I spent my twelfth summer insisting that I was dying.
Several months before summer break, my hair began falling out at the crown. Clumps of it gradually pulled away from the top of my scalp, leaving a looming bald spot in their wake. Feeling ashamed of this predicament, every day I tied my hair up in a tight high ponytail, constantly aware of what I was hiding, a dread I was already familiar with (I wore sweaters even in the early fall and late Spring heat, denying that I was uncomfortable because I thought I was “too fat” to show more of my body than was necessary). The opening of June saw me visiting the dermatologist with my parents, where I was swiftly diagnosed with alopecia areata. The end of June saw me in a therapist’s office, where I was a mystery.
Sometime between accepting my reality as a partially bald pre-teen girl and the day my mom decided it was time for me to see a psychologist, I decided I was dying. Not because of the hair loss — but because of practically everything else. My causes of death included malaria, a brain aneurysm, and leukemia. The symptoms ranged from an odd tingling of the scalp to a small bruise of unknown origins. Each time I discovered a slight abnormality in my body, I thought: this is it. No number of doctors reassuring me that I was not on the brink of a terminal illness calmed my mind. Sugar pill placebos couldn’t override my over-analytical woes.
If it wasn’t an illness that ended me, I thought, it was certainly going to be something else. I was going to die, young and afraid. Food that looked slightly odd was going to poison me. I began to imagine objects as cursed. Every place I visited — the grocery store, the library, the sidewalks of my neighborhood — put me in the path of people with evil intentions. I knew, even then, that these thoughts were irrational — but What If…?
Nowhere was safe, not even the inside of my skull.
My brain believes that most everything is a threat. I’m naturally susceptible to a general unease (what others might call “anxiety,” although that word has been so overused and watered-down as to lose its edge), a state of being which, left to marinate in an overactive imagination, creates a never-ending series of Worst-Case Scenarios.
The Obsessive-Compulsive is equipped with a debilitating self-awareness. We have minds fine-tuned to minutiae, always on a high-alert search for another problem to identify. When we’re faced with stress or change, our brains create problems for us to fixate on — little distractions, a defense against real (often more mundane) horrors.
Imagined problems have no real solutions. They’re infinite uncertainty traps.
The solution, I’d discovered, was to wash my hands.
One day, towards the end of summer, I had a revelation: there was a way to protect myself. It was so simple — scrubbing my hands with a bar of soap, lathering, and rinsing repeatedly until it felt just right. It was clean and responsible. I wouldn’t get sick that way (how had I not thought of it before?). I would remind myself to do it once an hour or so, to develop good habits. I felt as if I’d cracked a code; the loudness in my mind was quieted for the first time in months.
I didn’t tell anyone about my discovery. They might not have thought it made sense, and I would have had to explain why it did. Eventually, I forgot to continue it, and life went on. I didn’t think of that short-lived habit as anything other than a reasonable response to my summer of “hypochondria.” I just needed to stop worrying so much, that was my problem — and my problem was gone!
Of course, it wasn’t. This wasn’t to be fully discovered until years later when, at fifteen, my brain betrayed me in a worse way than it ever had. It broke apart my reality and sent me reeling for years, grasping for any sense of constancy. To protect myself from potential disasters, I gradually developed a complex system of mental compulsions.
The pay-off to these pathways of reassurance was, rather than eroding my fears, it moored me in them.
Conrad Aiken said that he’d been reading the newspaper one day when he saw a sentence that struck him:
Cosmos Mariner — Destination Unknown
It was not a philosophical statement, but a public report of a port ship with a literal unknown destination.
Aiken might not have been obsessive-compulsive, but like most poets before and after him, he harbored a tendency towards the thanatological and all its implications — mortality, decay, consciousness, spiritism. This preoccupation most likely took root in his childhood: when he was eleven years old, Aiken’s father shot his mother and then turned the gun on himself, effectively making Conrad into an orphan inside of his own home. Also like so many poets before and after him, he turned his pain into prose and his existential anxieties into verse.
There was so much intrigue in that brief, open-ended sentence that Aiken had it engraved on his bench-shaped riverside tombstone. It’s a fitting marker for Aiken’s life, which was so often shrouded in restlessness, but it’s also an invitation to everyone else: to stay, to study the water, and to be.
My mind pines after certainties. Yet when I allow the uncertainty to settle, I realize there’s a sweetness in mystery. Sometimes I think I never want to know the answers to the questions that I’ve spent countless hours of my life ruminating on — I want to linger in the liminal space between curiousity and knowing. Obsessive-compulsive disorder has often led me to make decisions (or indecisions) out of fear. This world, too — cynical, hell-bent on control — sometimes encourages me to stay tied to these fears that I’ve internalized.
The truth is less straightforward. We have full autonomy over our lives, yes; but we must also recognize that there are parts of life that cannot be manipulated by our wants or wills. It is a delicate balance. But if we are still and lay down our oars, and we allow ourselves to be untied from the illusion of total control, we may open ourselves up to the greatest depths of joy and the highest forms of wonder.
XVIII
Thus from the window eastward faring in thought I went,
no longer now by footpaths humbly content to go
but spreading imagination’s widening wings;
and saw the origin, the east light, the red daybreak,
the void of the unknowable, whence we come.
And must we know — I thought sadly — the unknown?
why must we seek it?