Am I Here Yet

In my dream life, Anne Bancroft invites me to the Taft Hotel to discuss her concerns surrounding my OCD and the ways it’s been causing a ruckus in my day to day world. In my real life, my doctor makes me come into her downtown office at 8 am to tell me the same thing. Feelsbadman. Over the years I’ve had to sit through a truly incredible number of platitudes, but one of the most difficult to digest on a regular basis has been the one about our greatest weaknesses also being our greatest strengths. I feel like leaping from a building every time I hear another sincere version of it, and if there were a way to change my address so a truism couldn’t reach me I would do it. I’m not upset about it because I think it’s untrue, it’s obviously right. It just misses so much of the physical experience of the reality it’s trying to describe that it feels irrelevant to me. In the context of my OCD, for years I’ve assumed that if OCD were a fruit flavor my type was the version the store brand ice cream is made with, mainly because I’ve always hoped that God was on a tight budget when it was shopping for my disorders. Unfortunately (or fortunately right!) the evidence seems to suggest otherwise.

I’m not gonna deep dive on any of this here because I’m not paying you to listen to me, but I’ll give you a couple quick examples of what I mean. When I was in 3rd grade some portion of the local fire department visited my class to talk about fire safety, and as a part of the presentation one of the dudes mentioned something about never leaving dryers or stoves on while you’re not home because they can catch your house on fire. I’ll skip the intermediate steps, but where that’s landed for me at 35 is panicking internally a high percentage of the times I leave the house that I left the stove or dryer on and my dogs are burning alive in their crates. That’s obviously not great, but that’s just the beginning of the cycle and I’ve lost a truly incredible amount of hours of hanging with friends or dates or whatever else to the hurricane forces winds of trying to remind myself it probably isn’t happening but maybe I should go home and check to be sure, or tracing the emotional fallout that would occur if that were happening, and on and on and on and on and on.

The second example is maybe the dumbest fact about me but I’m not sure. When I was 22 I moved to Raleigh and I was dating this girl long distance, and she mentioned one time on the phone that I needed to be careful about drinking from the water fountain at my gym to make sure I didn’t get herpes from it because then that would mean she would get herpes. There’s a lot to unpack there, but for the sake of time I’m going to just say that we were two peas in a fucking pod. She and I were good Christian kids or whatever and I was still a virgin at the time, but that didn’t stop an OCD avalanche from sliding down the face of my undersexed mountain resulting in me getting myself checked for herpes by my doctor 10 or 11 times over the course of 2 months. Towards the end he started asking me every visit if I realized that you can’t get herpes if you haven’t had sex before and I said yeah I know but like are you sure because she’s gonna leave me if I do.

There’s a certain amount of comedic and real relief every time I get home and find my dogs unscorched and yelping that they’re going to call the cops if I don’t give them Greenies, as if I need to apologize to them every time I forget to leave Matlock on for them while I’m gone. But living in the midst of many separate cycles like that on a daily basis is a non satirical version of hell, and some of my recent work with my therapist has just been starting to process my own sadness from all of the time and energy in my life that I’ve lost to this sort of stuff. It feels like I’m at the halfway mark of my time here, and huge chunks of the first half are missing because of shit like this. But since this is also apparently a good thing I figured I would share my most recent example of A Thing I Obsessed Over To A Sickening Degree That Makes All Of This Supposedly Worth It, which you can find below. It’s a custom Ableton theme I made after wondering while a patch was installing if Ableton themes 1. could be made and if so 2. how.

I’m excited someday to stop driving all the way back around the block to triple check that I locked the front door, and in the meantime I’m learning to accept and then eventually love the current version of myself that may not ever get to that point. I hope you enjoy the Ableton theme I guess lol, and if you care about that sort of thing and want to try it out you can download it here or make your own on the same site. I can’t quite figure out if it sucks or not, and I’ll probably make some changes to it this weekend while I’m working on music stuff, but here it is in its current form. Yeehaw and happy Friday.