The task of a lifetime

At some point, I wrote this in my journal:

To call by their right names the ways in which you differ—this I believe to be the task of a lifetime.

It sounded noble, poetic, and vaguely tragic, as most noble and poetic things do. I probably phrased it the way I did more because it sounded good than because I strictly believed it to be true. “The task of a lifetime”? Surely that’s an exaggeration. We begin to figure these things out early, after all. Or they’re figured out for us (e.g. grade school nicknames). I didn’t intend what I wrote to be true exactly, and I certainly didn’t intend it to be prophetic.

I’ve known since I was 20 that I’m bipolar. For 16 years, that provided a sufficient and stable way of describing my alterity. I get depressed; I get manic. Finished. I didn’t have more to figure out.

I wrote this earlier essay in part for my therapist, so she could see a little of the obsessive qualities we’d started to consider as a component of my psyche. That was in late November. I spent the days after Thanksgiving in a frantic state, writing as much as I could during the long weekend. I talked with Naomi (then my partner, now my wife!) about these notes of obsession and compulsion I’d begun to recognize and trace back through my life as if they formed a hidden melody I had never thought to listen for. Naomi kindly took notes as I talked and together we wandered through my past, listening with new intent.

What about the project that fixated me for a solid year as a graduate student? I’d taught myself to blow glass for it, to fuse borosilicate tubes at temperatures high enough the glass would glow orange and flow like honey. With that skill (roughly) acquired, I set out to make a vacuum-tight gas-handling line to capture the carbon dioxide produced from a high-temperature reaction between barite and graphite and—and—and—but none of it mattered, really. I had the chapters I needed for my thesis, yet I spent hours, days, entire weekends in the lab with my torch, blow-tube between my lips, wearing my secondhand dydimium glasses. I worked with a desperation, a fury, that left my brow damp and my throat sore. I scrounged cylinders of oxygen and methane, and when I couldn’t find methane, pure hydrogen. I spent $400 of my own money to buy a diffusion pump off eBay. Mounting it took days as I shattered the same part of the gas line again and again. But how convinced I was I needed to finish that project! Otherwise, I was certain, I would never become the scientist I longed to be.

Or earlier: before grad school, I’d single-mindedly fixated on the sensation I’d failed in my life. I sat at my computer at work and, because I had no particular work to do, I looked up biographies of truly exceptional chemists. Bob Woodward, a personal hero of one of my undergraduate professors, himself became a professor (at Harvard) at 27. Around then, he developed the first total synthesis of quinine. Later came the Woodward-Hoffmann rules, so simple, so elegant, so powerful in explaining which chemical reactions need only heat to proceed and which need light. Woodward was 27 when he became a professor—granted, I hadn’t even started grad school yet, but I was 25 at the time, so I had a solid two years to establish myself in my own regard. Two years—I still had time, right? I tried to convince myself, but I had to swallow past a lump in my throat to get rid of the bitter conviction I’d frustrated all the great hopes once placed on me.

Earlier, much earlier—and simultaneously more and less consequential: I still recall the hollow desolation that filled my chest when I thought about how every man-made object would ultimately be thrown away. It would all eventually end up in a landfill, crushed or torn under the treads of a bulldozer, or left to bleach in the sun until it was subsumed by the next tide of filth. Stuffed animals, even household appliances—I could hardly bear the thought of their loveless destruction. Perhaps what I felt was a first hint of existential despair, only directed for some reason at inanimate objects. Perhaps because their lifecycle is shorter and easier for a child to comprehend? Perhaps because I lacked firsthand proximity to human death? Despairing at the death of something that was never alive makes little sense to an adult, yet I suspect it’s something a lot of children do. The difference I think for me was the intensity of the emotion—almost crippling, to the point my spine felt like it was replaced with a bar of steel that had been driven far into the ground, pinning me in place—and what I did in response.

Here’s where the situation gets silly in the manner of children’s logic. I remember a washcloth we had. It was royal blue and had a cartoon duck embroidered on it. That by itself wouldn’t have meant anything, but what drove the steel bar deep into the ground and pinned me in place was even smaller: the duck’s head was turned so that it looked directly at you, watery eyes watching you over an orange beak that seemed to smile. I’m sure that smiling cartoon duck was designed to appeal to kids. Maybe it would entice them to use it and actually bathe. Instead, I vacillated between hiding from it (and hiding from that particular form of despair) and needing to find some way to show that duck it was loved during the brief duration of its life. Eventually, the need to love won out, and I recall how I carried the washcloth with me as I walked around the house.

