Obsessive

"Tell me about graduate school. That must have been stressful." My therapist and I have been talking a lot lately about when my OCD symptoms really went into overdrive. I can remember the moment when I realized something might be seriously wrong. I was living in a small town ten or fifteen minutes from where I went to graduate school. I had just pulled into the parking lot to attend class and the thought popped into my mind "Did you turn the stove off after you made tea this morning?"

"Yes." I told myself. "Yes. I checked it twice. I checked it because I knew this would happen."

"But are you sure?" The voice says. 

I check the time. Going back home and checking the burners is going to make me late, but I turn on the car and fly home anyway. The stove is of course, off, but I pull the heating elements out of the stovetop, set them on the sidewalk outside, take a picture of them on the sidewalk, and hurry back to class.

"Kelly?"

I snap out of the memory and answer the question. "Well, yeah, I guess you could say it was stressful. I was working full time, going to school full time, pulling straight As, doing an internship, and editing a magazine."

"You know that's not the normal approach to graduate school, right? Did you see any symptoms aside from the stove and checking to make sure the door was locked?"

"I was trying to train for a half marathon all three years I was in graduate school. I could never do the long runs because I was so tired. Like, get my thyroid checked tired."

"I'm sorry, you were what?"

"Training for a half marathon. I ran one right before I started graduate school and, I don't know, it seemed like a reasonable way to deal with all the stress."

My therapist laughs so hard she starts crying. 

***

Most of the smart women I know have anxiety disorders. 

Sitting here thinking about that sentence, I realized I could name seven bright, capable women who struggle with anxiety disorders. And by bright, I mean could intellectually eviscerate you if you gave them half a chance. And they'd all get a big kick out of doing it. But they all also suffer from anxiety unlike (and I'm generalizing here) anything I've seen in my male friends. Perhaps men don't show their anxiety in the same ways as women and I'm missing it. Perhaps society has made it entirely unacceptable for them to admit to anyone that they have anxiety. Or perhaps this is really something that's endemic to smart, thoughtful women. I don't know. 

What I do know is that, at some point, I've had a conversation with every single one of these women about the pressure to be successful, about the faces we present to the world and who we are in our private lives. We've talked about the cognitive dissonance between those two and the utter schizophrenia that occurs when you're trying to be, well, perfect in every aspect of your life. You're the lady who's in charge of your career, your sex life, your romantic life, your family, your credit score, etc ad nauseam. And God forbid you admit that you have credit card debt or that you skipped the gym or that you eat emotionally or that you worry about being the crazy cat lady. 

I can't help but feel like feminism has really let me down in this way. Older feminists have told me time and again that if you just work hard enough, if you learn to put your emotions aside for a little while, if you get the right degrees and the right partner you'll be able to have it all: kids, a nice house in the city, a loving, supportive partner in your life, a career that you find satisfying and will quickly rise to the top, and you'll be able to help the next generation of women do even more. I don't have any of these things. I'm not even close to having any of them. I have days when I'm lonely or sad or sexually frustrated or wondering if I'll ever demand the type of respect in my field that I crave and if that wasn't bad enough there's no space where I can admit to those things. Because admitting to them means letting down the home team. It means risking the disapproval of women I admire greatly and having them think that I'm just not working hard enough.  

***

Part of the reason that all of this is on my mind today is because I came across a picture while I was flipping through my cell phone, trying to decide which ones I would like to have printed. There are some great ones. One of me and Krista in the kitchen. One of my family out to lunch. One of me geeking out over my Next Generation Pez dispensers. A few pictures from NOLA, and a few of the first snowfall here in the North Country. A darling picture of my mother and me last weekend.

And then there's the picture that made me start to cry.

A dumb picture, right? No aesthetic value, no one in it, absolutely nothing interesting whatsoever. Except for the date.

November 21, 2012.

This is the last time I had to take a picture of the stove before I could leave the house. It was over three months ago.


I have spent twenty-eight years of my life trying to be an A student, trying to thrive in my career and school and be confident and an excellent mentor for the women who are younger than I am. I've spent twenty-eight years of my life repressing any thought of tiredness, of wanting to take a break, of feeling that just maybe I'm taking on too much. And I've succeeded at all of these things. I've mentored the women who are younger than I am. I've talked about how fulfilling my career is and how I'm satisfied with my life exactly as it is. I've talked candidly about relationships and partners and my expectations therein.

What I have learned from earlier generations of feminists, what they would never admit and would probably criticize me for saying, is that hard work isn't going to get me everything I want. In fact, it's unlikely that I'll be the next Hilary Clinton or Marie Curie and it's sure as shit not because I'm not willing to work for it. I've also learned that women of my generation of feminists need a place where we can be ourselves, where we can talk about anxiety and depression and how fucking hard we're working to change the world and how few results we see. We need space where we can talk about everything we're trying to juggle and admit that our credit scores aren't what we want them to be or we've secretly research sperm banks because we want to have kids by the time we're 35, partner or no.

I've spent twenty-eight years of my life living with anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression. Did feminism make me anxious, obsessive, depressed? No, of course not. But it didn't make it any easier for me to admit that I was these things. The pressure to be the next Elizabeth Warren or Gloria Steinem kept me from admitting that there were some wires crossed in my head for many, many years. I tried to cure myself with religion, with facts, with self-diagnosis and eating better and working out and meditation. And none of it ever seemed to work. The hard lesson that I've taken away from twenty-eight years of earlier generations of feminism influencing the way I live my life is that like it or not, I can't be the woman who works full time, volunteers for PPH and Emily's List, runs forty miles a week, eats organic, raw, entirely prepared by hand meals, who has a satisfying sex life and partner and children. I can't.

Or, I can, but in order to be that woman I also have to be the woman who gets up fifteen times a night to check to stove, who takes pictures of it before she leaves the house, who can't use the hair-dryer or the iron without worrying all day that she's left them on.

For years I would have said that trade-off isn't that bad. I could handle the OCD symptoms in exchange for having it all. Now that I've earned my 90 day mental health chip, I realize how wrong-headed of a trade-off that is.