Happy Birthday

I love my birthday.

People who have known me for a long time know how much I love my birthday. Thankfully, the people who have known me for a long time are also tremendously kind, and are willing to indulge me and my borderline obnoxiousness in the weeks running up to the actual date.

I love my birthday for a lot of reasons. Mom and Dad always worked hard to make the day special when I was growing up, so there are good memories associated with it. These days I love any excuse to wear high heels and a dress and drink champagne with my friends. I love taking a whole day to celebrate the sheer improbability of my own existence and the fact that I was born in a place and time where I could make a big deal out of it.

But what I love most about my birthday, what I love even a little more than attention and love and presents and champagne is the chance to pause. I like holidays that give me a chance to reflect and consider where I've been and where I'm going. This year's birthday is no different, although instead of mulling over the past year, I seem to be stuck contemplating a much younger version of myself.

This year I seem to be fixated on my adolescence. It's unsurprising, really. Starting therapy has caused me to reexamine old behaviors. My favorite book from high school has recently been made into a movie and is receiving a lot of press. I've been rereading my old journal for kicks. These are all part of my musings over the past few months, but I think part of the reason I'm so focused on my adolescent self, particularly my eighteen year old self, is simply the passage of ten years.

Eighteen was a big year for me. I had my first boyfriend (the previously mentioned math tutor.) I read The Great Gatsby and The Razor's Edge, and Hamlet for the first time. I had a teacher who, quite literally, changed my life. I got my driver's license and one of my closest friends came to live with my family for a time. I decided I could be a writer. I began to make plans for my life, picking twenty-eight as the logical time by which I could measure how far I had come.

By twenty-eight, I would have had my Ph.D. in Literature from Columbia for two years, completing my degrees straight through. I would be living in Chicago, possibly Milwaukee, teaching for one of the large Jesuit universities and working on publishing my third book of poems. I would be causing a dust-up in the Roman Catholic tradition by becoming a married lady priest. My husband and I would be celebrating our sixth wedding anniversary, and he too would be working on a final manuscript--one of his many novels. Our ten month old would be potty-trained and we'd have plans for another kid around my 29th birthday. Our family pictures would include our golden retriever, Atticus, and like our C.V.'s, would make our friends and family unspeakably jealous.

These achievements had a lot to do with how I pictured my perfect life. They were goals that were achievable with a certain amount of work. They had enough material earmarkers of success so I would know that I achieved something, but required enough spiritual and intellectual hard work to make them worth working toward. Even at eighteen I was entirely preoccupied by the idea of perfection.

I'm still obsessed by the idea of perfection. It's one of the dirty secrets of people with OCD. We ache for perfection and ways to measure progress and as a result can be incredibly hard our ourselves when we don't achieve it. And my late twenties looks like anything except perfection. It looks like paying rent and student loans, working some seventy-hour weeks. Sometimes it looks like eating mac and cheese out of the pot, standing up in the kitchen because I'm too tired to think. It looks like living alone and feeling really fucking lonely sometimes. It looks like going to a therapist to help sort out some of the mental chaos I've been trying to suppress for twenty-eight years. It looks like the occasional OkCupid date and wondering how it is that a smart, funny, articulate girl could end up going out with such weirdos. It's having my heart broken so many times I've actually lost count.

It also means Top 40 dance parties in one friend's basement one weekend and playing with another friend's ten month old baby another. It means discovering that the process of getting a Ph.D. sucks and it's not really what I want to do. It's realizing that while I may not have my life partner yet, I have friends I love, respect, and admire, and that I still sometimes get that giddy, free-fall feeling when you meet someone new and you really click. There's the illusion, which I don't think ever gets any less satisfying, that I've finally managed to figure myself out.

This year I'm going against every instinct and every compulsion I have and not making a list of what I want to accomplish by the time I'm thirty-eight. I want to, desperately. I want to reform my ideas of perfection and set new standards for myself so I can take stock at the end of the next ten years. But as much as I want to set out my rubric for the next decade, I'm not going to do it.  This is, perhaps, the biggest gift that I've received this year, surprisingly one that came as a result of a mental health diagnosis. This life isn't a series of things to crossed off a a to-do list, and that I'm never going to be 100% happy with the life I'm living.

It sounds a little grim, I know, but for the first time in almost-twenty-eight-years, I feel like I can let go of the idea of perfection and finally be me.

Happy birthday. 

Vulcan

"Well," I said, pausing to take a sip of my beer. "I guess I'd have to say I'm part Vulcan."

This one-liner instantly cracked up the charming guy sitting across from me. I was waiting on some friends at a bar and noticed his Kirk vs. Picard shirt. I've been working on Star Trek: The Next Generation for months now and instantly struck up a conversation with the guy. We were chatting about how we would spend our time on the holodecks and the flaws of TNG storytelling. He admitted that he felt a strange affinity for Captain Kirk, mainly because of his unbridled passions. I was a little skeptical and said that I felt I had the most in common with Vulcans. I think he thought I was joking, but his girlfriend arrived and my friends waved me down from the doorway and we part ways before I have a chance to explain.

