Devil in the Details (4 page)

The ride is the same; so is the scenery. There can be no greater
proof of the uniformity of human hard wiring than the sameness of
obsessive-compulsives’ triggers. Cross-culturally and
trans-historically, we zero in on the exact same things: details
and doorknobs, electrical sockets, locks, light switches, blood,
bugs, and germs. AIDS is a recent favorite; with its overtones of
sex, blood, and contagion, it seems custom-made for the
obsessive-compulsive imagination. Surely these fears are evidence
of some evolutionary remnant, an instinct for self-preservation
gone haywire, but I can’t help wishing our cathexes were more
colorful. Why couldn’t we be obsessed with, say, tropical drinks or
fad dances? It would be much more entertaining if the disorder
compelled us to mix banana daiquiris or perform the lambada.

Perhaps our obsessions are entertaining enough. In real life we
are meek and law-abiding, but in our minds we are murderous sex
fiends. Most obsessive-compulsives fear they are going to stab a
loved one. Many of us can’t bear to be around knives at all. This
fear isn’t all that irrational; knives are dangerous, and goodness
knows even loved ones can push it. Our other fears, however, make
less sense. Though we are neither pedophiles nor animal-lovers, we
fear that we are going to rape the baby and the housecat. We worry
that we are going to make passes at friends, family members,
strangers we find repulsive. Straight obsessive-compulsives often
fear that they are actually gay. We all worry that we are
unwittingly peppering our speech with profanities. We replay
conversations over and over in our heads, convinced that we blurted
out something unforgivable. When I was a young child this wasn’t
too bad, but by adolescence it was a real problem. After a
perfectly pleasant exchange with a great-aunt I could spend hours
trying to recall whether or not I’d told her to go screw herself
the hard way. I would beg my sister, Vicky, for reassurance. “You
heard our conversation. Did anal sex come up at all? I know it
sounds crazy, but I think Aunt Rose may have raised the issue.”

“No, you were the one who brought it up,” Vicky would respond,
sick to death of talking me down. “You told her you were going to
give it to her all night long. I wouldn’t expect a birthday check
from her this year.”

Cruel, sure, but I could hardly blame her. Reassurance-seeking
is the obsessive-compulsive’s most annoying habit, as incessant as
it is disturbing. We tend to ask loved ones things like, “I’m not
going to poison you, am I? I’m really worried I’m going to poison
you.”

But our loved ones needn’t worry. Though obsessive-compulsives’
primary fear is that we might hurt others, we’re much less likely
than the general population to actually do so. OCD is a closed
circuit. Obsessive-compulsives are the original navel-gazers, too
caught up in our own worries and routines to unleash our negative
impulses on others. Even if we were inclined to do harm, we
wouldn’t have time. Compulsions tend to keep us busy around the
clock.

Here, too, there’s little variance. We all love to write lists.
We like to clean. We enjoy worrying. And then we have our
specialties. There are the washers, the checkers, the counters, the
tappers. Most people fall into more than one category, but one
behavior tends to dominate. A hopeless dilettante, I dabbled in a
few. Tapping captivated me for a while, then washing, then
checking. Each was a variation on a theme, a spell chanted in
another language.

What I wanted, simply, was magic. I’d grown up with Samantha,
Sabrina, and Jeannie, those sparkling blondes whose tics and
twitches could solve any problem. My OCD just seemed like more of
the same. These jerky urges, I was sure, gave me powers. There is a
magic in OCD, revolving as it does around lucky numbers, magic
words, formulas, and rituals. Tapping the bookcase meant everything
would be okay. Washing the plate three times meant my family
wouldn’t die. So I tapped the bookcase, I washed the plate, and
guess what: everything was okay. They didn’t die. Abracadabra.
Magic.

