by Jeff Bell
Samantha says I’m underestimating myself.
“I think you should go on the AOU retreat,” she tells me one Sunday on the way home from church. She’s talking about the annual “Adults of Unity” retreat back in Kansas City, Missouri. A dozen or so people from our local church are going this year.
“Yeah, sure,” I say, dismissing the idea outright.
“Think about it. What could be a safer environment than a church retreat? It would be so good for you.”
Samantha’s right on both counts, and I know it. At her insistence, I agree to talk to Wayne Manning, who used to work at the Unity Village retreat grounds and still makes regular visits out there. Wayne, knowing my fear of inflicting damage, promises to pass along a list of every hazard I’ve left behind in Missouri as soon as I get home. I send in my registration the following day.
So now I am plotting an escape from my island, and Doubt is pissed off and determined to make sure I stay put. Like Christof scrambling to keep Truman from getting away, my cerebral enemy begins setting one trap after another to scare me into changing my plans. Scruples issues. Germ issues. Driving issues. Hazard issues. My OCD attacks double by the day.
But it’s too late. My airfare is paid for, my retreat deposit nonrefundable.
I can’t even imagine how this movie will end.
twenty-seven
fast-forward 2 weeks
Nine hours, two flights, one shuttle ride, and a half-dozen OCD episodes after leaving Sacramento, I arrive at Unity Village. I am exhausted and need a nap in the worst kind of way.
I check in, and the lady at the registration desk directs me to a long motel-like building at the edge of the retreat grounds. Quaint and rustic, I’m guessing, is how most guests would describe this dilapidated wooden building built back in the 1950s. But “old” and “vulnerable” are the first two adjectives I come up with as I haul my bags into my room.
I have my own small bathroom—a big, big plus—and the first thing I do is check the flow of the toilet. It’s the first thing I always check. Better to know at the onset what kind of problems I’m likely to have with clogs and overflows and various flushing issues. My test toilet paper scrap seems to go down just fine. But I can hear a steady drip coming from the nearby shower. Turns out it’s the hot water valve; it won’t shut off completely. I should report this right away. But I challenge myself to wait until tomorrow or maybe the day after that.
The rest of the room is pretty much what I’d expected: a couple of twin beds, a small desk, two nightstands, and a back door leading to the retreat grounds’ main pathways. Everything seems to be in working order. No loose electrical sockets or sagging towel racks or other hazards I’ll need to fix or report.
According to my activity schedule, lunch is still being served in the cafeteria for another ten minutes, so I decide to make my way over there for a bite. But I can’t seem to get the back door open. At first I think I must be missing some kind of a latch or deadbolt. Then I realize the whole door is swollen—or perhaps, painted—shut. Maybe we’re not supposed to use these rear doors. I look out the window and see one back door after another open and close. I give mine one more tug. Nothing. No way am I going to try pulling any harder than that. I have visions of collapsing the entire old building.
I’ll just go around the long way all week, I decide.
I get my first glimpse of the sprawling retreat grounds on my way to the cafeteria. Lush green lawns as far as I can see in every direction—1,400 acres worth, I think I read. There are two lakes, an oversized pool, tennis courts, a golf course, and a world-famous rose garden. The place has a college-campus feel, with crisscrossing pathways connecting a dozen or so Mediterranean-style buildings. Very serene. Very tranquil.
As for our itinerary, it’s supposed to be entirely open-ended. The retreat brochure promised a mix of planned activities and free time, with participants free to choose whatever balance of the two that they’d like. I’m thinking I’d be perfectly happy hanging out in my safe room the entire time.
But I don’t. I force myself to go to the general assembly after lunch and scout things out. There are people of all ages filling the room. Lots of couples and large groups of friends. More women than men by a factor of at least two to one. I feel like the odd guy out. And that’s even before I start with any of my OCD oddities.
It’s well after eleven by the time we wrap up all the afternoon orientations and dinner and an evening concert. I can’t wait to get my head on my pillow, and the two come together like opposite poles of a magnet. I am exhausted. Too exhausted to even give more than a passing thought to the sticking back door, and the dripping shower faucet, and the small tear I noticed on the seat of the airplane, and the lamp that I bumped into on my way into bed.
Jackie would call this OCD flooding.
Our first full day at the Village is a Sunday. We’re encouraged to spend at least half of it wandering the grounds and learning our way around. I am again tempted to stay in my room, but I’ve spent far too much money on this trip to let that happen. I know I need to do what I came here for. I have got to find ways to push myself, and the obvious one is just down the road. I put on my swim trunks and sandals and head to the nearby swimming pool I’ve been hearing about.
The air here in Missouri is sticky with a wet summer heat that we in the West know nothing about, and the idea of diving into a pond of cool, crystal clear water is highly inviting, to say the least. But I have a problem. For at least three years now, I have found it next to impossible to get myself into a public pool. For that I can thank Doubt, always ready with one deadly contamination scenario or another to scare me away. My sweat, a splash of urine on my leg, the bacteria from my athlete’s foot or jock itch infections: there are so many hypothetical sources of trouble.
