30: Obsession

Jillian

So I started being very preoccupied with doing things twice. If I, for example, dropped keys, I would then lean down and pick them up. But before I actually picked them up, I would probably drop them again. Like really close to the floor so no one would quite know what I was doing. But I'd be very aware that I was fulfilling some sort of two obligation.

Jillian

My favorite color was blue, and I also had this fantasy that blue was basically an even color. So it all seemed to fit in. But yellow seemed much more odd to me. And red seemed odd to me. And brown seemed even. Black seemed odd. This doesn't resonate at all with you?

Jillian

Yeah, days. Both Sunday and Monday seem even to me. But I don't like them as days at all. I much prefer Tuesdays and Thursdays, which seem odd. I mean, days are weird. Monday, Wednesday seems pretty even to me. Tuesday, Thursday, Friday all seem odd.

Jillian

You do?

Jillian

The big symmetry thing that I can remember is going to a Broadway show with my family. And I had this sense that it didn't feel quite right to just clap with my hands. And so, I developed this thing about clapping with my elbows, with this idea that somehow that would produce a more symmetrical experience. And so, I would clap with my hands, and then clap with my elbows, and then maybe even clap with the entire hand and elbow.

And I can remember just sitting there and someone turning to me and saying, what are you doing? What are you doing with your elbows? And thinking like, this is not normal.

Jillian

Yeah. But I always felt like your irritation about it was just irrational. I mean, for example, it used to come up a lot with the alarm clock, right? Like, I set my alarm clock usually for 8:02. If I need a little more sleep, then it's 8:12 or 8:22. I don't really like 8:32, but I'll do that.

But so, when I used to want to set the alarm clock for 8:02, and you would object and want to set it-- I mean, first of all, sometimes you would object. You would just want to set it for 8:03, which was just pure malice on your part. Like, obviously, I'm not going to be happy if the alarm clock is set for 8:03. I mean, what would you really care if I set the alarm clock for 8:02?

Jillian

But you only think about it as piling stuff if it's something that really feels like an obligation. Which the two thing is in a certain way, but it's also just something that you like, or that I like.

Jillian

That's because I realized it was coming out of a sadistic impulse in you.

Jillian

No, you would never just happen to set it 8:01. You would set it and there'd be something very sinister about your setting the alarm clock.

Jillian

Is this really the place to rehearse this?

I mean, there is a way in which I'm addicted to the two thing. And in a way, that's almost as powerful as any other physical addiction.

Jillian

No. I think that I actually kind of like it. I mean, I think I like having that kind of order in my life and having routine.

Jillian

Well, I mean, I was clued in enough to know that people would think it would be kind of weird. Your average Joe is not going to be that sympathetic to someone who has an obsession with the number two.

Although I do think-- the more I talk to people-- I do think people have variations of these things. You talked about it about being a continuum. And on the one side of the continuum, would be the people who you might just label as quirky. And the other side of the continuum would be the people who might have to start taking Prozac, right? And I think-- yeah, I think most people are on the continuum.

Paul Tough

We talked about it a lot. And I don't think either one of us really came up with a definite answer. The one thing I kept thinking about though is, to me, obsessions can sometimes take the place of religion in people's lives. An organized religion gives you certain rules, certain rituals, by which to live your life. Things will be orderly if you follow those rules. And if you grow up in a nonreligious environment, maybe you start creating those rules for yourself.

Jillian

Yes.

Jillian

But my siblings and stuff, I don't think they really experienced-- I could imagine that it is a kind of substitute. But if is, then it was pretty specific to me.

Jillian

What do you know about [? Elena ?] and the rubber bands?

Jillian

And do you know why she wore them?

Jillian

I don't know either. I think she wore them-- I mean, she wore a lot of rubber bands. She didn't just wear them around her arm. She wore big rubber bands around her neck too. [LAUGHS] She had lots of rubber bands all the time. And I think she also carried paperclips in her pockets.

Jillian

I think if you go into any house though, you'll find these kind of things. My mother used to say that having four kids expanded her idea of the normal. Like, what the normal could entail.

Paul Tough

Well, I've gathered another few stories about obsession. The next one is a little bit further down that continuum. This is one with somewhat more serious consequences.

