Portrait of an Unreasonable Mind

A very special edition of Inner Workings.

Illustration by Stephanie Davidson

Hi readers! I am thrilled to send you an essay that is close to my heart, originally published in Under The Sun Magazine, issue 10. If you value work like this and have a few extra bucks a month, I invite you to consider a paid subscription. You will get access to monthly longer essays like this one and support a slower, deeper type of writing. Join the Inner Workings community today.

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Portrait of an Unreasonable Mind

12.

The threat of earthquakes first entered my consciousness at age twelve when my family traveled from the East Coast to spend a week in San Francisco. It was 2000, the advent of the Razor scooter, and my mom bought me a gleaming specimen with translucent blue wheels. For a period of days, it was the greatest item I had ever owned, and I traversed the magical city atop that shining conveyance, hills swooping like waves, skyscrapers climbing up the dizzying slopes as if placed on stairs. I took the hills cautiously, used the brake heavily, pressing down on the metal over the back wheel with my heel to generate as much friction as I could manage, achieving a highly controlled fall down the hills of San Francisco. I didn’t have a death wish, for goodness sake. At twelve I tended to be cautious, and when my mom told me the interesting little tidbit that my cousin in California had felt his first earthquake, I thought it was good that I lived three thousand miles away. The constant threat of an earthquake, all the time, anytime, without warning, without recourse, sounded too much to bear. One needs the control of a heel on the brake.

13.

A year later, sitting in eighth-grade history class, I first imagined hurling myself out a window. I eyed the open third-story window from my tan desk and wondered if I would die from that type of fall. I pictured the steps I would take toward the jump: placing my pencil down in the groove of my desk, sliding sideways out of my little metal chair, walking over to that window, opening just the width of a slender thirteen-year-old. In the days that followed, I imagined sticking a fork in an electrical outlet, putting my hand down a garbage disposal, jumping in front of a train, stabbing myself with a kitchen knife.

I did not wish to die, not consciously. Until then, my life as a preteen had been charmed in the way of the best childhoods: unconcerned with basic needs, loved by my parents, and free to be completely preoccupied with the dramas of growing up. I was good at math, I had a Razor scooter sitting neglected in the basement, and my first kiss tasted like orange soda. And then, all at once, I imagined blending my fingers in my mom’s blender. When one of these horrific thoughts appeared, it persisted with unwavering strength, clinging in my brain like a pit bull’s locked jaw, accompanied by one illogical, repeated message: You must do it or you’ll always suffer from thinking about doing it. You must jump or you’ll always consider jumping.

23.

The potential for earthquakes didn’t stop me from shipping out across the country at twenty-three to take a prestigious job in San Francisco like an ambitious Gold-Rusher. How can a person elect to live on ground that could shift at any moment? Ground that will, statistically, mathematically, reliably crack open at some time, probabilistically not too long from now? An incredible trick of the mind. I moved to San Francisco of my own volition, even though I could easily read about the past destruction. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the worst in recorded history, lasted only thirty seconds, killed three thousand people, and left over 250,000 homeless. Jack London, a reporter at the scene of the earthquake, astounded by the scope of the damage from this one shake, wrote, “All the shrewd contrivances and safeguards of man had been thrown out of gear by thirty seconds’ twitching of the earth-crust.”

13.

At thirteen I existed with my violent thoughts for a few days in silence—who would I tell? What would I possibly say? They clanged in my mind, relentless, interminable, urging, do it, do it, do it. So one evening I shut myself in the bathroom, filled the sink with water, plugged in my hair straightener, dunked my hand in the sink as if directed by an invisible, hypnotic evil, and then dipped the tip of the straightener into the water. Before I submerged the appliance enough to shock myself, I recoiled in fear, dropped the straightener on the floor, and went to find my mom to tell her I needed help.

