by Jeff Bell
But I can’t.
The heat of the hot tub becomes unbearable. I know I’ve got to get out of here, go run and hide. But I can’t even move, I’m so paralyzed with fear.
This is the Fall, the one I’ve seen coming for weeks. No way to stop it now, not even a chance. At any second—this very one or the next—I’ll begin cart-wheeling head over heels at twenty miles per hour, paying the price for this exhilarating ride, as I’ve done so many times before on rivers and lakes. The only difference here is that this time I am already in the water. This time the rest of the world is closing in on me for the crash.
I call Sam at work and start firing off all the what-if’s Doubt is feeding me: What if the duct was, in fact, part of the whole firewall system? What if the cable itself is a fire hazard because of passing hot air? What if you didn’t properly seal your hole in the duct, and some deadly gases from the basement get into the heating system and hence the house?
Sam tells me everything is just fine. She is sure of that. But what does she know? I need an expert. Someone with a solid understanding of heating systems. Someone with an engineering degree. Someone with an insurance broker’s appreciation of fire hazards. Someone like … Dad. The problem is he is off on one of his sailing adventures, bobbing around somewhere in the middle of nowhere, gone for at least another three weeks. I know I can and will check with my father just as soon as he gets back, but in the meantime, I need a reassurance fix from somebody. So I corner my brother-in-law at a get-together a few days later.
Poor Uncle Mikey, as we all call my sister’s husband, Mike. A mechanic by trade, he’s one of the handiest, most mechanical guys I know—and because of that, he, like my father, is a prime resource for my checking. The difference is, Uncle Mikey is onto me. The two of us are like brothers, and have been for years. He knows all too well from our many conversations what a vicious cycle reassurance creates. So when I share with him my concerns, he narrows his eyes.
“You know we shouldn’t go there,” he says.
“But this one’s different,” I explain. “I really need to know. I’m hurting bad.”
Now what’s the poor guy supposed to do? He gives in. I win. Especially when he shakes his head and laughs, as he tells me how ludicrous my thinking on all this is.
Now I feel better.
But only for an hour or two. Our conversation is not enough to stop my tapes. So I read up on heating systems. I hold an old scrap of coaxial cable above a heating vent to see how hot it gets. I come up with all kinds of clever experiments.
Still, I can’t stop myself from playing back my fuzzy images of the installation and my conversation with our landlord.
In a rare moment of clear thinking, I realize I need to talk to Jackie. I make arrangements for a special phone session, and at the appointed hour we begin tackling another exposure together. Step by excruciating step, Jackie leads me through the worst of my fears surrounding the whole cable issue. For a full forty minutes I imagine out loud every hypothetical disaster that Doubt can come up with. Nothing is too far-fetched for this little exercise, and with Jackie’s coaxing, I blab on and on about God-awful catastrophes, all the while watching my anxiety and heart rate climb off the charts.
And then something happens. I suddenly get very tired of hearing myself talk. I become almost bored with the entire process. Somehow, it’s as if I’ve managed to wring out every last drop of anxiety from each of the once highly charged words I’ve been using to describe my very worst nightmares. “Fire,” “flames,” “suffocation,” and so many other of Doubt’s vocabulary favorites could now just as easily be flavors of ice cream; they have lost all their emotional meaning to me.
“Great, Jeff!” Jackie exclaims when I concede this to her. “That’s the flooding effect we’re looking for. Outstanding.”
I’ve made a good decision, calling Jackie for this exercise. I know this was a good investment, in the lexicon of my believing pyramid. I can almost feel some unseen force stopping my fall, if only temporarily. But I have a new problem, one that becomes more clear to me with each passing hour: My physical anxiety—the tightness in my chest, the knot in my gut, the incessant pressure behind my eyes—it’s still all right there, right where it was before Jackie’s exposure. The only difference now is that it doesn’t seem to be “attached” to the cable obsession anymore. It’s just there, trapped in my body.
I once read that free-floating anxiety is the most intolerable sensation a human being can experience, and that OCD might, in fact, be a defense mechanism of sorts designed to confront it. The theory goes that OCs “assign” their biochemical anxiety to particular fears (obsessions) so that they can then take ritualistic actions (compulsions) to feel as if they’re at least doing something constructive.
I don’t know about all that, but I do know I keep catching myself working backwards from my tied-up gut, trying to make sense of all my cable anxiety and transferring the whole bundle of it to whatever triggers just happen to come up. A tire tread. A lane change. A passing ambulance. A handshake with a guy at work who’s still recovering from surgery. Trigger by trigger, I keep my bundle of anxiety alive and always attached to something, passing it ever forward, like a baton in a marathon relay race. The process becomes exhausting and takes a huge toll on my ability to focus. Kitty and I host an awards program, and I fumble my way through my lines, obsessing over my sneeze earlier in the night and Doubt’s insistence that I got everyone sick.
I am exhausted. Bitter. Aching inside and out. And I am falling ever downward, arms and legs flailing like some poor stiff in an action flick who’s just been sent flying with a punch through a penthouse window.