Lauren Slater

There is something satisfying and scary about making an angel, lowering your bulky body into the drowning fluff, stray flakes landing on your face. I am seven or eight, and the sky looms above me, gray and dead.

I move my arms and legs, expanding, contracting, sculpting snow before it can swallow me up. I register a mistake on my angel, what looks like a thumb print on its left wing. I reach down to erase it, but am unable to smooth the snow perfectly. So I start again on another angel, lowering myself, swishing and sweeping, rolling over.

No, yet another mistake. This time, the symmetry in the wing span is wrong. A compulsion comes over me. I do it again and again.

In my memory, hours go by. My fingers inside my mittens get wrinkled and raw. My breath comes heavily and the snow begins to blue. A moon rises, a perfect crescent curl whose precise shape I will never be able to recreate. I ache for something I cannot name. Someone calls me. Come in now, come in now.

Very early the next morning, I awaken, look out my bedroom window, and see the yard covered with my frantic forms. Hundreds of angels, none of them quite right. The forms twist and strain, the wings seeming to struggle up in the winter sun, as if each angel were longing for escape, for a free flight that might crack the crystal and ice of our still, stiff world.

Looking back on it now, I think maybe those moments in the snow were when my OCD began, although it didn't come to me full-fledged until my mid-20s. OCD stands for obsessive compulsive disorder, and some studies say over three million Americans suffer from it.

Some mental health professionals claim that the onset of obsession is a response to an underlying fear-- a recent trauma, say, or a loss. I don't believe that that is always true. Because no matter how hard I think about it, I remember nothing unusual or disorienting before my first attack.

I don't know exactly why at 2 o'clock one Saturday afternoon what felt like a seizure shook me. I recall lying on the floor in my apartment in Cambridge. I was immersed in a book, The Seven Storey Mountain, walking my way through the tale's church. A monk moaned. And suddenly this, a thought careening across my cortex, I can't concentrate.

Of course, the thought disturbed my concentration, and the monk's moan turned into a whisper, disappeared. I blinked, looked up from the book. The floor suddenly frightened me. Between the planks, I could see lines of dark dirt and the sway of a spider crawling.

Let me get back, I thought, into the world of the book. I lowered my eyes to the page, but instead of being able to see the print, there was the thought blocking out all else-- I can't concentrate.

Now I started to panic. Each time I tried to get back to the book, the words crumbled, lost their shapes. I said to myself, I must not allow that thought about concentration to come into my mind anymore. But of course the more I tried to suppress it, the louder it jangled.

I looked at my hand. I ached for its familiar skin. But as I held it out, the sentence, I can't concentrate on my hand, blocked out my hand. So all I saw was a blur of flesh. I tried to force my brain onto other topics, but with each mental dodge, I became aware that I was dodging. And each time I itched, I became aware that I was itching. And with each inhalation, I became aware that I was inhaling. And I thought, if I think too much about breathing, will I forget how to breathe?

Say "God I'm sorry" 14 times I ordered myself. This is crazy, I said to myself. 15 times, a voice from somewhere else commanded.

In the days after my attack, obsessive thoughts returned. What before had been inconsequential behaviors, like counting to three before I went through a doorway or checking the stove several times before bed, now became imperatives.

There were a thousand and one of them to follow. Rules about how to step, what it meant to touch my mouth, a hot consuming urge to fix the crooked angles of the universe. It was constant, a cruel nattering. There, that tilted picture on the wall. Scratch your head with your left hand only.

It was noise, the beak of a woodpecker in the soft bark of my brain. I did very little for the next year. I didn't want to go out, because any movement might set off a cycle of obsessions. I sat hunched and lost weight. Fear and grief prevented me from eating much.

When I was too terrified to get out of bed, I checked into the local hospital, where I lay amidst IV drips, bags of blood, murmuring heart machines that let me know someone somewhere near was still alive.

Then one day, my doctor said to me, there's a new medication called Prozac still in its trial period, but it's 70% effective with OCD. I want to send you to a Doctor Vuckovic. He's one of the physicians doing trial runs. I shrugged, willing to try. I'd tried so much, surely this couldn't hurt. I didn't expect much, though. I certainly didn't expect what I finally got.

