From The Paris Review:
Here is my morning routine: when I get out of bed, my feet must touch the edge of the rug, one at a time, while I softly vocalize two magic words that are best described as puffing and plosive sounds. If my feet don’t touch correctly, or if I don’t say the words right, I get back in bed and try again. Once I have properly performed this initial procedure, I again tap my left foot on the carpet while vocalizing the first magic word, and then—while holding my breath and without moving my mouth or tongue one millimeter during the duration—I silently incant a phrase that is far too nonsensical and embarrassing to share publicly, then tap my right foot while vocalizing the second magic word.
This can take anywhere from ten seconds, if I’m lucky, to two or three minutes. Once executed to my satisfaction, I am able to go downstairs, unplug my phone and perform roughly the same procedure on it, with my thumbs instead of my feet, and then I am allowed to use my phone. Likewise, the refrigerator door when I’m making coffee. Likewise, the edges of my laptop when I power it on. With these routines completed, I can start my day, open a Word document, and begin writing.
I realize this sounds bad, but it’s a compromise I’ve reached after decades of managing my obsessive-compulsive disorder. I’ve gone cold turkey before, renouncing all habits and tics but they eventually creep back in. A therapist once described OCD behaviors as a “blob,” which felt apt—whatever part of it you press down on, another part bulges back up. These little routines are, in a sense, a deal I make with myself, so I don’t have to perform random routines all day long. Not doing them is not an option. If I don’t do them, the world will end.
I can’t remember exactly when it began. As is true of so many disorders, medical literature generally links OCD with the onset of adolescence, and this tracks with my earliest OCD memories: missing the bus to middle school because I had to touch mailboxes and the curb in a certain sequence; playing songs on my cassette deck over and over in order to pause on an exact word or chord; staying up in my teenage basement lair, flicking the lights on and off in patterns that, if my parents had noticed, would have looked like some Morse code call for help, which in a way, it was.
The most vivid memory I have from this era is typing out the final draft of an English paper over and over. I’d written and revised it first by longhand in a notebook, in anticipation of the Sisyphean task to come. The rule I’d set for myself—or rather, the rule that had mercilessly evolved over the course of the school year—was that if I made one error typing, I had to erase the whole thing and start over. When I typoed in the final paragraph, I deleted all four pages and took a break to cry. I finally pecked the last period when the sun was coming up.
. . . .
One of my earliest memories is sitting on the carpeted stairs of our home, suddenly aware of my heartbeat. I was perhaps four, and I was convinced that I was having a heart attack. I listened to it thudding away in my chest and expected to die with each little rush. When I was eight or nine, I became terrified by and obsessed with a Time Magazine article about something called AIDS.
. . . .
The vague motivating threat for not touching a curb or counting to a certain number was always an imaginary illness—ironic given the very real illness I actually had: although it took me decades to realize it, by thirteen, I was suffering from a full-blown mental health crisis.
. . . .
Controlling a sentence—controlling this sentence, as I type—is for me the best, most pleasurable work there is. I build the paragraph, tagged by its thematic first word: control. In crafting this sentence, this paragraph, this essay, I get to be both architect and construction worker, and both jobs offer equally pleasing aspects of control. The former involves creative design and abstract thought; the latter brings the visceral, simultaneously logical and intuitive pleasure of finding the right word, moving it around, putting it in just the right place. Having written that sentence, I know I must reverse myself and concede that the idea of there being “just the right place” is illusory—that even this work is, in its essence, as arbitrary as anything else. This is true, but nonetheless as I write, I shut out the world, other responsibilities, Twitter, the news, everything.
Link to the rest at The Paris Review