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Category Archives: quotes
manic writer
I had lunch with my friend Brittane this week. Brittane is tall and gorgeous and insightful and full of God’s strength. She has her degree in psychology, and she has this perfect way of asking questions so that you almost feel like you’re getting free therapy while you hang out with her. She’s a delight.
I was telling Brittane about the rollercoaster I can’t seem to get off … the high highs, the low lows, the sudden switches. “I don’t mean to be blaise about this, since I hate when people are like, ‘I’m so OCD,’ but sometimes I wonder if I am manic depressive.”
Brittane, in her perfect way, nodded, listened, asked questions, offered insight until we stumbled upon one important fact: these days, my rollercoaster is only about my writing life. Since my writing life is SO important to me, I wasn’t seeing the forest for the trees. It felt important, like a hand-hold. “Maybe it’s just what the writing life is like,” I said. “It’s just a continual up-and-down.”
If it is, I’m on the rollercoaster for good.
Back in the office that afternoon, I read a quote on Donald Miller’s blog that fit so perfectly with our conversation. It read:
To write is to struggle with your sanity, at times. And there will be bad days and you will feel defeated. This work is more difficult than climbing a mountain because you are doing it in the dark. I want to urge you to keep going. You matter and your words matter. By writing, you are saying to God I agree with you, you gave me a voice and the gift was not in vain. By writing, you are showing up on the stage of life rather than sitting in the comfortable theater seats (there is a time for both) and are casting your voice out toward an audience who is looking for a character to identify with, somebody to guide them through their own loneliness, no matter how transparent or hidden that loneliness is.
It was just what I needed to hear in that moment. I will continue to write, to ride this rollercoaster, because I agree with God, that he gave me a voice and the gift was not in vain.
compulsions become monsters
“Compulsions are a lousy solution to the problem of having obsessions.” Fred Penzel
Some of you don’t know just how true this quote is! I was explaining OCD to a group of student workers in my office the other day, and here’s what I had to say about compulsions:
They start as a way to provide temporary relief to the stress/terror/anxiety/disturbing nature of obsessions, but after a while, the compulsions get out of control and become monsters themselves.
For example, maybe an OC will worry that a room is contaminated and therefore, she is going to get sick herself and die. So she washes her hands to forestall any illness, and for a moment, it relieves that anxiety. But after awhile, she is washing her hands all the time to try to keep that anxiety at bay, and now her hands are bleached, raw, bleeding and she can’t stop.
Which is worse– the obsession or the compulsion? I know different OCs have different answers. I’d like to hear yours!
YA literature
Young adult literature is probably my favorite kind of book to read. It’s fun, accessible, and– if you’re a picky reader like I am– it’s incredibly well written. Here’s a list of some of my all-time favorite YA lit.
1) Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
2) Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling
3) The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
4) Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli
5) The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
6) Ordinary People by Judith Guest
7) Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
8) Bridge to Terabithia by Kathleen Patterson
9) Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta
10) The Pigman by Paul Zindel
… and so many more (Saving Francesca, Finnikin of the Rock, The Sky is Everywhere, Tuck Everlasting, The Secret Garden …)! Do you like YA lit? What are your favorites? Have you tried writing YA lit before? What are the critical elements to include in any YA story?
try to love the questions themselves
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
OCD in a nutshell: Life holds uncertainty, and obsessive-compulsives can’t stand that.
The natural desire of an OC is to erase uncertainty, but that is an impossible feat.
Instead, cognitive-behavioral therapy teaches an OC to be okay with uncertainty.
And trust me, life is so much better this way.
The Last Battle
On this first night of 2012, I am thinking about my favorite book, The Last Battle, written by C.S. (Jack) Lewis. If you haven’t read The Chronicles of Narnia yet, then 2012 is your year! These books have been so important in my life that I find myself reading the entire series about 6-8 times a year. They are well worth the time invested.
In The Last Battle, there is incredible confusion in Narnia– there is an imposter pretending to be Aslan, the great Lion, who is making terrible commandments. There is one bit of dialogue I’d like to share with you:
You will go to your death, then,” said Jewel.
“Do you think I care if Aslan doomes me to death?” said the King. “That would be nothing, nothing at all. Would it not be better to be dead than to have this horrible fear that Aslan has come and is not like the Aslan we have believed in and longed for? It is as if the sun rose one day and were a black sun.”
“I know,” said Jewel. “Or if you drank water and it were dry water. You are in the right, Sire. This is the end of all things.”
During my darkest OCD moments, this is how I felt– and actually some of my issues I refered to as “black sun obsessions”– obsessions where the ground was taken from beneath my feet, where I felt as if my entire worldview was being dismantled. Those nights, my soul felt as if there were no place to land. I was in free-fall.
But, later in the book, the King and Jewel discover the Truth— that an ape is behind this entire masquerade.
But now, as Tirian looked round on the miserable faces of the Narnians, and thought how they would all believe that Aslan and Tash were one and the same, he could bear it no longer.
“Ape,” he cried, “You lie. You lie damnably. You lie like a Calormene. You lie like an Ape.”
