Me

I

I often question how much I should say about myself. In our world, there are various authors and artists who are received via their identity and I think that’s an awfully cruel thing to do to a person. Imagine being a person with all sorts of ideas, arguments, hopes and secret festering fears, wanting to speak those things, but being reduced to a publicly available history, or worse- reduced to a series of two to five statements about one’s identity.

I remember an artwork I saw once, I have forgotten the name and the artist, but the idea stuck with me. It was a poster, presented as a statement about some unseen artwork. It went on for lines and lines about who the artist was, and why it was so exciting to have someone like that produce an art work. Just as it was about to get to the subject of what the artwork was about, it “ran out of room”. I don’t want that for anyone. It is a tremendously dull culture, a culture without imagination, that is more excited by artists than artworks, writers than writing, or for that matter, politics than politicians. But things become many orders of magnitude worse when the actors are further reduced to a few categories- race, gender, sexuality, and trauma, squeezed into marketing slices and political conveniences. I am deeply afraid of becoming that OCD guy.

Still, I think there is value in speaking honestly about painful experiences in detail, in a way that brings them beyond easy abstractions. In speaking without the easy generalities that conceal the texture of the condition and its endless presentations. Yet also, the strange, and sometimes strangely beautiful vistas of it. It is of course true that mental illness is mostly endless and exhausting, but sometimes broken glass does catch the light in a certain way. All that said, allow me to try to explain my position.

II

At the root, I can feel within me a need for things to be a certain way. It is more than merely wanting, or trying- it is a distress that things might not turn out to be that way. In a probable distortion of Buddhism, I think of it as taṇhā or craving. But I suppose this much is not unique to mental illness but common to almost all of us. We might use the metaphor of adhesion to a desired possibility- the feeling of not just wanting something very much, but wanting it frantically. A kind of desperate psychic exertion towards an idea. In the crudest, most reductive terms, want that is lingering hurt. It has phenomenology that, once you are attuned to it, is distinctive. I believe it takes on a certain somatosensory character- it feels like grasping or trying to grasp with a paralyzed arm, perhaps. It is not merely desire.

I believe this desperate craving for security characterized by OCD is an experience that is particularly well explained by Buddhist psychology. As it comes and goes, one can feel the switch of unsatisfactoriness-craving-taṇhā going on and off, the burning of it when the switch is on as one fixates. Sometimes, it will switch off, the burning ends and one feels at peace. Sometimes there is even a moment of joy in shaking off, it feels like dropping something, or even like breaking into a run. Sometimes I even think I feel a slight heat in my forehead as if the increase in blood flow to my prefrontal cortex can be felt in my skin.

There is, in OCD, a burning need for a moment of relief that so rarely comes- a desire for completion, of grasping the matter and putting it away. We all know the moment of conclusion, of decision, the confidence as something is locked in- the setting aside of the mental scales as confidence surges in and one is affirmed in one’s judgment. It has a phenomenology all of its own. In OCD it is simply absent and so the signal to stop never comes. The paralysis of a mental limb is I think the best metaphor I know of for the phenomenology.

III

Many things I have placed aside. The inevitability of my own death, of my parent’s death, of my friends dying, of the loss of beauty and physical powers with age- these I have made myself accept (though not without a little grumbling). These are, for me, easy mode.

What is harder to evade is clinging to things closer to my self-image. I want to keep myself.

I cling to my desire that I should not be hated- yet my OCD tells me that I may have done very bad things and this may one day be revealed. Even my sense of being a fundamentally good-if-flawed person is not guaranteed- it will likely be one of the first things to go in many scenarios. I crave that I should retain my attributes such as intelligence, yet my OCD tells me it could all be consumed by some disease. Everything I have- even things that aren’t normally thought of as possessions, could be taken away.

The imagined, all-enduring, crystalline self at the center- one’s ‘captaincy of the ship’ ‘mastery of the soul’- can go just like anything else. . It is a lie that one can be assured, and assured forever of one’s “character”- let alone the image of such. All one can do is choose the good now to the extent it is permitted.

The addiction to seeking certainty, or even probability, that I will not be disgraced takes me slightly- ever so slightly- closer to being an entity worthy of disgrace. The addiction to trying to know whether my mind is being rent apart by some horrible disease brings me closer to an outcome in which my powers were wasted just as surely. The choice then- Do I cling inappropriately to the image of myself as a good person, or do I value trying, as best I can, to be a good person? Do I worry about my powers and so undermine them, or do I try to exercise them?

I might by clinging let myself slump into despair and possibly annihilation- affecting my family, friends, world, and self out of fear that I will lose my self-image as good. I might instead insist on following the good- even if I no longer have the assurance that I am a “good person”. Try to do good, or try, quixotically seeking the assurance of goodness.

I find concentric circles of divestment interesting. At first, you think that you want to be good because you are rewarded for it. Then you think that you want to be good because it will make your parents and friends proud. Then you think you want to be good because it will make you proud. Then you think you want to be good because you want to live your life as a good person. Then you think you want to be good in this moment because you want to be good in this moment. Finally, you realize you don’t even have this guarantee- you don’t know the good! All you can do is try to reach out to the good in the moment because, right now, you care about the good. That’s it.

Amicus shared this useful extract from Tennyson:

The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue be dust,

Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and the fly?

She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just,

To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky:

Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.

- Wages, Alfred Tennyson

But it’s more than that. Given that one cannot control or know one’s whole life- that the future and the past are distant, that so much is hidden in the present- the wages of attempted virtue now might not even include virtue, let alone its assurance.

We cannot be elsewhere in time or space, but we can stop ourselves from being here. We cannot give ourselves an essence, but we can cease to be at all. I do not deceive myself that we can know by definition that all the evils of the world are ultimately for goodness, nevertheless, there is a sense in which the elements I fear- the fragmentary contingency of it all- are what makes it life.

IV

I want to be known. I have always craved to be known. I wish I could simply sit in an old grove, in the dappled light of the tree of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, on an eternal afternoon and be with people who know me. But, outside this grove, I grow tired. The endless repetition of the same problematic which has presented itself before me for over half my life. At a point, we begin to experience our pathologies with something like boredom.

In Look to Windward the protagonist, overcome with guilt, grief, and despair, finally past all of it- in the place after the storm, asks one of the God-like computer minds to read his soul. I presume he is so tired of secrets that cannot be conveyed, because there are no words for them, or because they might not be believed. I am so tired of not being known. I am not so foolish as to think that everyone has the same problems as me, that everyone’s existential complexes are similar, but I do think I am not the only one. We are all, in the deepest sense, virginal for we have not been known. I think even the fear of death is complicated by our opacity. It becomes a fear of shuffling off into non-existence like an unopened parcel returned to the sender, unknown.

I found myself saying to a friend: “Don’t despair, despair is a luxury we cannot afford”. The hands are few, the labor is great and the day is at an end. What I am, what I feel, and what I could have been was over before it began, and the world as we understand it begins to fall away. It would be a strange place and time to grasp at things that could never be held anyway.

Who knows, maybe one day- technologically or mystically- someone will know us all.