I don’t know which was scarier: to know that I might actually hurt myself without wanting to, or to discover in my brain a place that was completely foreign, that did not adhere to reason, that I wanted gone, that wouldn’t leave, and that might be the most extremely terrible thing that had ever happened in any person’s mind.

16.

My diagnosis came officially some years into my teens, after I had stabilized on Zoloft and talk therapy. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is marked by repeated obsessions or intrusive and uncontrollable thoughts, followed by compulsive actions aimed at relieving the obsessive thoughts. The disease comes in endless cruel varieties. The classic handwasher is plagued by the idea that if he doesn’t wash his hands, he will get a terrible disease. Another obsessive feels that if she doesn’t open and close her front door ten times when she leaves the house, her mother will die. The obsessions are nonsensical and the compulsions will never bring the desired relief, so the sufferer is trapped in a torturous pattern of unreasonable thought and unfounded action.

My brand of the disease is called Harm OCD, in which obsessions are focused on hurting oneself or others, and my mind proved excellent at serving up a buffet of horrifying options. I later learned that almost everyone has some such unspeakable thoughts once in a while—of jumping in front of a train or throwing a baby down the stairs—but most can just dismiss the thought as some weird thing and move on. The difference for a person with OCD is that we latch on to it, we want to vanquish the thought once and for all, we want to be certain it will never return, we desire a final answer, we demand ultimate control, and so we turn to our compulsions.

One of the most torturous characteristics of OCD is that the sufferer is often lucidly aware that her obsessions are nonsensical, that her compulsions are unreasonable, and that acting them out will never help. Still, she feels compelled to try.

28.

For a time in San Francisco, I lived with my husband in an apartment on the top floor of an old two-family Edwardian with a landlord who turned out to be a petty con artist and who eventually came under investigation by the Eastern District of New York for smuggling human skulls into the country from Southeast Asia. That old Edwardian, I thought, given the owner, might not have a particularly well-kept foundation. For years I did not dwell on that thought, except for a few minutes every few days—for me, not much.

Five years into our time in that San Francisco, in that same apartment, an earthquake woke me and my husband in the night for the first time, shaking us awake in a rush of adrenaline. We lay there in silent paralysis until it was over, thirty seconds or so. It was a minor earthquake, causing a few framed photographs to topple over, but to me it proved, once and for all, that I would die in an earthquake.

The next day I ordered an earthquake kit, the simplest safety measure, which I still hadn’t taken after living in San Francisco for five years. This fact is hard to square with the rest of my story. How could someone with literal OCD and a fear of earthquakes live in San Francisco and not have an earthquake kit? Because I was avoidant? Because I was in my twenties? Something about the late development of the prefrontal cortex? How can a mind make so little sense? But now earthquake preparation was urgent, an alarm in me activated and beeped loudly. I ordered wall anchors, express delivery, for the tall armoire at the foot of our bed and a floor-length mirror with a heavy black frame leaning against the wall, both in easy reach of my torso should they topple forward.

After that I started thinking about earthquakes daily. Or more accurately, nightly. Every night, waking up around two or three in the morning to pee, I sat on the toilet and considered what I would do if an earthquake hit right then. Would I go under a table or in a door frame? Back in bed, I reasoned through the logistics of earthquake destruction, looking for reassurance in made-up facts. Since we were on the top floor, there wasn’t much house to fall on us. If the house was collapsing or if a fire started, we could run through the apartment and out the back door. Worst-case scenario, we could probably jump out the bedroom window without dying, since it was only three stories up, and I don’t think we would die from that type of fall. Humans are notoriously weak at evaluating risk, and I am certainly no exception. And yet I listed the reassurances to myself at three a.m., attempting some kind of faux-actuarial risk assessment. The result I sought was a finding that I was totally, one hundred percent safe.

Attempting Safety.

