Things I Can’t Quite Explain
After nearly two years of blogging, I’ve been able to explain most of the things going on in my head in a way that I hope is accessible to readers. However, there are still some things I find difficult to understand, let alone explain to someone else.
A few of these things have cropped up as my musical-writing team is working on edits. Writing a character with OCD in a fantasy universe has been fun but difficult, especially since there have been a lot of misconceptions to clear up.
One of these things, which I have experienced but don’t fully understand, popped up in the script the other day. As I edited it, I remembered all the moments I leaped into conversations in the middle of other people’s thoughts or sentences, so excited to get the words out that I could barely talk.
I remember having this feeling a lot when I was a child. When I had a thought I wanted to share, no matter how inconsequential it might have seemed to the overall conversation, I felt deeply desperate to share it. It wasn’t an obsession, but it almost felt like a volcano boiling inside of me, ready to explode unless I set it free myself. Over time, I learned to douse this inner fire, although in some circumstances - usually related to my deepest passions - I still feel the need to interject.
I don’t have any particular obsessive thoughts or compulsions about this. It comes on suddenly just like an obsession, but I don’t think anything bad will happen if I don’t say the thing. Instead, it feels like I have the perfect response for the conversation, something that will make me sound smart and desirable as a conversation partner, and in the moment, it is inexplicably urgent.
Another challenge of editing has been the need I feel to correct all spelling and grammar mistakes I see. Once again, it’s not like I think someone I love will get hurt if I don’t edit things correctly, like I thought in my childhood about a variety of daily tasks. But, just like if I know that my dollar bills don’t face the same way in my wallet, the thought occupies my mind, and I unintentionally tune out everything else until I can fix it.
This presented a problem during my senior year of college, where I took a class in the writers who inspired Shakespeare. Many of the class texts were written in Old or Middle English, and I had such a problem with the unusual shapes of letters and spelling of words that I couldn’t understand what I was reading. It was the first time I ever had problems with reading, and no matter how hard I tried to convince myself that it was something I needed to overlook, I couldn’t.
This problem bothers me more, as it seems like a link to the stereotype that all people with OCD have alphabetized bookshelves and arrange everything so neatly that things fit together perfectly. It reminds me of the online compilations of “pictures that will make your OCD happy” that depict objects lined up in a row or matching or somehow being organized. It bothers me that I fit the stereotype in this way, although all the negative sensation I feel from not editing things well is a general sense of malaise. With enough effort, I can ignore it and come back to it at a better time, and at work, I am often praised for finding typos that elude others’ eyes.
This week, as I edited the first complete version of the script, I came across something else that has escaped my understanding for a long time. The character with OCD, the one who I was so excited to see in a fantasy universe, was not supposed to be a loner, and yet everyone who wrote her wrote parts where she was completely alone emotionally. She didn’t just talk over people or have specific things she felt the need to do; she did all of these things alone and isolated herself from everyone, even when it was supposed to be a completely different character who was lonely.
Reading that hit home. It felt all too real. How many times had I “messed up” by showing my obsessions, compulsions, anxieties, and fears to others throughout my life, only to find myself alone? Thankfully, now, I feel like I have a loving and compassionate community of friends, but it’s taken me until my late 20s to feel this way, like many of my friends felt in elementary or middle school.
I have a theory that I was too busy fighting things in my head to be able to make deep friendships, but at the same time, I don’t know for sure if that’s accurate. Is there a component of loneliness to OCD? A component of too much introspection? A component that made me laugh at a Tumblr post showing some of my favorite characters living with mental illness captioned “‘Wow, you’re an old soul’ is a polite way of saying ‘wow, you’re only 12 and you’ve already used up all your serotonin’”?
In the end, I reached out to the musical project leader. I explained that even though I don’t know why certain behaviors happen, they’re not all that matters in the life of a person with OCD. And we went through the script together, line by line, not looking for typos but for ways to really, truly make this character a part of our world.
And when I heard the project leader’s first draft of this character’s song, I cried. It somehow took all these things I didn’t understand and made them feel right, almost as if this character was real and sitting next to me. As if I was speaking to someone else who also couldn’t articulate every nuance of their lived experience, but we matched, and we belong in the worlds we’re in.
Ellie, a writer in the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.