by Jeff Bell
been, counting down the minutes until
I can “check” with Dad about the cable
episode. I hate that I am so compelled to
do so, especially when I can see the com-
pulsion for what it is. Yet I am determined
to carry it out with as much dignity as I
can muster. Dad will just have to under-
stand. I am doing this so I can move on
with things. I must accept my current
shortcomings and indulge them as neces-
sary. This doesn’t feel right, but it’s the
best I can do right now.
It’s the whole acceptance debate all over again. Maybe I had underestimated my ability to look after Nicole in a room full of wild young kids; I did survive the big dance, after all. But this is different. There is simply no way I’m going to get through the rest of my life without checking with Dad on what feels like the most oppressive obsession I’ve ever had to battle. Why even attempt to delay the inevitable? Get it over with now and move on. Isn’t that really what makes the most sense?
Makes sense to me, I answer myself in a voice that sounds suspiciously like Doubt’s.
We spend nearly four hours together at the seder, my father and I. Two hundred and forty minutes—any five of which would suffice for my checking needs. But I can’t seem to string together even three of those minutes between all the group time, and the seder ceremony, and Dad’s many stories about his grand adventures in Africa. Before I know it, it’s ten o’clock and Samantha is tugging on my sleeve telling me we need to get the girls home.
This is entirely unfair, in so many ways.
But no matter, I’ve still got plan B. Two days from now, Dad and I will have a full afternoon together, when we and the rest of our family spend Easter Sunday with Samantha’s mother, Joy, at her place in Napa. I’ve made it this long. What’s another forty-eight hours?
Halfway through this next two-day delay, I find myself in Joy’s backyard, sprawled out and stargazing by her meandering creek. It’s a clear and crisp night in the Napa Valley, and a full moon is casting its glow across everything in my sight. There’s a certain stillness to the air that we in suburbia seldom get to experience, a distinct absence of car horns and air conditioning units and all the other hums and buzzes of modern living.
I wish Samantha could be out here with me to take all this in. She, however, is tucked away with Joy and the girls, dyeing eggs, baking pies, getting everything ready for tomorrow.
I suppose I too am getting ready, but in my own way. I am steeling myself for the humiliation I know is coming when I launch into my checking drills with my father and hear my own desperate pleas for reassurance. I am paving the way for the inevitable shame I’ll fight for weeks after having again succumbed to my monster.
God, I wish I didn’t have to go through all this. What I wouldn’t give to have the willpower to not even broach the subject with Dad. What an incredible step forward that would be. For a second or two I actually imagine that possibility. And then I hear myself laughing out loud at the prospect. Yeah, right. Not a chance— not when the alternative is sixty more years’ worth of cueing up the cable-installation tape, much as I again catch myself doing at this very moment.
For the bazillionth time, I hit the Play button. I watch the familiar images of me drilling the hole and running the cable and squeezing caulking out of a tube. I rewind the tape and start to play it again.
And then I realize something: here I am on my back, staring up at the mighty heavens, and I am seeing nothing of them. I am focusing only on the garbage in my head. And come to think of it, this is what I always do. For 172 nights I have forced myself to spend a few minutes under the stars. But why? When is the last time I really even tried to lose myself in those stars instead of using my time beneath them to review a few more of my life-sapping tapes?
Pretty hard to see when you refuse to look. Pretty hard to hear when you refuse to listen.
So that’s what I decide to do for the next ten minutes. Look and listen. I lock my eyes on the brightest star I can find. I let my ears filter out all but a nearby owl and a chorus of crickets.
Within a few seconds, thoughts of the cable line pop back into my head, but I refuse to give my attention to them. An image of Dad flashes across the virtual screen strung between my ears, but I refuse to assign my focus to it. Doubt whispers something about me wasting my time and repeats the warning over and over, but I let the words fade away like the drawn-out closing refrain of a ’70s pop standard.
And so it goes with one thought after another. I watch them float by like so many clouds crossing the sky on a windy afternoon. I catch myself feeling more in charge than I knew I could be. I note that I am exercising my free will in dismissing all the garbage inside my head. I see that I am choosing which thoughts I give my attention.
Good. And you must also choose where you turn for comfort.
Whoa. Where did that one come from?
The thought repeats itself, and I wonder for a second whether Doubt again is messing with me. I break my stare and look away from the star.
But this isn’t Doubt’s whisper, and I know it. In fact, I’m all but certain that I recognize the source of this thought as the very one that had gently suggested I turn on my car radio, and pencil out a pyramid, and give Carole a call when I did. I have no name for it and its powerful nudges, but because of the depth from which it comes, and because of its seeming alignment with something much bigger than myself, I can’t help thinking that perhaps “inner believer” is the label that fits. Maybe not. Maybe this is just the “voice of reason” that normal people are always talking about. The only thing I’m really convinced of is that this calming force—whatever its name—is precisely where I’d choose to turn for strength and comfort, if only that were a choice I could make.
But it is.
I am not staring at a star anymore, or picturing a blue dot in some trancelike meditation. I am not counting my breaths or losing myself in the pulsating rhythms of nature. I am just sitting here in Joy’s backyard, fully conscious and aware of everything around me. And yet right here with me is this mysterious whisper of inner guidance.