Some children have a favorite blanket they bring along like a tail; I had a favorite washcloth. Is one that much stranger than the other? Is one a cause for concern and the other not? Standing outside myself, I would have concluded that something about the washcloth brought young Brian comfort in the way a familiar blanket might comfort another child. Yet within the universe of my soul, the situation was different: I derived no comfort from bringing that cartoon duck everywhere I went. In fact, carrying it around caused me the diametric opposite of comfort—acute distress. However, that distress was itself what caused me to carry the washcloth: only by having it with me could I assuage some of the intensity of my despair at its ineluctable demise. This chain of strange logic (temper the mortal anguish of an inanimate object by tangibly demonstrating your love?) led me to seek out exactly that thing that replaced my spine with cold steel.

Later, this fixation with the death of what was unalive spurred me to twist my mind in any way I could think of to rationalize the necessity of such astounding pain. Only after violent contortions did I find a solution I could believe in: I told myself that inanimate objects must experience great joy when used for their intended purpose. A blender exalts every time it is used to blend something; a doormat sighs with delight whenever you wipe your feet on it; a washcloth shivers happily whenever you use it to soap your face. That had to be the solution. And as long as these lifeless objects experienced the joy of use, their lives would be full enough I didn’t have to despair at their death. Shattering a clay pot that was never filled seemed to me unconscionable, but if it had been filled once, breaking it wouldn’t also shatter my heart. I never truly believed any of this, but it was an argument I could use to rationalize the pain of mortality, and if I never actually examined the argument’s soundness, I didn’t have to carry around a washcloth with a cartoon duck on it to relieve myself of the constant crushing awareness of destruction.

Some thirty years after I carried around that washcloth duck, I was nudged into understanding something about myself that has always been true: I have obsessive-compulsive disorder. The defining trait of the disorder is the ego-dystonic nature of your obsessions: you derive no joy from them but rather intense distress, and that distress is what drives the compulsion as you seek any way, no matter how outwardly irrational, to relieve your mental anguish. I fixated on making a vacuum line in grad school as a concrete way of lessening the fear that I would never reach what (at the time) I so dearly desired. Likewise my obsessive investigations into scientists of universal renown. The example with the washcloth, while the least consequential, is perhaps also the cleanest demonstration of classic OCD characteristics: when overcome by the distress the washcloth aroused in me, I could not function meaningfully until I practiced some ritual—carrying a physical object or repeating to myself a story—that I didn’t really want to perform. When Naomi and I began to hunt these tendencies in my past, I believe we both heard this hidden melody whistling in our ears.

Over time, my compulsions have largely sunk out of sight—thankfully I no longer carry around a washcloth with a cartoon duck—and instances when I become as inexplicably driven to physical actions like assembling the vacuum line, actions noticeable to others, are now rare. Rather, the compulsions largely take the form of thought patterns instead, which I imagine is a significant part of why I’ve been able to see dozens of therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists without the possibility of OCD arising. Incidentally, it did come up during one of my first meetings with a psychologist, a man I still remember for the sadness in his eyes that said he had seen too clearly the nature of the human psyche and could not forget the wisdom he’d gained. He conducted the comprehensive psychological evaluation of me my parents ordered after I dropped out of high school. I spent a day of answering multiple choice questions on a laptop and discussing the emotional meaning of various illustrations (a man dressing while a woman lay naked in bed clearly meant regret). After, the psychologist with the sad eyes prepared a report. I had Major Depressive Disorder, but I showed tendencies toward grandiosity that “merited ongoing vigilance.” I also scored just above the clinical threshold for OCD, but the text of his evaluation seemed to downplay the significance of that. I may well have been unaware at the time of the melodies in my own history and psyche to the extent that my answers during that evaluation, while honest, departed from the most felicitous account of the truth. Regardless, that psychologist, who’d known me for one day, uncovered two diagnoses that would take me 20 more years to convince myself were appropriate.

I sit here, looking out the window of a cafe on a day when low grey clouds block the sun, and I find myself almost chastised by the unintentional truth of what I once wrote, more for its poetic value than its truth. I once believed I had, by the age of 21, completed the task of a lifetime; I never really saw myself as a child, not even when I carried a washcloth around to comfort my soft young soul, but I believed once I was old. I was old when I was 21. I’d already completed the greatest struggle of self-discovery I would ever need to, and like a man who allows himself to finally recline after a lifetime of hard labor, I could, at least in the arena of self-knowledge, put my feet up and cast my mind back over the music of my life, which bore no new melodies.

I suppose the trouble is that we never hear the entire song of our lives until our lives are ending—and maybe not even then.