The pads of paper on Vuckovic's desk are all edged in green and white with the word "Prozac" scripted across the bottom. The pen has "Prozac" embossed in tiny letters. He asks me about my symptoms for a few minutes, and then uses the Prozac pen to write out a prescription.

After a couple of days of nausea and headaches, the Prozac began to work its magic. One morning, I woke up and waited for a command. Touch your nose. Blink 12 times. Try not to think about concentrating. The imperatives came. I could hear them, but from far away, like birds beyond a mountain, a sound nearly silent and easy to ignore.

By the fourth day, I felt so shockingly fine that I called Doctor Vuckovic. I believed he had saved me. "I'm well," I told him. "Not yet. It takes at least a month to build up the therapeutic blood level." "No," I said. "It doesn't." I felt rushing enjoy. "The medicine you gave me has made me well. I've actually never felt better." A pause on the line. "I suppose it could be possible." "Yes," I said. "It's happened."

Lauren Slater

How could a drug change my mind so abruptly? My brain wasn't wet clay and paste, as all good brains should be, but a glinting thing crossed with wires. I wasn't human, but machine. No. I wasn't machine, but animal, linked to my electrified biology more completely than I could have imagined.

We have come to think lately of machines and animals, of machines and nature, as occupying opposite sides of the spectrum. There is IBM, and then there's the lake. But really, they are so similar. A computer goes on when you push its button. A gazelle goes on when it sees a lynx. Only humans are supposedly different, above the pure cause and effect of the hard-wired primitive world. Free will and all.

But no, maybe not. For I had swallowed a pill designed through technology. And in doing so, I was discovering myself embedded in an animal world. I was a purely chemical being, mood and personality seeping through serotonin. We are all taught to believe it's true. But how strange to feel that supposed truth bubbling right in your own tweaked brain pan.

Mornings now, I got up early to jog, showered efficiently, then strode off to the library. I was able to go back to work, cutting deli part time at Formaggio's while I prepared myself for divinity school the next year by reading. I read with an appetite, hungry from all the time I'd lost to illness. The pages of the book seemed very white. The words were easy, black beads shining, ebony in my quieted mind.

Then one day, as though I'd never swallowed a Prozac pill, my mind seized and clamped and the obsessions were back. I was staying with a family in Appalachia in Kentucky on an oral history project. During my interview with Kat, the mother, I decided to take a break in the sandy yard.

It was almost 100 degrees. Chickens screamed and pecked. In one swift and seamless move, Pat's husband, Lonny, reached down to grab a bird. He laid it down on a stump, raised an ax, and cut. The body did its dance. Blood spilled. I ran inside. I took a step forward and then said to myself, don't take another step until you count to 25.

After I'd satisfied that imperative, I had to count to 25 again, and then halve 25, and then quarter it, before I felt safe enough to walk out the door. By the end of the day, each step took over 10 minutes to complete. I stopped taking steps. I sat on my bed.

"What's wrong with you?" Kat said. "Come out here and talk with us." I tried, but I got stuck in the doorway. There was a point above the doorway I just had to see, and then see again. And inside of me, something screamed, back again, back again.

The next morning, a Sunday, Kat told me, "You'll feel better if you come to church with us." She peered into my face, which must have been white and drawn. "Are you suffering from some city sickness?"

"Come to church," Kat said. "We can ask the preacher to pray for you." But I didn't believe in prayer where my illness was concerned. I'd come to think that whatever was wrong with me had a simplistic chemical cause.

I woke late one night, fists clenched. It took me an hour to get out of bed, so many numbers I had to do. But I was determined. And then I was walking outside, pushing past the need to count before every step.

I'd passed midnight fields, a single shack with lighted windows. Cows slept in a pasture. I rounded the pasture, walked up a hill. And then before me, spreading out in moonlight, a lake. I stood by its lip. My mind was buzzing and jerking. I don't know at what point the swans appeared. White swans, they must've been. But in silhouette, they looked black. And they seemed to materialize straight out of the water.

They rose to the surface as memories rise to the surface of consciousness. Hundreds of black swans, suddenly floating absolutely silent. And as I stood there, the counting seized, my mind became silent, and I watched.

The swans drifted until it seemed for a few moments that they were inside of me. Seven dark silent birds, 14 princesses, a single self swimming in a tepid sea. I don't know how long I stood there, or when exactly I left. The swans disappeared eventually. The counting, ticking, talking of my mind resumed.