But the props, the props were lame. Instead of top hats and
rabbits I had furniture and flatware, plants and plates. They
didn’t get any better as I grew older. By the time I was seven,
most of my compulsions revolved around stuffed animals. Stupid
stuffed animals. I hated them. They were so babyish, birthday gifts
I’d gotten instead of the more adult playthings I really wanted,
like checkbooks and carpet sweepers. The animals were just so
needy
, so much work. They had to be washed and dressed and
cared for. Worst of all was the compulsory feeding, conducted every
night after I’d been put to bed. They ate air served up in a
plastic panty hose egg. Each animal got five servings, consisting
of fifteen bites each. The feeding was strictly ordered, with the
animals lined up by size. I moved down the line with my egg, making
eye contact with each while maintaining a breathless narrative
chatter. “Biteforyoubiteforyoubiteforyoubiteforyou biteforyou,” I
exhaled. “Now, abiteforyoubiteforyoubiteforyou biteforyou.” I had
twenty or thirty stuffed animals, and if they skipped dessert I
could be done in forty-five minutes. My mother finally noticed what
was going on and confiscated my plastic egg, with an admonishment
to cut the crap.

That was fine. I had other hobbies. I’d become a voracious
reader, which prompted a whole new genre of compulsive behavior.
For the better part of second grade I couldn’t stop internally
narrating everything that happened to me. I put my conversations in
mental quotes, my actions in descriptive passages, pausing in
cross-eyed concentration as I tried to get it all down in my head.
“Stop looking at me like that,” my sister would threaten (“‘Stop
looking at me like that,’ her sister threatened”), and I would
raise a questioning eyebrow to buy time (“She cocked an eyebrow
inquisitively”). That would just make my sister angrier (“‘I mean
it, stop it,’ she repeated. ‘
STOP IT. STOP IT!!!
’”).
The narrative always finished unhappily (“The oafish beast twisted
her sibling’s delicate arm, then grabbed her dainty palm and spat
in it. ‘That’ll teach you to stare at me,’ the harpy warned”). The
end.

Learning to read was probably the worst thing that ever happened
to me. It just gave me so much material, the newspaper most of all.
‘Dear Abby’ and ‘Ask Beth’ probably weren’t the best reading
material for a seven-year-old, but they were the only features in
the local paper that held my interest. Advice columns opened my
eyes to everything that could go wrong. Their readers’ problems
became my own, giving me things to obsess about while I sat awake
not feeding my stuffed animals. What if my boyfriend pressured me
for heavy petting? What if I discovered my best friend’s husband
was having an affair? What if my inlaws refused to cut their son’s
apron strings?

All sad stories, but the one that kept me up nights was from an
unfortunate reader who wanted to know if her prematurely sagging
breasts had been caused by jogging without a bra. I already had
plenty of reasons to dread PE – boredom, unflattering uniforms, the
possibility of exertion – but I didn’t know a droopy figure was one
of them. This sent me spiraling into a panic. Unable to think about
anything else, I finally addressed the issue in a tête-à-tête with
my mother. She was not sympathetic. “First of all, you’re about six
years away from puberty. And since when do you jog? Sitting on the
couch watching eight hours of cartoons a day, as you do, is not
going to affect your bustline either way. Worry about something
that might actually happen, like brain atrophy or butt cramps.”
Dissatisfied, I stomped off to my room to draft a letter asking for
advice on dealing with an insensitive mother.

Advice columns, after all, covered just about everything. But I
don’t remember anyone writing for help with their
obsessive-compulsive impulses. In the late 70
s
, OCD
was not the disease du jour. (TMJ was. Burt Reynolds had it! It was
glamorous.) MS, CP, SIDS – they tackled all the other acronyms. But
OCD wasn’t even really a disease yet. People didn’t know they had
it.

I certainly didn’t. And after a while, I didn’t have it anymore.
It had moved on. When it came back again, five years later, it
would be wearing a yarmulke and a prayer shawl, causing crises in
the laundry room. My OCD mutated into scrupulosity, and it got its
hooks into me like garden-variety OCD never had.

I liked scrupulosity because it got right to the point. It’s the
purest form of OCD. In a sense, all OCD is religious, of course;
it’s a disease of ceremony and ritual. (Freud, for the record,
argued the opposite – that all religion is obsessive. Inflammatory,
sure, but if you’ve been pestered by a doorbell-ringing,
Watchtower
-wielding missionary you won’t argue the point.)
OCD certainly looks like religious practice: we perform our
compulsions with exacting devotion, we repeat incantations, and you
know what cleanliness is next to. But with scrupulosity, the
rituals truly are rituals, the incantations are prayers. The
stakes, moreover, are infinitely higher. With other forms of OCD
you fear that if you don’t perform your compulsions, your father
might get sick; with scrupulosity, you fear you’ll cause a global
spiritual Armageddon or, at the very least, damn yourself to hell
for all eternity.