What I am trying to say is this: there are no black suns if you love Jesus Christ– only things that appear to be black suns. He is bigger than our obsessions, and He is the solid ground beneath our feet. It may feel as though Christianity could crack down the middle like a split log, but God is our gravity. I was never in free-fall; I was lying in the great palm of my God.
same secrets
“I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition—that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else.” Frederick Buechner
While I think this quote is universally true, right now I’m thinking specifically in the context of obsessive-compulsives.
Alone, we imagine that no one else could think the horrible things we do.
But when we are in community, we realize that our secrets are pretty much all the same. I know that’s it’s not necessarily an abracadabra moment, but when you start realizing that other people share your secrets, you feel less like a monster and more like the victim of an ugly disorder. In other words, you start seeing the TRUTH.
The TRUTH is…
You are not the only one who imagines harming a child.
You are not the only one with excessive concerns about contamination.
You are not the only one who fears you’ve done or thought something blasphemous.
You are not the only one who fears you might be homosexual.
You are not the only one who needs symmetry.
You are not the only one with counting compulsions, who makes lists excessively, who feels a NEED to confess, who is driven to accumulate useless things, who counts, who has unwanted sexual thoughts, who needs to check “one last time” a hundred times.
You’re not a freak– you’re just a textbook case of OCD. One amongst an entire community of people whose lives have been affected by this thief. I love the online OCD blogging community– I love that people are sharing their secrets and learning that all our secrets are pretty much the same.
diagnosis
Eve Ensler writes, “I believe in the power and mystery of naming things. Language has the capacity to transform our cells, rearrange our learned patterns of behavior and redirect our thinking. I believe in naming what’s right in front of us because that is often what is most invisible. I believe freedom begins with naming things. Humanity is preserved by it.”
And I agree.
To me, naming an enemy steals away some of that enemy’s power, and that is why I believe diagnosis is so important.
For years, I didn’t know what was wrong with me– only that I thought and worried more than anyone I knew– enough to think myself into panicked circles from which escape was nearly impossible. I couldn’t see this behavior in any of my friends, this dizzying chasing-of-my-own-tail beginning the moment I woke up. I was the odd man out, always stressed to the max, always teetering on the edge of something HUGE– heresy, atheism, a change in direction or pursuit, a redefining of my entire worldview.
But how can you fight against an invisible enemy? Since you can’t see the enemy standing between you and the mirror, instead you see yourself and the fight becomes personal. All the while, the real culprit is standing right there … only it is unnamed.
And then, the diagnosis arrives. OCD is named. There is a transfer of power, even if only minute. And the real war begins.
Anonymous, you feasted on me like a silent maggot,
until I was weary of the ugly business of waking up.
You fed on my tears, licking the salt off of
your fingertips in a greedy appetite for sorrow that
backed me into a boxy corner of paranoia
where I first learned your name.
My move.
bad vision
Quote
I have a friend who struggles with an anxiety disorder, and she sent me this email the other day and told me I could post it on my blog:
I had a dream that I was in my back yard alone, and this huge wolf came around the corner. It was massive and growling and its hair was standing up. I started to panic and looked around to help me, but there was no one. The wolf started to run at me in slow motion, and it was getting bigger and bigger. As it lunged, I reached my hands out to try to grab its neck and strangle it. I closed my eyes as I began to wrestle with this snarling wolf, and I closed my hands around its neck as hard as I could. We were wrestling on the ground, me on top of it, and I opened my eyes. I panicked, realizing that the wolf had suddenly turned into this adorable house dog (practically a puppy) with a collar on. I jumped up, not understanding how I had suddenly been strangling a harmless puppy. Then I woke up. Sometimes this is how I feel, like I get terrified and paralyzed over things that are, in reality, not a big deal at all…
To which I responded:
I completely get what you’re saying. For the majority of my life, I have been thinking that puppies were wolves. It’s just SO HARD to see things correctly when something in our heads/bodies makes us see things wrong!!!
This is the brutal power of mental illness.
tricho
In Matthew 10:30, Jesus says, “And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”
That is lovely to know as someone with trichotillomania.
Trichotillo-whatta?
Trichotillomania. The compulsive urge to pull out one’s hair. NBD. 😉
I’ve suffered from this for years, can’t remember how long– I think maybe I started compulsively pulling my hair out in college. I am blessed though– some people have it waaaay worse than I do– to where I’ve googled some images and have deemed them too disturbing to post.
Here’s one that’s pretty mild:
My own pulling is from a very specific spot on the back of my head. Over the years, there have been many times when the back of my head actually is sore because of how much pulling I’ve done. For a long time, I’ve had a “tuft” there– a small “sprig” of shorter hair, since I let it grow to be a couple inches and then pull it again, so there is a patch of continually short hairs. But now I have short hair, so you can’t see it, suckas. 🙂
It’s not as big a problem for me now as it used to be, although when I get stressed, I will just sit on the couch and pull and pull– just ask my roommate. I am gaining mastery over it now, but it used to be this COMPULSION– if I didn’t pull I’d miss this tiny release. I learned that if I squeeze my hand into a very tight fist, I could sometimes get the same release as a pull.
I know, I know. One more weird tale from the obsessive-compulsive.
At least I didn’t eat my hair then, as many tricho sufferers do. If you’re ready for nightmares, google it.
JACKIE LEA SOMMERS 