Selected Excerpts from Triggered: A Memoir of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

(A few weeks back my editor, Rob, sent me a selection of what he thought were the strongest quotes from the memoir.  I asked if I could put them up here, and he said he thought that was a fine idea.  Consider this advance advertising copy for the memoir, for myself, by myself…)

On OCD as “the doubting disorder”:

“Consider the possibility that, at any moment, the end of the world could occur.  The ground will crack, the clouds spark with red lightning, hungry waters rise.  The sky hums with annihilating angels.  Imagine the final crisis of man. Now: I would like you to prove, with absolute certainty, that this is not true…”

On OCD and sex:

“If a girl accepts an invitation to help count the tiles on your bedroom ceiling, then she will probably be disappointed when she realizes you were speaking literally.”

On OCD and religion:

“I have found Catholicism and obsessive compulsive disorder to be deeply sympathetic to one another.  One is a repressive construct founded in existential terror, barely restrained by complex, arbitrary ritual behaviors; the other is an anxiety disorder.”

On OCD and the “imp of the mind”:

“Imagine the worst thing in the world.  Picture it.  Construct it, carefully and deliberately, in your mind.  Take all the time you need but be careful not to omit anything. Imagine it happening to you, to people you love.  Look around, pick out the most vulnerable-looking person in the room.  Imagine it happening to them.  Now try not to think about it.  Forget everything, entirely.  Now.”

On the seductiveness of OCD:

“It was in this moment of release that my OCD seduced me.  This is how the disorder perpetuates itself, by occasionally rewarding trauma and neurosis with brief moments of relief. Every so often, everything will work, and you will somehow convince yourself that you are safe, and the disorder will claim credit.  I had struck a bargain with the OCD, and after long months of struggle the disorder seemed to fulfill its promise.  The transaction was complete.  In that moment I became subservient to it.”

On OCD humor:

“By the sink, I noticed a perfunctory sign warning readers to wash their hands.  It was scrawled with graffiti: NO YOU CAN’T GERMS ARE UNPREVENTABLE AND INESCAPABLE.”

On literary-inspired OCD:

“My first-full blown bout with OCD I owe to Kurt Vonnegut.  My third-grade teacher, thoughtlessly neglecting the handful of her charges suffering from undiagnosed madness, told us about a book she was reading.  That book was Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.  In her pre-digested version of the novel, the world was threatened by the evil molecule Ice-9…”

On choosing a college:

“With self-inflicted jubilance my mother and I spun around and rushed back to the school store, looking for official regalia I could stamp myself with.  I chose a pair of t-shirts.  The first of these read ‘The People’s Republic of Swarthmore,’ and was printed with a hammer and sickle.  The other shirt featured the official Swarthmore College logo and then read in a large clear font: ‘Guilt Without Sex.’ This was the place I decided was home.”

On OCD and well-meaning social workers:

“Part of the problem, she suggested, was that the depression itself often prevented me from asking for help, and it might be useful for us to create a special term I could use to let them know when I was badly hurting.  She suggested ‘crumping.’ We will consider the implications of this for a moment.  I am curled in the bathroom, pills strewn across the floor, rivulets of blood running from my slashed wrists.  My father kicks the door off of its hinges and my distraught parents rush in.  Honey are you alright what’s wrong tell us.  I try to reassure them.  ‘It’s alright Ma, I’m only crumping.’

On love, apathy, and the family pet:

“It has been suggested that the opposite of love is not hatred but apathy.  There is nothing so utterly dismissive as the ‘fuck off’ of a cat.”

On OCD and the rest of us:

“So to anyone reading who also struggles with mental illness: I am sorry.  I am so sorry.  I am sorry for what you have been through, and I am sorry that no one, certainly not I, can understand the unique nature of your suffering.  If I could give you advice: learn to lay your burden down, if you can.  Do what you have to so that you can heal.  It may help you to talk about what you have endured; it helped me.  Does it sound embarrassing, trite, if I claim that I feel a kinship between us?  I don’t care.  I don’t care at all any more.  You are my brother, my sister.

Now for the rest of you bastards…”

You can also check out some advance reviews of Triggered here.

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