It’s no surprise that scrupulosity is the oldest recognized form
of OCD. There’s a fine line between piety and wack-ass obsession,
and people have been landing on the wrong side for thousands of
years. There are records of obsessive-compulsive monks going back
to the sixth century. By the twelfth century, scrupulosity had been
named, recognized, and even lauded by the Catholic Church. Later,
as sufferers wore clergy down with their annoying doubts and
worries, it was recognized as a disease requiring psychiatric
intervention, but for a long time scrupulosity was seen as a
virtue.

And why not? Some of Christianity’s best and brightest had it.
The Little Flower, Therese of Lisieux, suffered excruciating
scrupulosity throughout her teens before going on to become the
patron saint of Fresno. Ignatius of Loyola was tortured by a
flaming case that compelled him to pray seven hours a day. Martin
Luther’s compulsion to confess was so severe and constant that his
confessors threatened to cut him off. John Bunyan’s scrupulous
obsessions were relieved only by spending hours chanting ‘I will
not, I will not, I will not’ while nailing his arms. It’s not as
exciting a celebrity roster as, say, that of syphilis, but it’s
enough to staff an all-star benefit on the History Channel. Today
the condition is common enough that there’s a Scrupulous Anonymous
group. I’ve never joined, so I can’t tell you if they subscribe to
all twelve steps or if they just repeat one step over and over.

I can tell you that, like most resources for the scrupulous,
they are Christian. If obsessive-compulsives are rat men, the
scrupulous are church mice. Scrupulosity affects Christians and
Jews in nearly equal numbers, but only Christians address the issue
with support groups and socials, chat boards and pamphlets.
Judaism, so verbose on most other subjects, is nearly mute on this
one. We have no vocabulary for it. Still, it seems clear that
there’s a history of Jewish scrupulosity. The scrupulous Rat Man
himself was Jewish, and there are tales of rabbis who compulsively
rechecked their locks, who examined every grain of salt for
contamination, who could spend three hours picking out the perfect
matzo for the seder. True to neurotic form, Jewish tradition argues
that these sages had perfectly good reasons for their behavior:
their good-for-nothing sons left the doors unlocked, the salt had
been contaminated once before, and what’s so wrong with wanting to
serve nice things?

The problem may be that traditional Jewish observance and
compulsive behavior are almost too close to differentiate. Judaism
has codified a whole choreography of compulsive, compulsory
gestures and tics. We reach up to touch the mezuzah each time we
pass a doorway. We kiss the prayer book when we close it, the Torah
when we approach it, any religious object when we drop it. We cover
our eyes when we say the Shema prayer, and bend, bow, and
straighten when we say the Aleinu. The Amidah, the silent prayer,
is a ballet of compulsive movement. We take three steps back and
three steps forward and bow before we begin; bow twice more; rise
up on our tiptoes three times; jump up and bow, then bow
left-right-left and take three steps back and three steps forward
again. We repeat verses, shout responses at given prompts, sit and
stand, sway and nod. With all the swaying, flailing, and outbursts,
a Jewish congregation could easily be mistaken for a Tourette’s
convention.

Orthodox Judaism looks so much like scrupulosity that some
psychiatrists, and my father, have asked if they might be one and
the same. The psychiatrists, at least, came to the conclusion that
they are not. They’re close, sure, but there are some vital
differences. Orthodox Jews are motivated by spiritual duty and
rewarded by a sense of fulfillment; the scrupulous are motivated by
circuitry and rewarded by chapped hands. Orthodox Jews may look
nuts, but in fact they’re perfectly well-adjusted. In other words,
pre-tearing toilet paper for the Sabbath may be crazy, but it’s not
compulsive.

If, however, you happen to be both compulsive and Jewish, you’re
in for the ride of your life. The Jewish scrupulous experience is
extraordinarily rich. Sure, Christians have that snappy “What Would
Jesus Do?” catchphrase to govern their ruminations and inspire new
ones, but even as a Jew, I find the phrase sacrilegious. (Is one
really supposed to characterize Jesus as a best girlfriend? When it
is applied, you end up asking questions like, “What would Jesus do
if his boyfriend pressured him for some tongue after cheerleading
practice?” It’s a bad formula.)