I let myself bathe in the wonder of it for as long as I can, but soon my thoughts return to my father and my challenge at hand. I think about our relationship over the years and how I’ve increasingly relied on his reassurance for comfort. I think about how my checking compulsions with Dad have come to represent the very worst of my OCD. And again I think about how great it would be to break my addiction.
“I choose where I turn for comfort. I choose where I turn for strength. I choose. I choose.”
I try on the words for size and think again about how much of my life I’ve let Doubt direct. I see in my mind the horrific “checking” scenes of so many films Doubt has scripted for me. I close my eyes and try to imagine my future in a non-Doubt-directed film. I expect dead air, as we call it in broadcasting. But to my great surprise, the scenes take form easily, as if they’ve always been there, just lying around on the cutting room floor. There’s a sequence of me laughing and playing with Nikki and Bri near a sand castle on a beach. And one of me dancing with Samantha on a hot summer night. There are scenes of me sailing my windsurfer, and scenes of me doing fix-it projects around the house. There’s a tape of me emceeing a big station event with kids all around me, and another in which I’m speaking at a lectern about my battles with OCD. In all of these scenes, I am happy and strong and whole.
This is me serving my greater good; I am sure of it.
“This,” I whisper, “is what I choose.”
Suddenly I’m feeling more comfort than any checking fix has ever provided.
Suddenly I can’t even imagine talking about cables with my dad tomorrow.
Or ever.
twenty-six
Ever see a movie that haunted you—in a constructive way, that is—for years? One that made you think, really think?
One that opened your eyes to some deeper truth you’d never seen before? One that, dare I say it, changed your life forevermore? For me there are two movies that fit this bill: one a Hollywood blockbuster (that I’ll get back to shortly), and the other my own “virtual production” of the scene I just shared with you.
For the better part of a decade now, I have tried to make sense of what happened that night and why it had such a profound impact on everything that followed. I still can’t say for certain, but I’m pretty sure it had to do with the connecting of dots. It’s almost as if this giant crayon appeared out of nowhere and started drawing lines and arrows for me: Here’s Dad and all that he’s come to represent (A). Here’s the comforting support of something deep inside you we’ll call your “inner believer” (B). Here’s the certainty of a greater good (C). And here’s the power of your own free will and belief (D). Now then, see how if you use (D) to choose (B) instead of (A) you can get to (C)?
I confess that today this idea often seems like a convoluted football play on a coach’s chalkboard to me, but for at least a few seconds on that night by Joy’s creek, it all made perfect sense. And if there’s one thing I’m convinced of it’s that dots once connected are forever joined, even if we lose sight of the lines again and again.
I can’t remember just how visible those lines were on April 21, 1998, but I do know from my tapes that I spent much of that particular day trying to connect some other dots on my own….
Exactly six months down. Exactly six months to go. Halfway there, wherever there might be.
It’s a Tuesday morning, about nine thirty. The house is empty and quiet as I sit at my den desk poring over the hundreds of index cards spread out in front of me. I am looking for answers, trying to make sense of everything that’s happened since my thirty-fourth birthday.
I am getting nowhere.
My index cards read like a mathematical cosine. One day I boast of being on top of the world, the next I use the most dire language possible to describe the depths of my hell. One day I list three items on my episodes cards; the next day twelve. Up and down, and up and down again. Week after week after week. I suppose, to a large degree, this is simply life with OCD. But I know if I dig deep enough, there’s got to be more.
And there is.
After an hour or so, I find what I’m looking for: a trend line of sorts—one that’s clearly pointing in the right direction. Day 156 has, in fact, proven to be the low point of these past six months. Easter Eve by the creek was, in fact, a quantum leap forward, one that has kept me from even wanting to check with my father on anything OCD-related ever since. I can’t explain any of this, but it’s all right there on the cards.
Unfortunately, also right there on my cards is evidence of another clear trend—one toward something Jackie has been warning me about. She calls it scrupulosity, and in my typical fashion, I’ve been researching everything I can on the subject, largely in the book The Doubting Disease. I’ve learned that the term itself refers to the notion of imagining sin where it doesn’t exist, and that people have been struggling with this sort of thing forever. Way back in the 1600s, in fact, spiritual heavyweight and Pilgrim’s Progress author John Bunyan wrote an entire book (titled Grace Abounding) dealing with his battles with blasphemous thoughts. And a century before him, Martin Luther spoke and wrote of his need to confess several times every day. It seems pastoral counselors have long had to deal with overly scrupulous parishioners, especially within the Catholic church, where structured religious rituals are commonplace and encouraged. I can’t help feeling a bit amused reading this, thinking about how often I’ve secretly wished I were Catholic so I could confess my wrongdoings on a regular basis. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been thirty seconds since my last confession …
Armed with my Jackie warnings, my new research, and personal experience dating all the way back to my potato-bug episode as a kid, I should be able to recognize my scrupulosity issues when they come up these days. But like everything else with OCD, it’s only in hindsight that I can be that objective. It’s only now, as I read through my notes, that I can look back on my moral concerns and see how twisted I can let them become—like just last week when Kitty and I went down to Monterey with our spouses to pick up a big award from the Radio-Television News Directors Association of Northern California. Samantha and I wound up at an Embassy Suites hotel, and for forty-eight hours I fought the urge to pay someone there for the free buffet breakfast a friend and I had helped ourselves to after a meeting at another Embassy Suites nearly ten years ago. If Sam had let me, I would have explained all this to the guy at the front desk and laid down a ten-dollar bill. She didn’t, though, and for that I’m thankful today. Now I can see the whole thing for what it was: another blatant attempt by Doubt to ruin what was supposed to be an especially rewarding occasion. I can also understand what Jackie’s been saying about my morality-based compulsions for years—that what I tell myself is the “right thing to do” is often nothing more than a selfish attempt to rid myself of my doubt and guilt. Should the guy at Embassy Suites really have to figure out what to do with my ten bucks ten years after the fact, just so I can feel better?