The truth is the deeper I get into Star Trek the more I feel I have in common with Doctor Spock and Ambassador Sarek than I do with Kirk or Picard. When expressing emotion towards people I care about, I tend to do it in very specific ways. I need things to be perfect. I dislike when people try to manipulate me emotionally. People with unbridled passions make me wildly uncomfortable.

Yet, more than anything, I love and am obsessed by the logical functions of the human brain. I'm deeply proud of my ability to think through problems rationally. As a student, I adored logic puzzles. In college and graduate school, my favorite colleagues were those with well-constructed, rational arguments. Even when I disagreed with their premise, I had a great deal of respect when their arguments were internally consistent. I love the rush that comes when I understand something for the first time. I love games that challenge my mind: crosswords, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, or puzzles. When my brain finds the logical conclusion to a problem I feel an unmatched sense of elation.

Of course, there are those times when my brain fails to use the faculties with which I was gifted. Say, when a guy I really like asks for my opinion on something or a friend denigrates a book I adore. In those situations, my rational brain short-circuits. These responses are limited to a few specific circumstances and once I take some deep breaths I manage to fall back on my intellect and provide or deconstruct an argument piece by piece. It's rare for me to confront a problem I can't think my way out of.

Or at least, that's been the case until recently.

Five years ago if you would have told me that I would eventually find myself seated in front of a psychologist slowly spilling my guts or watching Star Trek, I would have called you crazy.

It turns out that I'm the crazy one. 

"So, Kelly," I find the shrink's professorial air and yellow legal pad oddly calming. "What brings you here today?"

"I haven't used an iron without supervision in five years."

"Oh?"

"And I can't stop checking my stove to see if it's off." I pause. "And I can't straighten my hair. I mean, I am capable of straightening it, but I won't unless there's someone to make sure the straightener is unplugged."

We spend the next twenty or so minutes talking about my weird behaviors, behaviors I have been secretly living with for over ten years now, behaviors I have gone to great lengths to conceal from friends and family because I know there's something slightly off about them. I tell her about how when I'm upset I count to one hundred by twos or fives on the fingers of my right hand, always my right hand, and I get really angry if someone interrupts me and I can't finish. I confess to having to take pictures of my stove top before I leave the house for the weekend so I can make sure it's off even from a distance. I tell her about how in graduate school there were nights when I couldn't get to sleep because I kept getting up to check to make sure the door was locked, even when the rational side of my brain knew it was locked because I had already checked it fifteen times. I tell her about how delaying any of these actions causes a physical anxiety response in me. My heart-rate quickens. I have a hard time breathing. My muscles get so tense I feel like I'm being physically threatened.

Saying all of these things out loud and to someone I just met is an experience so weird it defies explanation. It's intimate and scary and the only time I've ever felt like it was the last time I went to see a priest for confession and started crying in the confessional. Thankfully, I'm nowhere near tears here, but when I'm finished I feel as drained and on edge as if I just ran a half-marathon. I have to clench my fists together both to keep my hands from shaking and to keep from counting to one hundred.

"Well," my doctor says, "you have obsessive-compulsive disorder."


That particular diagnosis isn't entirely unexpected. After all, I'm not an idiot. I knew these behaviors were . . . unusual. But when I thought of OCD, I thought of people who are germ-phobic, who have to carry around hand sanitizer in their purses and have to have their houses in perfect order. My house always looks like a bomb full of paper and books exploded in it and while I'm a regular hand-washer, I've been known to go a few days without bathing while I'm camping. Because those were my perceptions of OCD, I always assumed that I was borderline, that I had some OCD tendencies but I'd be able to use to rational side of my brain to shut them down. Hearing the diagnosis simultaneously produced an "Oh Thank God!" feeling and an "Oh shit, what am I going to do now?" kind of dread.

The elation is pretty self-explanatory. When mental illness has a name, it also has treatment options. Suddenly, staring me in the face was the possibility of a life where I could leave the house without taking a picture of the stove. Where I could iron my clothes the night before I went to work instead of spending a week steaming them out in the bathroom when I take a shower. I had never even bothered to envision a future where these small rituals weren't a part of my daily life, when checking and rechecking, counting and worrying weren't going to eat up hours of my time.

The dread has been growing since I left the psychologist's office. What scares me most is the knowledge that I am broken. Some small thing has gone awry in my brain and has caused these behaviors. Worse than it being broken, it's something I can't fix on my own. My brain can't think its way out of this problem and that's something that has never happened to me before. It's an overwhelming realization and a terrifying one. I've spent years relying on my brain to answer abstract questions about God and my soul, to think through the origins of the universe, to navigate me through complex interpersonal relationships. Now I'm faced with the reality that the equipment I've used to find those solutions is malfunctioning and all of those answers may be incorrect. I'm shocked by how openly emotional I've become, how easy it has been to admit my fears and concerns to the people around me, to ask for help while my mind is churning.