The state of California excels at pursuing safety on unstable ground, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world. The 1989 earthquake in San Francisco, the next biggest modern quake in the city after 1906, killed sixty-nine people, most fatalities from the collapse of a bridge deck and a highway overpass. That quake was followed in 1994 by a major earthquake in Los Angeles, and together these kick-started a massive earthquake readiness project in California. Over the following twenty-five years, California spent billions of dollars retrofitting or replacing two thousand bridges statewide, from small highway overpasses to the Oakland Bay Bridge, which alone cost $6.5 billion. Because of this effort, California is as prepared as it gets when it comes to earthquake readiness, compared to other places located on fault lines that haven’t had recent earthquakes. (Though in one expert’s estimation, “That does not mean [California is] prepared enough.” I consumed these facts ravenously, devouring the encouraging statistics about California’s readiness, the dollars spent, the number of bridges reinforced, the strictness of codes, the duration of the effort. I was safe, see? I was safe for sure! And then I felt a pit in my stomach as I wondered which bridges near me are “not prepared enough.”)

In Oregon, which faces a ten to fifteen percent chance of a magnitude nine earthquake in the next fifty years—a quake size California has not seen in modern history—earthquakes weren’t even mentioned in city codes as recently as the 1970s. The last massive earthquake in the Cascadia Fault Zone, where Oregon resides, occurred around 1700, and we are aware of it thanks to the oral traditions of the Native people who lived there at the time. Stories collected by historians point to a catastrophic event that destroyed entire villages and killed people and animals in untold numbers. So to live in Oregon, it seems to me, is even more nonsensical than to live in California, which is already a seemingly unreasonable decision for a human to make, but one that I have made.

An Unreasonable Mind.

What interests me is how my mind can simultaneously believe a thought and know it is unreasonable. The senselessness of OCD stalked me through my adolescence; my compulsions focused on avoidance of potential threats. After the onset of the disease in middle school, I avoided using electric mixers and sink disposals and sharp knives and hair dryers located within reach of a sink, and I asked my mom to buy outlet covers to put over outlets. In my later teens, when obsessive thoughts about holding myself under water emerged, I stopped taking baths and avoided going to pools, beaches, and lakes, and if I absolutely couldn’t avoid it, I sat well back from the water with a book and said that I wasn’t really “in a swimming mood.” For a stretch of months while living in Boston, I was unable to go down onto train platforms for fear of jumping, so I made excuses and asked for rides and walked and biked long distances and spent an unreasonable sum on cabs. I was able to enact these changes in secret, such that the tectonic shifts in my mind could remain almost fully hidden from everyone.

During my twenties I entered into a phase of solutioning around my OCD. I tried a parade of medical and nonmedical interventions to reinforce my mind against my violent thoughts. I did talk therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, somatic therapy, coaching, acupuncture. I took a meditation class on managing anxiety and another on self-compassion, and I took two different types of SSRI medications. Influenced by early encounters with alternative medicine, I stopped medication altogether. If pills were a damaging crutch, I should and could achieve full control without their help. I tried an array of exercise programs, tried putting my bare feet on the bare earth daily, tried going to bed earlier, tried getting up earlier, tried getting up later, tried any number of morning routines that would put me on a stable path once and for all. Then I went back on medication, deciding that it was, in fact, a useful tool. The medicine worked for me, and I’m not an unreasonable person.

The Pandemic.

Because of who I am, because of the brain I possess, the world around me is, was, has always been what one psychiatrist described as a “landscape of anxiety.” It’s a landscape I always live in, to some degree, even knowing it is mostly fabricated. The onset of a global pandemic presented a sort of Olympic championship for this type of mind. To think now about the months when I wore winter gloves in the grocery store, when I wiped down my groceries and repeatedly sanitized surfaces, evokes a certain sad sense of cuteness, like watching a baby goat try to walk.