Still, even in shattering illness, I had been quieted for a bit. Doors in me had opened. Elegance had entered. This thought calmed me. I was not completely claimed by illness. Nor was I a prisoner of Prozac, entirely dependent on the medication to function. Part of me was still free, a private space not absolutely permeated by pain. A space I could learn to cultivate.

It is a smaller space than I would have wished for myself. Even after I raised my dose, the Prozac never worked as well as it once had. And years later, I am sometimes sad about that. Other times, strangely relieved, even though my brain is hounded. I still must check my keys, the stove. I must pause many times while I write this and do a ritual count to 30.

It's distracting to say the least. But still, I write this. I can walk, and talk, and play. I've come to live my life in those brief stretches of silence that arrive throughout the day. I am learning something about the single moment. How rife with potential it is. How truly loud its tick.

Mayer Silber

If we hear lightning, there's a blessing for that. If we see thunder, there's a blessing for that. If we hear bad news during the day, there's a blessing to bless the true judge. If we hear good news, depending on what type of good news, we might say, [UNINTELLIGIBLE].

Mayer Silber

I would only say that it's just the capability to be devout to something. I think maybe we should go onto the differences from there. And I guess it sounds like, the way you described them, and I may be wrong, that these people are imprisoned by certain actions. I don't feel imprisoned. I don't feel compelled to say, oh, I can't be in a car from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. I look at it as freedom.

Mayer Silber

I would say that I do. Yes. To be honest.

Meir Silber

What's the bad thing that would happen?

Mayer Silber

Oh, I guess maybe it's the fear of not knowing. The fear of not belonging. Sort of like this abandonment, that maybe with my abandonment of God, God would abandon me. And I would be alone. And I'd be responsible for myself. Where here I feel like if I can go and do the things that God wants, God is with me.

Greg Whitehead

A scream is often treated as some kind of insurmountable, impenetrable obstacle, pure, white noise force, that is beyond analysis and unworthy of any kind of interpretation. But here at the institute, we hear the scream from entirely the other perspective-- the scream as an opening, as an entry point, as an access point. An entry into a vast interior landscape that has as its surface this highly nuanced, very individual, psycho-acoustic force to it.

[SCREAMING]

Greg Whitehead

There's also a scream line, the actual journey that the screamer takes into the interior landscape. And when we established the telephone answering machine here at the institute, we called it the "scream line," because that machine was going to circulate individual scream lines into--

Woman 1

Thank you, Mr. Whitehead. I believe you are on the wrong track. I'm sure if you came to my house, you would hear the screams that you'd never want to hear again. [LOUD SCREAMING]

Woman 2

[SCREAMING] Oh, I feel much better now. Thank you.

Man

[SCREAMING]

Girl

Hi. I'm [? Melia Mangum. ?] I'm eight years old, and here's my scream. [SCREAMING] Bye.

Greg Whitehead

The scream--

Woman 3

Hi. It's kind of early in the morning to scream. So I don't think I'll scream, but I'm going to tell you a story. I was thinking about how screams sometimes come later, much later, like a kind of delayed reaction.

So this is a true story that happened long ago when I was a teenager. And I was on this train. Like, I'd run away I think with this guy. And we were on this train. And we'd been going for days and nights. And it had got really steamy on this train. And it's kind of a seedy atmosphere. And everybody was playing cards. All the time, playing cards and smoking.

And then suddenly, this fight broke out. Like, out of nowhere. First, it was just these sounds. It was, like, really muffled sounds. Bodies colliding and ricocheting down the corridors and stuff. And then these kind of muffled shots.

And we pulled the door across our compartment, and this body kind of rolled over, rolled past, stumbled past. And there was blood just smeared all over the glass. And you couldn't see anything because of that. It's like the sounds and the vision, and everything was muffled.

But it took hours and hours before we reached the next town, and we're going through this small desert. But when we eventually got there, the train stopped. And there was this scene kind of took place in absolute silence. It was extraordinary. No one seemed to speak. And it was incredibly hot and hazy. And there was just this desert all around.

And they took the body off the train. And then the guy who'd killed him was taken off with handcuffs. And these few cops appeared from nowhere. And it was just like this platform in the middle of nowhere. I mean suddenly, out of the silence, this scream came. It was just like something between a wail and a scream. And it's like it just went right through the whole landscape.