Six months become seven all too quickly, as I step up my efforts to make something of my project before time runs out on it.
I continue to battle scrupulosity issues—like needing to drive back to the grocery store after unpacking a stray pack of gum that the checker must have accidentally tossed in my bag, and feeling compelled to remind a waiter that he’d refilled my coffee in case there’s an extra charge—but I’m at least learning to hit the Stop button when Doubt gets me reviewing virtual tapes of scruples issues from my past.
I am, in fact, now standing up to Doubt on a fairly regular basis. It’s all about choice, I’ve decided in the wake of my Easter Eve breakthrough. And I can choose not to listen to Doubt.
Doubt with a capital D does not exist. I understand this. But for whatever combination of reasons, the whole Doubt-as-Director model seems to be working for me. First, it strikes me as right in line with traditional OCD therapy, which encourages OCs to externalize their disorder and learn to talk back to it. And second, it seems so well suited to my own convictions about the power of free will and our need as humans to overcome some illogical innate fear of our own God-given greatness.
So I go with it.
And then, on June 7, 230 days into my project, I get my first glimpse of what Doubt actually looks like.
It’s a Sunday evening, and I am in a crowded Sacramento theater watching The Truman Show, Peter Weir’s brilliant film about a man who plods through life unaware that his hometown is a giant TV studio filled with Hollywood actors, and that his every move is being watched by millions of viewers. As an often jaded member of the media, I’ve been eager to see this flick, pitched on its surface as a story about societal voyeurism and the extremes to which media moguls will go in search of ratings. But from the opening credits, it’s pretty clear to me what this film is really about: one man’s quest to know his true identity.
Here’s this guy, Truman Burbank, trudging along on the small island of a city he’s afraid to leave, until he can no longer fight some inner nudging to seek something bigger. He attempts to venture out, to expand his horizons and discover his true self. But time and again he is thwarted by a series of hazards and obstacles carefully orchestrated by the show’s eccentric director, Christof, who simply can’t afford to let Truman get to the truth. The show would be over, his director’s job gone.
Sitting here taking in Ed Harris’s brilliant portrayal of the cunning and conniving Christof, it hits me like a bucket of cold water thrown in my face: I am watching a multimillion-dollar Technicolor Hollywood depiction of precisely how my own nemesis works.
I am getting my first glimpse of Director Doubt.
On the way home, and in bed, and for days to follow, I imagine Ed Harris’s Christof whenever I find myself taking my cues from Doubt. I can almost see him in his hi
gh-tech control room, coordinating with special-effects technicians to create elaborate OCD traps, each designed to keep me from getting off my “island” and closer to the reality of who I am.
It’s all so much easier to visualize now, like when I’m at my bathroom sink one Sunday morning, scrubbing away and delaying the family from getting to church. I am lost in my compulsion, entirely incapable of stopping—for church or any other reason—until I get this Christof-like image of Doubt in my head. I can almost hear Ed Harris barking orders over a PA to his crew: “Attention Control Room personnel. Doubt here. Jeff is heading off to church where he’ll again be reminded that he’s more than his fears and his doubts. We can’t let that happen. We need to drill into him that his hands aren’t clean. We need to keep him from ever leaving this house.”
In one of The Truman Show’ s most powerful scenes, Christof explains to a reporter that he’s in charge of Truman’s life only because Truman, not knowing better, lets him “direct” it. As Christof proclaims with great arrogance in response to one of the reporter’s questions, “We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented.”
Slowly but surely, I am coming to understand that that very statement is at the crux of every one of my OCD problems.
I am also beginning to realize one other thing: I, like Truman, have been living on an island—a moving one with Samantha at its center. Sam is my OCD safety net, and I am so dependent on her that I can’t even risk being out of her range. What would happen if she weren’t around to drive me when I’m incapable of getting behind the wheel, or scoop me off of the bathroom floor when I’m emotionally unable to get up by myself? How would I ever get by without Sam to cover for me when I’m about to get caught in an OCD ritual, or to talk me out of pursuing some god-awful compulsion I’ll later regret? I can’t even imagine the answers. So I refuse to let myself even think about being very far from my wife at any given time.