March 22. This project and life are slipping
away from me. I have lost my balance
and fallen, and now I can’t seem to get back on
my feet. OCD’s twin pillars of fear and
doubt are square in my path and seem-
ingly immovable. Again I find myself on
the verge of quitting, wanting desperately
to roll over, defeated on my path, and let
life trample me as it might.
Is this even constructive, putting such wretched thoughts down on index cards, day after day? What’s the point? Clearly my project is going nowhere, and quickly.
March 25. Day 156. I am curled up under my sheets in our empty house after having called in sick an hour ago. I can’t be at work today. I can’t even fathom getting myself out of this bed. My fear, my anxiety, my paranoia—all have reached levels that frighten me in ways I can’t even begin to understand. I feel more empty inside than ever before. Everything around me is dark and fuzzy around the edges. Clearly, this is the worst bout of depression I’ve ever had to deal with, and Samantha is fed up with my stubborn insistence on relying solely on my project to get myself through it. Jackie too is suggesting that my current approach, even with her supplemental coaching and treatment, is hardly working. The two of them, my wife and my therapist, keep bringing up meds. I myself am so hopelessly lost that I’m questioning everything: all my core beliefs, all my believing words on my ridiculous pyramid, and all my collective hours of quiet time under the stars.
Who am I fooling?
Day 156. As I put down tonight on a journal index card—one I’m fairly certain will be the last I ever waste my time on—I can only pray this particular day will someday prove to be “the bottom.”
I can only pray this day will somehow mark the end of the Fall.
twenty-five
fast-forward 9 days
Carole Johnson knows all too well about days like my Day 156. She tells me this over sandwiches and fries a week and a half later, on Day 165. This is the lunch I’ve been putting off for the past five months. Why, I’m not certain. I thought maybe I was ready to talk with another obsessive-compulsive today. But now, sitting here across from one, I’m not so sure. Maybe I’m still not up to seeing my reflection in somebody else.
Carole explains to me
that she’s a repeater, another common OCD creation I’ve never really understood. She says her obsessions almost always involve random catastrophic thoughts, like something really bad is going to happen to so-and-so, and the only way for her to “clear” these thoughts is to carry out specific patterns, generally involving sets of three. She might, for instance, be setting the table for dinner one night when the thought crosses her mind that a loved one is going to get hurt or die. In order to save herself the agony of obsessing about this horrific notion for hours, she performs a simple thought-clearing ritual, putting the plate that’s in her hand on the table, and removing and replacing it precisely three times.
For whatever strange reasons, three is Carole’s magic number, and its power over her is enormous. Sometimes it’s a toilet needing three flushes, or a light switch requiring three on-and-off cycles. Once, Carole tells me, she had one of her “intrusive thoughts” while going through a hotel doorway hundreds of miles from home. Circumstances kept her from making more than two passes back through the doorway right then, and she had to leave without completing her ritual. For more than a decade Carole obsessed about that particular thought. Nothing could save her from its grip until a return trip to that hotel finally provided an opportunity for exactly one more pass through the exact same doorway.
“Can you believe that, Jeff?” Carole asks.
I can, which is strange considering I have never felt compelled to repeat any action in sets of three, or for that matter, in sets of any other size. My responses to obsessions are so much more logical than those of repeaters. At least that’s what I always try to tell Jackie and Sam, both of whom generally raise an eyebrow and all but laugh in my face before I can finish. Still, I can’t deny that the power of my compulsions is every bit as strong as what I’m hearing today.
Carole’s stories scare me, not because they’re so hard to believe, but because they’re so familiar. We are, when it comes right down to it, no different at all. Nothing more than opposite sides of the same coin—one that some cruel twist of fate has sent spinning on its edge, out of control and nearly out of circulation.
It takes me a good twenty minutes to get past my hang-ups with talking to Carole, but then before I know it, I find myself sharing much more than I mean to. She is just such a comfortable audience, one of those rare people who can make you feel so at ease that you don’t even realize you’re blabbing on until it’s all out there and way too late to take any of it back.
We talk about my depression, and my checking patterns, and my years’ worth of wasted time and money before I found Jackie. We talk about our shared belief in a “greater good” and free will and the power of positive thinking. And at some point, the conversation comes around to my journaling project.
“You know those index cards you’re filling up aren’t just for you,” Carole says.
“I’m sorry …?”
“Your index card notes about OCD and doubt—” She is leaning across the table now, staring into my eyes. “A lot of people are going to find themselves in those notes.”
Now I know that I’ve said too much. This is my secret. My unspoken, deep desire to do something constructive with all my index cards. To keep my bargain with the stars and share my story for a greater good. Like Jampolsky’s cancer support-group kids. Or my old AA friends. I want to do this too, if for no other reason than the selfish one of giving meaning to all the lost years.
But this isn’t something I talk about out loud. Not even with Sam. Besides, the whole notion is pretty laughable right now. What a frightful, depressing anthology of failures any book of mine would be.
Carole must read my face. She reaches across the table and puts my hands in hers, much like a grandmother might. “It will all make sense some day, Jeff,” she says. “Mark my words, it will all make sense.”
