Patterns

I like books as much, and often times more, than I like people.

It's one of those facts that I've known about myself for more or less my entire life. As a middle school student, I would read at recess. I used to climb up onto the side of the chimney at my childhood home because there was a ledge there large enough to curl up on, hide from my parents, and fall into a book. As a college and graduate student, I still made time to read outside of class because I knew it would help me preserve the vestiges of my sanity. So of course, I've been geekily into all the "Girls Who Read" things floating about the internet lately.

It's not that I don't like people. Of course I do. But people are, frankly, terrifying. All those emotions, thoughts, opinions. All those opportunities to do something wrong. I am, in addition to being one of the most introverted people I know, one of the shyest. These two things are almost a guaranteed one-two K.O. for making new friends, as meeting new people both exhausts and scares the beejezus out of me.

Books, of course, offer all the the emotional catharsis of, you know, real life minus all of the tricky interpersonal navigation that has to come along with actual human interaction.

***

Patterns, for people with OCD, are vital. 

Patterns help us stave off psychological panic. They keep the world in order around us and allow us to function during the course of our days. So we count to one hundred or recite the ABCs when we're upset. We touch brick walls when we pass them, check door locks and irons, eat the same breakfast every morning at the same time. All the while preserving, hopefully, some ability to leave the house in the morning and go to work and lead successful, adult lives. I got a graduate degree, passed my comprehensive exams with honors, and raised nearly a million dollars for an organization while suffering from ever-increasing OCD compulsions. 

Patterns allowed me to do so.

***

I've become a blurter. 

For years I've successfully managed to tamp down my emotions. Or, possibly simply become a Vulcan and not have emotions. When my mental health began to crumble, I stopped journaling and have zero record of my emotional state during that period in my life, and I don't trust my memories. What I do know is that if  I had them, I kept my emotions under control. Feelings for someone who clearly didn't have them back? Shove them down the memory hole. Pissed at a friend of yours for canceling plans last minute? Go for a long walk. Sad and guilty because your grandfather died and you failed to see him over Thanksgiving because you were lazy? Tell exactly one person literally sworn to secrecy (your priest) and then never speak of the incident again. 

Last fall I was writing frequently about how I felt like I was walking around with my skin turned inside out. All of the emotions that I had spent so long avoiding were suddenly flooding back in and I didn't have the capacity to deal with them, so I felt overwhelmed and vulnerable most of the time. Apparently, over the course of the year, my solution to those emotions has been to blurt them out, often in public places.

This particular section of blurting comes on a Saturday night in the middle of a Kitchen Window. 

Victoria and I are looking a tea towels and I start emoting, big time. A cookbook has triggered a desire to talk to a (former) friend and I'm upset about the fight we've had (while still convinced that what I did was right) and miss them tremendously and just want to send them a photo of this completely ridiculous cookbook and fast-forward to the part where I'm done processing and one of us has apologized and we're back to being friends again. 

I'm still telling Victoria all of this ten minutes later when we hit the sidewalk. 

***

It's not unusual for me to finish a book in less than 24 hours. 

Most recently it was a novel, Something Missing, by Matthew Dicks. It was a funny, sweet book. It had a few structural problems (I doubt anyone's first meeting with an estranged father would go that well) but I was willing to overlook them for one simple reason.

The book was one of the kindest, best, most sympathetic looks into the mind of a person with obsessive-compulsive disorder I've ever encountered. It was like reading my own thought patterns on the page, everything from obsessing over conversations that you've had or will have and refining your answers until they're perfect to the deep sense of relief and calm that you feel when you finally walk into your own space. 

It was that last part that really hit home with me, a long description of what our hero feels when he walks into his pine air-freshener scented garage primarily because when I shut the door of the apartment and am surrounded by my things, my books, my pottery, my music, that I feel an overwhelming sense of thankgodnothingbadtomecanhappenhere. 

