OCD and Pens

Sitting in a room of 300 desks, math class in college - "Math for the Liberal Arts" for those of us who haven't used a quadratic equation since high school. I'm a Freshman at 21 and taking a full load of courses. I'm trying to keep everything perfectly organized. For English Composition class I have a green folder, green notebook, and use a green pen. For Leadership Skills it's purple; for Literature it's black. In Math it's blue.

We've gotten through voting methods and now we're on Euclidean circuits. I'm struggling to keep up with the TA's writing on the chalk board. Dammit! My pen is out of ink. I scrounge through my purse, through my backpack, through my coat pockets. Shit shit shoot! I'm pulling pens out of everywhere, but none of them are the right pen. I've got a No 2 pencil for test days, black pens, red pens, green pens, purple pens - no blue pens. My heart is beating faster and it's getting hard to breathe. The TA is filling up the third board and soon he's going to be erasing the notes I was trying to get down.

A girl beside me asks, "What's wrong?" I whisper back, "I can't find my pen!" She looks at me oddly, and as her eyes take in the office supply cache on my desk they widen. "Oh." I keep ripping through my purse, over and over, even though I've been through it already. I dump the contents on my desk. Cigarettes, hairbrush, caffeine pills - Dammit where's my PEN?? I start to cry. It's soft at first, fat tears rolling down my cheeks and landing on my notes, smearing them and making them illegible. The TA erases the first board and the second, and begins writing out a problem two or three ahead of me. I start to hyperventilate, knowing I can't catch up now.

Full of concern, the girl beside me raises her hand, "Uh sir? I think Angie needs to go to the counseling center." He sees me, falling apart, head in my hands, my racking sobs becoming audible now, and motions her to remove me from the room. She grabs fistfuls of pens and shoves them back into my purse, takes my notebook and text book and puts them in my backpack. She packs up her own things. "Come on," she tells me, "It's time to go." Blindly following her through the film of my tears, I let her lead me out of the room.

She walks with me out of the Mathematics building and over to Student Services. We take the elevator to the second floor and go through the double doors reading "Counseling Center." The woman behind the low wrap around desk in the lobby hands me a clipboard with a five-page checklist of common problems. I mark off more than I leave blank.

The girl who's name I don't know leaves me there, and I read and re-read the checklist, over and over again, making sure I haven't missed anything. My breathing is more normal now and my heart beat is beginning to slow down. Finally, after about half an hour, a counselor comes to see me.

We talk for about an hour, and I cry and choke and struggle to explain why exactly I had such a spectacular breakdown in the middle of class. "I didn't have the right pen," I keep saying, knowing by now how stupid it sounds. She roots around in her filing cabinet, and pulls out another checklist.

"I'm going to come back in a few minutes, but I want you to fill this out while I'm gone," she tells me. Again, I mark off more than I leave blank. She returns to the room, looks over my list and says to me, "You have obsessive compulsive disorder."

All my life I'd avoided getting a medical diagnosis - avoided hearing any "words of death" spoken over me that would give power to the demons, yet once she has said them I don't feel terrified; I feel relieved. There's a NAME for this? Other people know what it is? Counting "1-2-3-4-5-6-1-2-3-4-5-6-1-2-3-4-5-6" isn't normal, but neither is it so crazy they don't know what it is?

She sends me off with a pamphlet and a note excusing me from the classes I've missed. I walk around campus, reading and thinking. "I'm not alone!"

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I watched Daniel Dennet's presentation at TED recently, and was struck when he mentioned that "Every time you read it or say it, you make another copy in your brain".

This can be very useful when studying. In college I would carry a single small notebook in my purse, and jot down practically every single word one of my professors would say. Once I got home, I'd recopy these notes into separate notebooks for each course. Each weekend, I'd review the notes for each course, and as exams approached, I'd go over them once again. For classes which required a lot of memorization of specific facts or definitions, I'd also make flash cards, and keep these in my back pocket to review while standing in line or between classes or at red lights in traffic. I made repeated copies of the information in my brain, so that I could recall it with ease in the high-pressure setting of an exam. I would know the right answers, because I had drilled myself on them so many times.

I got to thinking about what this meant in terms of religious practice. As a child, prayer was woven into the fabric of everyday life. We prayed over meals, in the mornings before traveling, and at night before going to bed. We went to church every week, at least once a week, and sang the same songs over and over every year. We made copy after copy after copy of these ideas in our brains. Perhaps this is exactly why so many religions emphasize the importance of daily devotions, bible studies, offices of prayer, and weekly church attendance. Each of these activities acts as a form of memorization, embedding the ideas more and more thoroughly into our minds, so that they occur to as the "right" answers, much as the notes I studied before exams.

I quit attending church services regularly after my son was born. For one thing, I was tired all the time. He was sickly as a young child, and I was nursing him, which was difficult when the church wanted me to leave him in the nursery, where he wouldn't be a distraction during the service. I also didn't fit very well in my "Sunday best" anymore with the addition of baby weight, and happened to break my ankle when my son was only a few weeks old. The combination left me at home a lot of Sunday mornings. As time went on and I could reasonably have begun attending services regularly again, I had begun to appreciate the heathen thrill of sleeping in, or lounging around in my pajamas, on a Sunday morning. I didn't quit attending church because I didn't believe in God, but as I failed to go to church, my belief waned. I'm not sure it would have been as easy for me to disbelieve as it was, if I'd been hearing the counter-message "God is true, God is real, God is here, God loves you, God cares inordinately about your sex life" every single weekend.

Many former believers I know talk about still having fears of hell, or dreams about church attendance, long after they leave their faith behind. I think this concept of "making another copy in your brain" may be the root of it. There are some things I learned in college I doubt I'll ever forget, like the principals involved in the "Corrupt Bargain of 1824" (when John Quincy Adams stole the election from Andrew Jackson). In the same way, I don't know that I'll ever forget the words and sign language to "Jesus Loves the Little Children" which I must have sung a thousand times in my early years of life. So when thoughts of God or Christian songs pop into my head, I don't need to give them any more credibility than the memories that they are. I was taught a myth as truth for over 20 years; it seems reasonable to believe, it may take some time before these ideas fade. In the meanwhile, I can study and drill and read and write over and over again the things I know ascertain to be true - the universe is a weird and wonderful place, no more designed for me than for the influenza virus. And I'm going to enjoy every guilt-free moment of the brief life I have in it.

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