I leave our lunch shaking my head. In just over one hour, Carole Johnson has managed to do what neither Samantha nor Jackie nor any of my self-help books has been able to accomplish in weeks: somehow snap me out of my funk. Maybe it was the talk about the index cards, or our discussion about free will. Maybe it was just being in the company of another obsessive-compulsive. All I know is that the dark and fuzzy edges are gone from my field of view. I am back on my sailboard, again harnessing the wind.
Day 156 is behind me now. It will go down as the low point of my entire project. Of this, I am as positive as an OC can be.
There are certain things you come to accept living with severe OCD—like the need to set realistic limits on your recovery expectations. Checkers with driving issues, for example, will probably never find themselves behind the wheel of a taxi or a Greyhound bus. I’m sure some therapists would beg to differ, but it strikes me that such acceptance is hardly a cop-out. I’d go so far as to call it healthy. The problem, of course, is the very fine line between acceptance and avoidance.
I am walking this line often in the early spring of ’98, and I know I’m guilty of winding up on the wrong side of it more often than I should. Still, there are at least a few items that I’m certain will always be on my “necessary acceptance” list, and chief among these is my inability to chaperone the girls, without Sam’s help, in a room full of kids falling all over each other. It’s just not going to happen. Samantha will always have to be the one to take them to Chuck E. Cheese and supervise their afternoons at the playground and gym. I struggle enough just watching our girls play soccer, bumping into their teammates and stepping all over everyone and everything along the sidelines. I can’t even fathom taking part in their scouting meetings and troop-wide get-togethers. And after the Christmas tree debacle, I certainly can’t risk getting caught again.
Samantha understands all this. She accepts my regular absences from so many aspects of the girls’ day-to-day lives. She has grown accustomed to having to cover for me. So a few weeks back when Nicole’s Brownie troop announced a father-daughter dance—scheduled for tonight—Sam was hardly surprised to hear me say I couldn’t possibly go. “I assumed as much,” she said, “It’s okay. I told Nikki you wouldn’t be available.”
I hate the idea of being unavailable for my daughter’s first dance, but, let’s be real, I don’t have a choice—or so I’m convinced until several hours after my lunch with Carole, when I’m driving home feeling especially bold, if not downright invincible.
“Nicole, you and I need to get ourselves dressed,” I announce as I throw open the front door to our house.
“For what?” she asks, looking over at her mother who is every bit as confused.
“The dance.”
My answer could have been “Disneyland” or “a ride to the moon” and still not have elicited the giddy excitement I can see in my seven-year-old’s eyes. Nicole scrambles off to her room to get dressed. Samantha pulls me into the den.
“What’s all this about?” she wants to know, almost as if looking for some catch or ulterior motive.
“Just feeling kind of brave tonight,” I say, knowing what a false bravado mine is. I’ve already accepted that Doubt is going to make me pay for all this in ways I can’t yet even imagine.
Within an hour I am parking our car three long blocks from the lot full of minivans outside the site of the dance. Nicole, who always whines about the hikes from my remote parking spots, this time makes the trek without a single complaint. Our bodies are both covered with goosebumps—hers from excitement, mine from fear.
“Hey!” a pony-tailed first-grader yells to Nikki as we make our way to the front door. The two of them run to greet one another and nearly plow down some other kid along the way.
“Nicole Lynn, watch where you’re—” I stop myself mid-sentence, realizing how futile my protective impulses are going to be for the rest of the night.
Nicole and I make our way inside, but not before she manages to bang into a wicker archway that somehow defies gravity by remaining upright.
I’m not going to survive this.
The next couple of hours play out like one of tho
se old driver’s-ed simulator films, with hazards popping up around every corner. At least a dozen times, I catch myself wanting to suggest to Nicole that it’s time to go. But over and over again, I manage to choose not to listen to Doubt. Generosity. Others side of the pyramid, Investment level.
At long last, the Brownie father-daughter dance is drawing to a close. “One more dance,” I tell Nicole, who is probably getting tired of my dragging her off to the farthest, least crowded corner of the room every time she suggests we return to the dance floor. The music starts, and to my great relief the song is a slow one. I take Nikki in my arms and hold her tight. We spin in circles, even play with a dip.
Look at us, I want to whisper in her ear as I survey the floor full of little girls and their daddies. Look at us, baby doll; look what we’re doing. I settle instead for “I love you, Nicole.”
“I love you too, Daddy,” she says, snuggling her little head up to that spot where it meets my stomach. “And Daddy …” She pauses, looking up at me now.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
A full week passes, and despite my gloomy predictions, I do not spend the time obsessing about the wicker archway, or the slew of kids Nikki bumped into, or anything else related to the dance. Turns out I’m far too preoccupied with another more pressing matter: my impending reunion with Dad. Passover and Easter are now almost here. For better or worse, my father and I are about to sit down together for the first time since my cable episode began more than a month ago. At long last, I will get the very reassurance I’ve been craving.
So why, I ask myself, am I such a mess just before we head to my grandfather’s place for our annual seder?
April 10. I am as anxious today as I’ve ever