Oddly enough, that feeling has never been about place. It's always been about the things with which I surround myself. The quilt on my bed, the deep red armchair where I do most of my reading, my coffee mug my friend Richard gave me, the smell of lavender and vanilla in the air. 

Reading Something Missing was like getting slapped across the face. 

I've thought for a long time now that OCD was, in total, about the obsessions and compulsions that I deal with. When I thought of those things, I thought about the stove, the door, the iron, the fact that every time I'm driving down the freeway I can't stop thinking about how I'm about to crash into the concrete median and die. What I didn't realize was how deeply patterns were ingrained into my life. How my need for privacy and things to be just so in my house without being tidy or organized is a manifestation of this disease. 

How that deep sense of relief and calm that comes when I flick the deadbolt is about staving off psychological panic. 

***

People interrupt patterns. 

I'm having a moment of existential crisis after an email with the subject line "Run Tonight?" pops up in my inbox. It's from my running partner, we skipped our long run on Sunday and he wants to know if we can make it up tonight. 

I run alone on Mondays. It's a short, fast two mile run around my neighborhood right after work. I run without the encumbrance of a cell phone, headphones, music. I just run. My running partner and I run on Wednesdays and Sundays. That's our time. I depend on those days because I know I'll have enough time for recovery and strengthening my weak hips in between. 

I run alone on Mondays.  

I hesitate a few minutes before sending back a one word response. 

"Yes." 

***

Marie Curie Day finds me entirely fired up and ready for thirteen rounds of intellectual bare-knuckle boxing with anyone willing to fight me. I am not, however, fired up about anything even remotely topical. It's not women in science or the preponderance of science events "just for women" that has me riled up. It's an article by a pretentious blowhard in The New York Review of Books. 

He claims (and for the record, he says that these claims only hold true in his own life) that the novel has lost its meaning. That we trick ourselves through fake catharsis, or are disappointed when our own lives don't following the similar arc of introduction, issue, resolution, emotionally satisfying denouement. 

I read literary criticism. Frequently. I can expound on Stanley Fish, dissect Kate Millet, explain Focault's author function. Lit crit classes were my favorite classes in college and were the capstone of my liberal arts education. I went to one of those colleges that wanted to teach you how to think, and lit crit did that for me.

This is all to say that I, too, am a pretentious blowhard.

But I've never made the claim that "because I dislike this form (or author or conceit) the entire genre lacks meaning." And I've never gone on to publish invective against whole genres in magazines (mainly because they wouldn't publish me). What really gets me, though, is the fact that I've had this argument so damn often lately.

I read almost exclusively fiction and poetry among a group of loud non-fiction advocates. Despite the fact that I love history, most historical non-fiction bores me. I don't like memoir (probably because I write it), and I understand science better when someone explains it to me and I can ask questions.

Those are part of the reasons I read fiction.

The other part is that fiction has changed and saved my life. Sandman made me feel something long after I had I thought I lost the capability to feel anything. Pride and Prejudice regularly gives me hope that I may not die old and alone.

Something Missing has made me realize that people interrupt patterns.

They do. With wanton disregard for schedules they invite you out to happy hour at the last minute. They forget to RSVP to dinner and arrive regardless. They rummage around in your bookshelves and forget to put things back in alphabetical order. They invite you to run on Mondays instead of Sundays, they take you to Kitchen Window and listen as you mope all over the store. They blow into your well-ordered life for a weekend or a month or fifteen years and spin your life completely, irrevocably, out of control.

People interrupt patterns.

They show you what life without patterns, without rituals and rules and set times and activities can be like. You run on Monday and still manage to do your hip-strengthening exercises. You kiss a stranger and live to tell about it. You share your feelings with a friend in a hugely public space without giving a damn that you're close to tears.You rearrange the books on the shelf and categorize them based on the impact they made on your life rather than by author's last name.

You realize that there's a slim chance you're starting to like people more than books.