I feared treating my OCD would hurt my work. The opposite was true.
I was 12 years old when I developed obsessive-compulsive disorder. My older brother had recently tried to kill himself by jumping from our attic window. I was the one who saw him first, as he limped around the side of the house, his back and hair matted with snow. Inside I found his suicide note and showed it to our mother. She collapsed in my arms, crying, and whispered, “This is a secret we must take to our graves.”
Before long, I found myself obsessing about any number of vague yet existential threats, and compulsively taking defensive action against them. I cycled through most of the classic OCD manifestations: avoiding cracks in the sidewalk, flipping light switches three, six, nine times (depending on my mood), checking and rechecking — and rechecking again — that our front and back doors were indeed locked.
I had no idea what was happening to me. I simply knew with certainty that if I did not execute these actions correctly, my loved ones and I would suffer.
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And hypochondria, too: A book titled “Symptoms” lived in the tall bookcase behind the potted plant in the living room; one searched for one’s symptoms in an index up front, then proceeded to the indicated page where one would be provided with the most dire diagnosis imaginable. “Symptoms,” with its heft, its red-linen hardcover and tissue-thin paper, became my Bible. I touched things and people with trepidation and regret. I probed my body for swollen glands. My frequent handwashing desiccated my skin like a riverbed in drought, blood breaking through the cracks. I was forever certain that I was coming down with something catastrophic, like tuberculosis, AIDS, cancer.
I was morally scrupulous, in the clinical sense, and prayed three times a day. (I wasn’t particularly religious; I was trying to cover all my bases.) Morning and evening prayer was easy, at home, but lunchtime at school could be tricky; I’d have to abscond to the boy’s room, or a shadowy, chain-link corner of the playground. I grew adept at praying without moving my lips in rote run-on sentences in which I begged God’s forgiveness for everything and anything I had done wrong in the past and would do wrong in the future.
Because I had heard that thinking about sinning was as sinful as the deed, and thinking seemed to be nearly ceaseless, I reasoned that praying ought to be nearly ceaseless, too. I slept with my hands laced in prayer, and when I awoke in the morning my fingers would throb as they tightly and ever-so-slightly uncurled.
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My mother noticed eventually. She must have been terrified: one son suicidal, another pathologically anxious. But she offered me a remedy.
“Take this,” she said, placing in my hands a few blank sheets of paper and a pen, “and write. About anything that frightens you. Set it all down in words, and your fear will go away.”
I loved her for this gift, and from that moment on I was a writer.
Germs and words
Of course my fear did not go away. But writing diverted and depleted my fear, at least for a while; what’s more, writing well seemed to require my OCD skills. My maladaptive anxiety disorder was suddenly adaptive. Instead of germs I was obsessed now with words. My Irish predilection for expansiveness was counterbalanced by the intuition that concise and precise language was most persuasive: Not an extra word or thought was my goal.
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The parameters of poetry were a bonanza for my brain. I was rebellious — I didn’t want to write in the forms my teachers assigned, like a Shakespearean sonnet or haiku. I contrived my own shapes and constraints, and found that the rhythms and patterns of sound and sense were more engrossing (and soothing) than prose.
Soon I was writing plays, discovering that the concision and precision of dramatic action onstage were just as important as the language that evoked it — arguably more important; every utterance of dialogue, every stage direction, was supposed to reveal an incremental development of plot, characterization or theme. Playwriting challenged me to obsess about subtext, the ephemeral reality of psychology that language can both contain and unleash.
Share this articleShareSometimes I wrote directly about my fear, and in this way I was self-administering a kind of exposure therapy. To “set it all down in words,” as my mother had suggested long ago, relieved me of the burden of my fear by externalizing it and providing me with the temporary delusion that I was in control of it.
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But even when my subject had nothing explicitly to do with myself, I would obsess: researching extensively, revising relentlessly. I have even gone so far as to write about the same subject in multiple genres, as if I could exhaust every angle of approach in pursuit of — what, perfection? I accepted that perfection does not exist in any artistic endeavor, and that imperfection is the soul of art. But still I reached for it, again and again.
The impulse was never aesthetic; I was thinking magically, believing on some level that perfection would offer me protection — from rejection and failure, yes, but also from the impending doom that had been stalking me since I was a child. I was inwardly a child still, believing that perfection can forestall and perhaps cure catastrophe.
A source of creativity?
Writing was therapeutic, but it wasn’t therapy. When I wasn’t writing, my disorder was as burdensome as ever, though interestingly in adulthood my OCD mainly took the form of hypochondria: excessive handwashing, avoidance of crowds, hypervigilant monitoring of my bodily sensations.
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The act of writing itself was often a fleeing from the interpersonal strife that was exacerbating my symptoms.
Like many artists I worried that untangling my neurosis might somehow enervate my creativity and drive: If I wasn’t subconsciously compelled to write, would I write at all? It took me 20 years to seek and receive a diagnosis of OCD, and I am happy to report that therapy has not impaired me artistically.
With the symptoms of my disorder diminished, I write more and better. I am less encumbered by perfectionism, and without the distraction of my disorder I am able to write more reliably in communion with my genuine (that is, non-neurotic) thoughts and emotions.
I no longer believe that words can render me immune to catastrophe.
At 32, I was disowned by my parents, for unexplained reasons, but likely because I had begun to make public the story of an emotionally and verbally abusive upbringing. At 42, I was diagnosed with colon cancer, six months after my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, and when our only child was a toddler. This past spring my older brother — the same brother who tried to kill himself when we were children, who struggled with depression all his life — passed away at the age of 53. I don’t know the cause of death or whether he turned to suicide or not.
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And through it all I have been sustained by my practice of writing. Not solely because it remains a channel for my fear, but because writing about trauma allows me to make something of nothing, to find beauty — or meaning, or purpose — in the wreckage.
After the satisfying toil of composition, I can hold in my hands a poem, a play, a brief essay like this, and these words, if they are good enough, will speak to and with readers and audiences who have weathered similar loss and distress.
I feel at once helpful and hopeful, which is a feeling not unlike love — love being one of the truest remedies for the symptoms of living.
Dan O’Brien is a playwright and a poet. His poetry collection, “Survivor’s Notebook,” was published this month. His memoir, “From Scarsdale: A Childhood,” will be published in October.
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