Today it’s a new one. Today it’s the brightly colored braid of embroidery thread around my wrist. The girls made it for me as a “friendship bracelet” to keep us together in our time apart. They are wearing similar ones this week, and there’s no way I can take mine off.
But what if the ink from the thread bleeds into the pool?
“Yeah, what if!” I want to shout back at Doubt at the top of my lungs. Instead I just stand frozen at the edge of the pool, trying to look casual but shaking inside like one of those paint-mixing machines. I’ve got to believe that anyone watching me must think I’m terrified of drowning. How could they know that my fear is not what the water could do to me, but rather what I could do to the water?
Minutes, hours, and days seem to pass as I stand by the pool. People come and go. One lifeguard leaves and another takes over. And still I just stand there. Doubt won’t let me jump in. Something deep inside won’t let me walk away. I am frozen in place, incapable of budging an inch. Not even the blazing Midwest sun can break my freeze.
But then in an instant and without any warning, something does melt through the fear that has me paralyzed. It’s a soft and gentle nudge, the source of which I cannot see, and it’s followed by the sweetest sounding splash I have ever heard.
Fourteen hours later, it’s the sound of a crash, not a splash, that grabs my attention. It’s the middle of the night, but the sky outside my window is brighter than any glaring Sacramento afternoon in the hottest stretch of the summer.
And then, in a heartbeat, it is pitch dark again.
I am still only half awake when the next booming crash rattles the glass just inches from me. Again the sky comes alive with intense zigzags of light stretching from east to west, and west to east, and every other combination of compass points possible.
This is, I gather, an authentic Midwest thunderstorm. It is the most spectacular sight I have ever seen. Lightning in urban Northern California comes in single vertical distant discharges. Nothing at all like this. I am mesmerized. Like a kid watching his first snowfall, I sit with my nose glued to the window. For at least an hour I soak it all in. I marvel at the wonders of nature, and I marvel at the past forty-eight hours.
I watch the darkness turn to light and I think about my swim in the pool. I watch the sleeping heavens come alive, and I think about my escape from the island.
I can’t remember the last time I felt so awake. So invigorated. So filled with possibility. I want to go outside and lie down in the grass (until I realize how asinine that would be during a thunderstorm). I want to call Sam and the girls and tell them I love them. I want to put on loud music and sing along and dance until I’m dizzy. I want to pound my chest and let loose a primeval yell. I want to live.
I want to live.
That’s it right there, I suppose. For the first time in years, I want to be alive.
I am a different person the next two days, someone other than the guy who checked himself into my room. This someone is making himself a part of the AOU retreat—meeting people, taking hikes in the woods, even signing up to read a couple of old poems in the annual talent show, despite Doubt’s insistence that I consider whether my original prose might in fact be something less than original. Can you really be sure you didn’t somehow plagiarize the material? What if you lifted a line or two from some other poem you’d read and didn’t even know it?
The week is half over before I know it, and I have yet to report a single hazard, yet to ask for reassurance from a single soul. Samantha and I talk on the phone every night, and I always hang up with teeth marks in my tongue from having fought so hard to avoid bringing up one concern or another.
At least once a day I find myself thinking about The Truman Show and one scene in particular when Truman is about to bust out forever from the studio bubble that has been his home. And then one afternoon it dawns on me that I myself have one final exit I have yet to break through, one I’m standing no more than five feet from at the moment.
I make my way over to the back door of my room. I put my hand on the doorknob and close my eyes.
You won’t do it. You don’t have the guts. It’s Christof taunting Truman. Doubt taunting me.
I tighten my grip on the knob. I grit my teeth.
I’ll make you pay the price for this forever. You’ll be playing back tapes of this moment for as long as you live.
Arggggggghhhhhh. I pull at the door with every ounce of my strength. The walls groan like a wrestler about to be pinned. The windows rattle. The ceiling shakes as if hit by an earthquake.
And then the door is open.
And then I am standing on the other side.
And then Doubt is nowhere to be heard.
Among Unity Village’s more popular attractions is a colossal labyrinth patterned after a famous medieval one in France’s Chartres Cathedral. It looks to me like a giant version of one of those circular mazes you draw as a kid. But the retreat directors insist it’s a powerful tool for walking meditations, and at lunch one afternoon, the AOUers I’m sitting with are going on about how wonderful it is. “I’ll have to try it out,” I say, just attempting to be polite. But then a woman named Cathleen turns to me and suggests we get together after the evening program to give it a go. I can’t think of any inherent OCD hazards, nor can I come up with any excuses off the top of my head, so I say “sure” and arrange to touch base later.
We meet up that night just as the Kansas City sun is slipping away for the day. I know nothing about Cathleen except that we both hail from Sacramento. She’s in her forties, I’m guessing, and is traveling with a woman who also shares our home city.
The two of us start tackling the mammoth concentric circles, weaving our way back and forth, moving ever toward the decorative center. A handful of other retreat-goers are also walking the labyrinth, and instead of focusing on my footsteps or my breath or anything else even remotely rhythmic, I am keeping a close mental inventory of just where everyone is; I can’t afford to go plowing into any of my fellow spiritual seekers. I am getting nothing meaningful out of this whatsoever, but the way I figure it, I am at least getting some exercise.
