Mr. Doom 2.0
Part One of this entry is here.
Since I'm trying to name the different part of my suffering, and this also helps shape my narrative into blog entries, I've changed the title of my posts regarding my ocd to Mr. Doom. This just fits. I considered Mr. Terror, Mr. Loop, but something about Doom is just right. That feeling, that sense of impending catastrophe, underlies all things ocd. Obsessing feels like my own death is just about to happen, or that some great dread event is coming; a silent, singular apocalypse. So Doom it is.
I left off when my stepmother moved in when I was 16, but I neglected significant content from before that time. One thing I mentioned only a little, but it deserves more treatment here: I had an intense fear of vomiting in public. My am. lit. class recently discussed Tenessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie; I had forgotten Laura, the borderline and fragile girl in the play, has the same problem: she vomits on the floor during a typing speed test her first week at business college and never returns. How that scene haunts me now, haunted me as I discussed it in class. That, apart from my separation anxiety, was my first great fear, the terror of committing an embarassing, uncontrollable, act. It was with me from about six or seven until high school, though it will still creep on at rare times.
My mother tells me I did throw up in class in kindergarden, and I have only the vaguest memories of some students standing around talking about this event (and what was their tone, they seem like shadows now, murmuring...were they setting me apart like a weak animal, were they laughing, were they sorry and supportive, all the above...I don't know). But that memory lay buried for a long time. All I knew was that when the first day of school rolled around, especially by second grade, third grade, I would be throwing up in the bathroom that first morning, telling my mother I was sick, terrified to go. She, of course, was mocking. Critical. Absolutely without nurturing empathy. Telling me to stop being nervous and to snap out of it, or that I was undergoing some spiritual trial (perhaps that came later). But the fear of throwing up in public escalates exactly like the cycle of ocd: first the thought, then the anxiety, then a stronger thought, the water in the mouth, the feeling of lightness in the stomach...it happens fast. The only release seems to be to let the stomach contents go. Then, if one actually vomits in public: the great horror has come.
Why did school scare me so much? I know in part because my father would forget to pick me up, actually would pick me up late, many days. Second grade for some reason stands out as especially bad for this. I'd wait behind the yellow line where all the kids waited, one side playground and one side parking lot, and no dad; sometimes I'd only wait a few minutes, a half an hour, sometimes hours; once he didn't show until after dark. That night I was finally put into a room with the few kids who were left and we were supposed to be watching television I think; I remember some boy I didn't know, some strange and predatory looking boy, holding out his hand to me to show that he had stuck a pin entirely through a callous in his palm. It didn't hurt, he said, as he showed me his hand with that pin completely through the skin. I felt very sick then. It felt like the darkest night of my life. Perhaps I had some memory of the pins that were in my elbow for so long in the hospital, perhaps the scene was simply too surreal to manage.
And when my dad finally did show that night, and I clung to him in the dark outside the little classroom where the handful of kids were being kept (by then the school had called him) one of the few times I ever remember holding him, he told me it had completely slipped his mind. He had gotten caught up at work and it had completely slipped his mind. His mind, you see, is not very good with things like that.
But most days he was not that late; I had memorized exactly what his car looked like, a brown Plymouth four door, and one would always drive by a few minutes after school would let out. My insides would jump, I'd think for a second that he'd made it, but then I learned the other car had an orange 76 ball on the arial. