Don't Get Too Personal

"Just don't get too personal."

About two months ago I was talking to a friend of mine about the possibility of writing an Ignite Minneapolis pitch on life with OCD.  I bounced some ideas off of him and asked him to read the shitty first drafts of the pitch. One of the notes was to avoid talking about the personal aspects of OCD and approach it from a neuroscience and therapeutic perspective.

"I just don't think personal stories would appeal to the organizers or attendees."

I could see his point, kinda. I just thought that he was completely insane. One of the many reasons I'm not a scientist (terrible at math and chemistry, threw up during every biology dissection, have a slight tendency to accidentally set experiments on fire) is that I lack anything approaching objectivity. I had zero interest in (and zero qualifications to) talk about OCD from anything approaching a clinical viewpoint.

So I said a grateful "thank you" for the advice on how to talk in front of groups and for some careful editing and went ahead and wrote a pitch about what it was like to fall in holyshitreallove with significant mental health challenges.

In other words, I pitched a talk I might actually be able to give.

You know, with a lot of Xanax.

The boyfriend and I were headed up to the North Country when I got an email informing me that my talk had been accepted. After reading the congratulatory "You're Speaking!" subject line I started to hyperventilate. The boyfriend (how is he always so calm?) set the tone for the entire next month by placidly asking "Are you okay? What happened? Do I need to pull off and get you your paper bag?"

True love.

"No," I gasped. "My pitch was accepted."

Let's hit the pause button for a second on the intense social anxiety and my deep dislike for being the center of attention. What was even more terrifying was that the talk I had pitched was both intensely personal and not just about me. It was as much about the process of falling in love with the boyfriend and his reaction to finding out about my mental health issues. It's one thing to write about it here, where there's a degree of removal. It's another to talk to a large audience about our lives together.

Over the intervening month we talked a lot about the things that were okay to address in the talk. Oddly enough, I was more concerned about our privacy than he seemed to be. I wrote, edited, scrapped, and rewrote the entire talk no fewer than fifteen times. With each new incarnation of the talk I tried to keep it as aloof and third-person-y as I possibly could. I remembered the advice to "keep from getting too personal," saw the truth and the wisdom in it, and made it my mantra.

And each time I got to the final paragraph I realized I hated the entire thing and binned it.

Finally, a week before the event, twitchy and exhausted to the point where even my anti-anxiety meds were barely having an impact, I broke down on Kerry. "I can't do this. I don't know how to do this."

"What's up?"

"I can't be objective about this. I don't know how to not make this personal."

She started laughing at me. Of course, she reminded me, I couldn't be objective about this. It was my story about my mental healthy diagnosis and it would be (in her actual, scientific opinon) stupid to try to be objective about it.

"Fuck that advice." 

With her advice (she is, after all, the source and fountain of all truth) I rewrote the talk to sound more like something that would actually come out of my mouth. I gave it to the boyfriend and asked if he thought it was too personal and if he was comfortable with everything I said in it. His response was simply: "It's amazing, and you're going to kill it."

I thought he was being kind and supportive. I didn't think for a second that I would kill it. I was just hoping not to crash and burn.  Truthfully, I don't remember much of the actual five minutes I was on stage. I actually had to ask when I got off if people laughed at the jokes, because I was so terrified that I couldn't quite hear the reactions.

The part I remember was near the end, when I was talking about how the boyfriend reacted to one of the craziest thing I've ever said to him. The audience actually gave an audible "Ohhhhh" and I had an "Ohhhhh" moments myself.

The ohmygodthisismylife part of sharing stories isn't what scares the crap out of me. I do it all the time while writing or in small groups. Sharing what having OCD and falling in love has meant in our lives was scary because it made me (us, really) vulnerable. For those five minutes, my disorder and our lives were open to so much criticism that the thought of it nearly made me bail on the talk all together.

Because of the way many people have reacted when I'm in the midst of an obsessive/compulsive episode or merely anxious ("Quit worrying." "Calm down." "You're exhausting.") I am disinclined to be candid without some physical (or intellectual) distance.

Ignite made that distance impossible.

Short of saying "fuck it" and dating with mental health issues, Ignite was the scariest, hardest, most rewarding thing I've ever done (and done without anti-anxiety meds!). It made me realize that aloofness is not always a virtue. I didn't know how much I wanted to be authentic, personal, and vulnerable on a larger scale.

I certainly didn't realize how necessary it is when talking about mental health.

Now, to help the boyfriend with his pitch for Ignite 9.

Failure, Ridicule, Death

"I'm going to fail, be ridiculed, and then die of embarassment, and that's not even the worst part!"

"What's the worst part?"

We're driving through Wisconsin to visit my parents and I'm emoting about a talk I'll be giving in the coming weeks.

"It will be on Youtube forever."

It isn't the first time or even the fortieth time I've recited the FailureRidiculeDeath mantra to the boyfriend. It's probably the sixty-fourth time. In the three hours we've been in the car. And I forgot my anti-anxiety meds at home.

It's going to be an unintentionally long weekend.

But despite the constant mantra of FailureRidiculeDeath that I've been repeating out loud for weeks now, the boyfriend has somehow managed not to leave me on the side of the road or pack up my stuff and leave it on the curb while I'm at work. Rather, he reminds me of my most useful mantra (the Litany Against Fear from Dune), gives me convincing pep talks, and occasionally busts out a terrible joke. 

"That does sound pretty dire. Oh well. Good thing I have all these other girlfriends waiting in line for a shot with me."

I turn to him with my faux-outraged face. He keeps his eyes on the road for a few beats, turns, glances at me, and smirks.

I break out laughing. For the moment, "FailureRidiculeDeath" has been replaced by a case of semi-hysterical giggles.

Throughout the weekend (and much of the coming week, I expect) I'll be stuck on the FailureRidiculeDeath loop. It gets bad enough that I am told by one friend familiar with my OCD diagnosis that I am "exhausting" and need to "stop obsessing over this."

Stop obsessing over my talk about life with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Tell me more, Obi-Wan.

For me one of the hardest parts about life with OCD is how isolating it is. Setting aside for a second the weeks I was having difficulty leaving my house because my compulsions were so strong, it's hard to talk to people when in the midst of an obsessive episode. I don't know how long it will last, I can't always rely on my CBT toolkit to get me out, and while therapy and meds have helped me get better I'm still far from well. And the isolation that comes from being unable to talk to many people about what's going on in your negative-feedback, brain-locked mind only reinforces all of the feelings of guilt and shame you're already experiencing.

Unfortunately, even among people who know I have OCD the default reaction still tends toward "don't obsess," "quit worrying," and "calm down." For a long time, my reaction was increased shame yeahIshouldhavethisundercontrol. These days, it's less shame and more frustration because there is no way to effectively communicate to a psycho-typical person what an obsessive or compulsive episode is feels like.

An added +1 to frustration is the fact that I don't always know what's going to help. Sometimes I need to be reminded to go for a run or go to Spin. Other times I need someone to recite "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer" to me. Occasionally I need to hear my calm-down song or crawl into a video game for a few hours. What I need depends almost entirely on how far down the rabbit hole I've already gone.

Still, despite the moments of isolation and frustration, I'm grateful to have a handful of people who know my CBT toolkit well enough to know how to help me replace FailureRidiculeDeath with something more helpful.

Even if that something is the image of other girlfriends, waiting in line.