But just because I can see that certain actions are senseless does not help me to avoid continuing. Since it became available, I have checked The New York Times COVID 19 tracker web page for San Francisco County with the frequency and anxiety of a person checking the status of a delayed flight home. Twelve cases per hundred thousand, thirty-three cases per hundred thousand; month after month I study the numbers, do the half-truth math, set mostly arbitrary levels at which I will feel safe (once it’s less than ten cases per hundred thousand, it will be safe!). For a time I had friends over to my house outdoors but never indoors until we were all vaccinated, then I had friends over indoors until the increased reporting of breakthrough cases in vaccinated people, then it was all outdoors again but a little less strict, for instance, going inside and getting water without a mask. I read that hundreds of vaccinated people in a small Massachusetts town had breakthrough cases. I heard that only one in five thousand cases are in vaccinated people. I read that vaccination immunity wanes. I read that there is no evidence vaccination immunity wanes. And from this tenuous information, I made certain decisions with conviction—no way would I go to a bar! And wavered on other things—seems like Ross and Elysse can come over indoors because we know them?

I, like everyone, have tried my best to parse through the information, to discern the reality. I can’t say that the effort for clarity has been roundly successful. It hit me with the weight of a fundamental truth to hear writer George Saunders observe, “The intersections between our perceptions and understanding and what’s actually true are pretty small, and pretty occasional.

Normal & Reasonable.

At thirteen and at twenty-eight, and even very recently, I just wanted my mind to be normal and reasonable. To me that meant addressing questions using logic, having emotions and reactions that appropriately correlate with external circumstances, having some basic coherence up there, being able to explain why I think what I think and do what I do; that is, normal. For example, it seems reasonable for a cautious person to use a brake on her scooter on the hills of San Francisco. It seems a bit unreasonable for that person to live in earthquake country, but then again, so many people do. The Native peoples of the Cascadia Fault Zone repeatedly resettled areas even after massive earthquakes and tsunamis had flattened homes and killed loved ones. It seems unreasonable to continually resettle somewhere that will be devastated every fifty, or one hundred, or five hundred years. I would probably never move to Oregon. But I would move to California, apparently. And given that, it seems unreasonable for me to worry about earthquakes every day. One can’t worry about every possible natural disaster. But what about my neglecting to buy an earthquake kit? Nonsensical. It further seems unreasonable to imagine killing oneself if one doesn’t want to die. This is unreasonable, this scorecard of reasonableness.

Recently.

A normal, reasonable person living in the COVID pandemic. I was not one. I said, often, with authority, things like: “COVID is less risky than driving your car!” But I know that the evaluation of threats, real and imagined, happens in the dark hollows of my brain, that the raw material of these threats morph in my mind and become strange, illogical creatures. I know that my sensors are particularly delicately tuned. And I observed how this pandemic cruelly transported more than a few others into my threat-filled landscape.

Psychologist Christine Runyan says, “Threat is always detected by the nervous system. It can additionally be detected by our thinking brain, but it’s always first detected at the level of our nervous system.” I would add that, at least in my case, even when the thinking brain gets involved, it does not necessarily lead to neat understanding.

Runyan goes on to say that our human threat detection system is “exquisitely designed. It is a beautiful evolutionary adaptation that, if we were to ever lose it, we would become extinct.”

The Rest of My Life.

It has been years since I last got stuck in a violent, obsessive thought for more than a few minutes. But don’t be fooled, don’t let me fool myself: this stability does not mean the thoughts won’t return in full force, shaking me to my core. I expect them to come, sometime when my mother is dying and my kids are starting a new school and my husband is working nights and weekends, and whoosh, they will arrive, like a massive shake, wiping out all my shrewd contrivances with thirty seconds of twitching, demonstrating with fearsome speed that everything I knew as true and reliable was just a fragile shell around the hot and gurgling unknown. Still, I am, somehow, miraculously, like so many other people who exist on fragile ground, able to live.

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💡🧠✍️ Did this essay spark any thoughts?

Do you have OCD or struggle with the world around you being a “landscape of anxiety”?

Do you have an internal scorecard for what is reasonable in your life?

Let us discuss in the comments!

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