should listen to Yelawolf and Macklemore who were (apparently) up-and-coming musicians. I have not listened to them. But now and then I still pray for him.

Here the story comes to an end. I don’t know if his rehab worked and if he was able to quit his addiction to drugs. I don’t know if he got anything out of our conversation. I also reflected later that, even if he did take my advice and pick up Mere Christianity, he might not have liked it, for what can Lewis have to do with Yelawolf?  I don’t know, and I am fine with that because even when we know the “end” of a story it may not even in fact be the end – ours is to be faithful regardless, as a friend of mine has put it well on her blog.

But I can say it affected me. The experience had all the strange marks betraying the work of the God who is as much a riddle to me as He is a friend and lover and Lord – He gave me what I had stopped longing for long ago, and fortunately when I was too weary to do anything stupid with it – all I could be was a broken self doing the best I could to talk about the God I knew. But it was still somehow encouraging. All I could think afterward was, “In season and out of season…how very like God.” Deep relationships are all about anomalies – the appreciation of a quirk here, or a personality trait there – and it is in these things we feel the qualities of the people we love most dearly. This had all the marks of such quirkiness – an inside joke of the knock-knock variety that my heart has not readily forgotten.

How Love of Literature Makes Me a Bad Teacher

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Awkwardness, Christ, Christian, Holy Spirit, Literature, silence, Teaching

Common sense would seem to suggest that the more one loves one’s subject, the easier it should be to teach it to others. I imagine there are some people for whom this is true. However, I find it exactly the opposite. The more I love my subject, the more difficult it is to teach it to others.

Why is this? I think the best explanation is that when one loves something very deeply, one comes to marvel at it in its whole complexity, at least as far as one can understand it. For instance, if we were to compare, say, pieces of literature to ornate castles, the ones we love best would be the ones in which we are thoroughly familiar with the cracks, passageways, and secret catacombs – the normal, the anomalous, the beautiful, and the vulgar all lumped together; to see any part of it is to see the whole; even the smallest part is the mystic’s synecdoche, bringing before one’s eyes the entirety with which one is so familiar.

And this is exactly the problem for teaching. It becomes hard to remember what it was like to encounter the thing originally, piecemeal – a bit here, and a bit there – and so one forgets that newcomers need a tour. When so many parts of a great and complex work of literature strike one speechless with awe, one forgets that, without help, these parts might seem confusing or meaningless. Our deep love for the thing strikes us speechless, but from the outside, that speechlessness can look like ignorance or indifference. And so I find that those works I have studied most deeply and love most thoroughly come across in exactly the opposite way I intend. I stutter because I am in awe – because I do not want to meddle with the perfect complexity of the thing – but very often this comes across as confusion or disorganization. Poets often speak of love as a kind of madness, and here it is maybe true; deep love for something makes us bad teachers.

Conversely, it is far easier for us to codify and categorize those things we are less attracted to or know less about. For those things we know less about, we become students alongside our students and so make the journey together. For those things we are less attracted to, there may only be a few bits (if any) that are compelling, and so we find it easy to put these subjects in fairly simplistic boxes.

What has this to do with being a Christian? Everything, I think, and I think this because I am in love with Christ and His Word and His Church and the Tradition he has given her and the Holy Spirit etc. And this is precisely why I find it so hard to communicate my faith – the life of my Beloved – to others. It is not something that will be reduced so that it fits in a portable handbag that I can then shuffle off on others. Rather, it is in my flesh and blood, in my very bones. And to communicate it without stuttering and stammering – the thing that actuates my every breath – is as impossible an act as standing outside myself. I find myself in the dazzle of a dynamic silence that probably looks like boredom to those on the outside.

I should be clear; I do not say this with the pretense that this makes everything in my life lovely or bearable or joyful – it doesn’t. Even less do I mean to flaunt this as some kind of spiritual ideal that everyone is called to; different people are called to different things. What it does I hope help explain, maybe, is my awkwardness and silence. I do not speak when I ought to, and I sometimes speak at the wrong time, and it is all haunted by a deep and abiding clumsiness. If you have experienced this, please forgive it if you can as the awkwardness of one who loves deeply, abashed and in awe of Reality and the One who made it. And when you do not hear me shouting words of praise, it is not because I do not wish to praise – it is simply that words are inadequate.