And it's like the dust sort of settled in the air as the scream kind of just hung there. It just seemed like for ages. I don't know if I can do that scream. I can hear it really, really clearly. I'll try, but I think it won't be like that. Anyway, it was something like this. [SCREAMING]

Liza Lou

I haven't had much luck describing this work. What does that mean, a beaded kitchen? You imagine a beaded skirt or a beaded top. The best I can do is I can say, this is a three-dimensional room. It's 200 square feet. It's painted. But it's painted with beads that you have to apply with the tweezers one at a time.

So it's this amazing amount of color. It's pinks and blues and silvers and golds. Imagine a wood grain counter in your kitchen. Only suddenly, instead of brown wood, it's become golden and yellow and burnt copper.

Liza Lou

I didn't think about it. I thought it would take about six months to do when I started. I didn't think it would take so much. I didn't realize it would take my life. It's like falling in love, maybe. It's a form of where you watch you life-- you watch everything else fall away. You lose everything in a sense.

For five years, I was in the constant stage of to-do lists. Of stress and pressure, and always feeling like a failure. Because every day you feel as though you've got nothing done. You maybe get five inches of work done-- five inches of an entirely beaded kitchen.

Liza Lou

It's such a personal problem. I mean, yeah. I always would feel like I didn't get enough done. I never had the feeling of, wow, did I just really do well today. Maybe I'll work an 18-hour day. And then maybe I'll continue to do that for two weeks. So how much time did that take? I don't clock in.

Liza Lou

I don't know. I don't know. And I don't know how much it cost me to do it. I don't know. If I knew those answers, I wouldn't do it. Nobody who thinks like that would bead a kitchen.

The wall panels were really challenging. Because the curiosity is the thing that motivates me. I'm not patient, I'm curious. So I already knew-- once I had done one wall panel, I knew what it was going to look like. Then I had to do nine more or eight more panels. And then they all get put together. And that was really difficult.

I would wonder, god, why am I so depressed? And then, finally, I stood the whole wall up and I realized, my god, no wonder I've been depressed. I've been doing the same pattern for the last three months.

Liza Lou

It's one step backward, and then another step forward, hopefully. Hopefully, it would buy two months in the studio-- one sale or two sales. And the problem with my work is that it takes so long. So selling a soup can wouldn't just set me back a day. It would set me back maybe several weeks.

For a long time, I resented how hard it was. This didn't seem right. I mean, nobody who works at I. Magnin has to work at I. Magnin in order to then work at I. Magnin. Do you know what I mean?

Liza Lou

Oh, thank god I didn't have to answer that question.

The thing is, people think I'm patient. And I'm not patient. I'm tremendously impatient. But I'm very, very curious. Just to point of death, I'm curious. I wanted to know what it would look like to bead a table. That's what got me through it. It's the same pattern. It's a pink and silver and blue pattern, again and again and again and again. But what sustained the interest was, what will it look like when it's finished?

So if I had lost the piece, and I knew what it took to do the piece, and I already knew what it looked like, why would I do it again? What would be the motivating factor? Would that be to make it so that you could see it? I'm not sure if that's what motivates me. I'm not sure if the approval of anyone else is what motivates me.

If I had known that there would be those kind of sacrifices, I probably wouldn't have done it. But as they came up, it was sort of like, as you cross that road, you decide if you're going to jump over it or if you're going to retreat. And every time, I found that I would jump over it.

Life is so-- there's so much chaos. I think that one of the great solutions to dealing with that chaos is to have a mission, to have some kind of purpose. That's sort of the way I deal with why I'm here, is to make every square inch something meaningful. My materials happen to speak of that, because they are so slow and painstaking. And I have all this time to think about purpose, and why am I doing this, and is this a meaningful thing to be doing? Everything has meaning. That's the philosophy of my work. Absolutely everything has meaning if you give it meaning.

I had this thing up in my studio. And also it's a loft. So I was having something repaired. And the repairman came inside and was fixing my washer and dryer. And he looked at my kitchen, and it was almost finished. So it was really what you're looking at, just about, maybe minus a tile or too. He put his hands on his hips. He said, neat hobby. [LAUGHS]