What I've found most surprising about this diagnosis and the ensuing doubt it has created in me is that my logical side, my Vulcan side, keeps leading me back to the emotional. It's as if the logical side of me realizes that it can't fix this problem, that it's emotional difficulty and I need help and that's all right. For the first time in many years, it's ok to admit that I'm an emotional, irrational, certifiably-a-little-bit-crazy human and not a cold-blooded thinking machine.

It seems I have more in common with Captain Kirk than I ever thought. 

A Long Expected Journey

The introduction to what will be a semi-regular series of posts called "So Say We All: The Trials Endured by Lady Nerds."

I was eighteen and a high school student when The Matrix Reloaded was released. My parents were disinclined to let me attend the midnight premiere, so I went immediately after school the next day. The friends with whom I was supposed to see the movie were all taking the Advanced Placement Economics test, so it fell to my friend Patrick and me to hold our places in line outside the Ultra Screen.

We queued up with our books and folding chairs, prepared to wait out the few hours before the movie. We talked and read, occasionally played cards, and it was some time before I noticed the guys in front of us, watching the first Matrix on their Mac. Truthfully, I wouldn’t have noticed them except for Patrick’s obvious snickering. My eyes flickered between my book and the guys until I noticed that they were staring at us, making it disturbingly obvious. It was a few minutes before my temper flared.

“Hey,” I said loudly, “take a fucking picture. It’ll last longer.”

The guys blushed, turned the volume up on their computer, and went back to watching the movie. At this point, Patrick’s snickering had become full-blown laughter and I turned on him.

“And what’s up with you?”

“Nothing,” he snorted.

“Then what the hell was the matter with them?”

He buried his head in his hands for a minute and laughed so hard he shook. “Honey, you’re the only girl in the whole damn line.”

Things haven’t changed much in the past ten years. I attend midnight premieres of movies now, and sometimes I go in costume. Over the past ten years my nerd cred has significantly increased. I throw a party every year to celebrate the new season of Doctor Who. I’ve had long arguments about Kirk versus Picard. I own a first-edition Tolkein. I’ve read every published word Neil Gaiman has written. I collect comics and bawled my eyes out during Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows.

For years I’ve watched nerds everywhere misrepresented in the media, in pop culture, and by other nerds. I’ve seen reporters interview cosplayers and comic collectors, shake their heads as they take notes, and mutter “freaks” as they walk away. I’ve stood in line for a movie or a book-signing and watched as the local news anchor grabs her cameraman and pulls him past me, standing there in a dress and heels, amiably chatting with the people around me, and zero in on the pale, pimply guys playing Magic. When this happens, I can feel the nerds around me tense up with irritation. But instead of walking up to her, we all grind our teeth and vent to one another. If someone is really pissed off, they might whip out their smartphone and blow up on Twitter, but that’s about it.  

Those instances always leave my stomach upset because I know those pimply guys are who my friends and family see on the evening news. Those guys keep my mother up at night because she’s afraid that I may bring one of them home to Christmas and he’ll spend the entire weekend regaling us with lectures on quantum mechanics (which I would find awesome) or in the corner fearfully quaking at the unbridled masculinity of the men in my family. When a reporter corners one of these nerd stereotypes, I can hear the following day’s conversation with my mother:

“Honey, don’t you think you would be happier if you, I don’t know, spent your time a little more normally?”

“What do you mean?”

I can hear her sigh and pull a mentholated cigarette out of her pack.

“I mean if you gave up all these costumes and comic books, and, well . . . dorky stuff, honey.” She drags on her cigarette. “I mean, I just want you to be happy. You seem so normal most of the time. I just don’t understand this.”

Mom’s opinion pretty much sums up that of the friends I’ve made outside of marathon LAN parties and Catan tournaments. They’re the people who know a literature and scotch snob with a high-pressure, intensely social job and they have a hard time reconciling her with the lady who regularly makes Star Wars jokes. They’re baffled by many of my hobbies, and I don’t blame them. The attraction of the nerd world escapes them, and if I’m honest, sometimes when I’m the only woman standing in the comic book shop around the block from my office, it puzzles me too.

Being a lady nerd is tricky. It often feels like I’m entering a foreign country on a soon-to-expire visa. A friend and I recently attended a presentation on Minecraft. We really enjoyed ourselves and learned a lot about the game and the draw to it. At the end of the presentation, there were door prizes. We won the award for “Looks Most Like They Don’t Belong Here.” I was wearing a dress and knee high boots. She had on a sweater and jeans. It was an odd moment, and one that took me back to the line for The Matrix Reloaded. 

Ten years later, I’m not the only girl in the room, but I’m certainly one of a very few. But, while my visa may be somewhat dubious, it allows me access all the same. I hope to be a Virgil to those of you unfamiliar with the realm of extreme nerdiness. Simultaneously, I’d like to be Dante, asking questions and trying to cultivate a deeper understanding of this world and my place in it.

Engage.