We finish up and Cathleen asks, “So what do you think?”
“Interesting,” I say, not wanting to burst her bubble.
“Somebody told me the best way to experience these things is with your eyes closed,” she says.
“Huh?”
“Well, of course, you have to have someone with you, guiding you along.”
“Oh, I see,” I say. I do. But I don’t like where this conversation is going.
“Whadda ya say? You up for it?” What can I say? The next thing I know I’m walking in circles with my eyes closed, Cathleen’s right hand on my left shoulder. I am scared to death. What if Cathleen runs me right into some other labyrinth walker out here. Wouldn’t it still be my fault? I want to cheat but I’m afraid of getting caught. I want this to be over. I simply can’t trust her.
“Isn’t this a great exercise in trust?” I hear Cathleen whisper at that moment. I wonder if she’s somehow picking up on how nervous I am.
She’s on to my dirty secret, I decide by the time we wrap up this tortuous drill and make our way to a nearby bench. I need to be careful here. She’s from Sacramento, after all, and who’s to say she won’t go spreading my dirt all over town.
We start talking about the retreat and Wayne and Carole and our other mutual connections back home. We discover our two rooms at the motel share a common wall, and wonder out loud what the chances of that were.
“So how’d you wind up getting involved with our church, anyway?” Cathleen wants to know.
“Oh, it’s a long story,” I say, almost dismissively.
“Yeah? I’d love to hear it.”
Now what to do? There are so many contrived stories I’ve resorted to in the past. But I can’t seem to bring myself to lie to this woman. Maybe it’s this exercise in trust we’ve just finished. Maybe it’s having spent the past several days attempting to live with at least some authenticity for once.
Maybe it’s just that knowing look on her face.
“I was going through some pretty tough years when I found our church,” I say.
Cathleen nods her head, makes it clear I need say nothing at all more than that.
But this is a test, or at least an opportunity, my intuition is telling me. I’m supposed to try talking about my OCD here. Supposed to see how it feels and whether I can do it. So I do. For the first time in my life, I share my secret with someone with no ties, professional or otherwise, to the OCD or recovery worlds. Even my closest friends and relatives know nothing of what I hear myself telling this woman I’ve known for less than a day. By the time I am done, I have shared with Cathleen every iota of my story.
There’s a long pause when I run out of words. I am standing naked now in a busy street with people in windows high above looking down and gawking at me.
I close my eyes. Because I can’t bear to look at Cathleen. Because it’s the only way I know to make the world disappear.
“Thank you,” Cathleen whispers. “Thank you for trusting me with all that.”
I can’t speak at this moment. But if I could, I’d tell her that it’s I who should be saying thanks. Because, while I’m not sure I understand the significance, I know I have just taken the first, and perhaps most difficult, step in going public with my story. And for this, I know that I’ll forever be indebted to Cathleen. I also know that she, like Carole Johnson, didn’t fall into my project by chance.
My emotions are raw and at the surface the entire next day. Whatever thick skin I had left on my body is now just tissue paper that continues to tear. Fortunately for my self-esteem, I’m not the only one fighting to keep things together. It seems half the people around me are bawling their eyes out time and again. Lots of folks dealing with lots of issues in this safe environment. I suppose that’s why most of us are here.
By nightfall we are all in desperate need of a break, and our retreat directors must know this. They arrange for a Sufi dance instructor to teach us some moves. Most of us look downright goofy going through the motions, but no one cares. We are all just unwinding, trying to have some fun before
our scheduled twelve-hour exercise in silence, which we kick off at nine with a group labyrinth walk. In a giant Congo line, we snake our way back and forth through the giant maze. When it’s over we head back to our rooms in a collective hush. The only sounds anywhere are coming from the Village’s natural habitat.
That is, until I get about halfway home and look down at my pants.
My fly is wide open. I mean wiiiiide open.
For a second or two I am paralyzed with fear. But then the irony hits me: Could there have been a worse time to get caught with my zipper down? There I was dancing with at least a hundred people in a giant circle, switching partners every few minutes. And just in case anyone happened to miss the white of my underpants peeking clear as day through my khaki shorts, what do I do? I parade past each and every one of them, again and again, as we make our way back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth, through the labyrinth.
I am a kid in church now who sees something hanging out of the pastor’s nose, but knows the commotion he’ll cause if he lets himself laugh as he’s dying to. The entire Village is silent. Even the crickets are mute tonight. But I am snickering under my breath and there’s so much more I need to let out.
I do just that—let it all out—when I get back to my room. I start laughing so hard that my gut starts to ache. So hard that my eyes are pouring over with tears. So hard that I can only imagine what Cathleen and her roommate and the people on the other side of my room must be thinking.
So hard that I start thinking about how many years it’s been since I’ve let out a laugh of any size at all.
The retreat continues for another full day, but before I know it, we’re all packing our bags and saying goodbye. Cathleen and I swap phone numbers and promise to get together back in Sacramento. We discuss the irony of traveling to a retreat more than a thousand miles from home with a hundred-plus people from dozens of states, and each finding that the one person we most want to stay in touch with is someone from our home city that we didn’t even know. What are the chances?
