OCD and the world as a reproach

 

I was around eight or nine years old when my father made some origami – paper folding – doodad for me. One generally starts these projects with a square, not rectangular, sheet of paper. This calls for folding upward and aligning the bottom edge with a long side, creating a forty-five-degree crease and therefore a square. That leaves a couple inches of excess, unusable paper which is cut off and discarded. Father did not align the two edges absolutely perfectly. There was a molecular fraction-of-an-inch overlap, which no one on God’s earth would, or should, notice or care about.

I threw an alarmed, rageful tantrum.

I and so many other children.

Why can we not stand to color outside the lines? Why does a shirt have to hang sym­met­ric­ally on the hook, or must all items on the desk be parallel to its borders? Why do some children form a ritual of counting by threes or sevens while walking through a doorway, or stepping on the sweet spot of tiles, never on the line? What is the feeling of wrongness that explodes with a transgres­sion against order, and why is it so terrible, so intolerable?

Here's what it is: Chaos is feeling, and since our primary internal feeling is pain, and it’s pain of the earliest critical loss of self, we cannot stand to feel. Just as a Narcissist would disin­te­grate to chaotic crib fire and torture without his aura of Perfection, so a child who has never experienced basic security – the “secure base” – from babyhood or infancy cannot stand to feel the truth. He must direct his life away from feeling, by means of the mind.

My Obsessive-Compulsive Personality-disordered teenager cannot lie down or walk in feel­ing. Every­thing in her life sits on a cushion of thinking. At 16 she is already a defense and prose­cuting attorney, has been a lawyer for years, countering everything I say, not to have a feeling land inside her. Only a catastrophe might puncture that cloud (and I’m not here to provide one).

I picture her and others finally collapsing into feeling, a place where others are happy to be: being engulfed in the summer sun while lying in the grass, watching the ants and grass­hoppers; feeling happily at ease at a birthday party with other boys and girls. But they can’t. They have to control themselves, think something, leave.

It's interesting that something small, like a bit of crayon color that extrudes the boundary, is a visceral symbol of our inner failure. But it surely is.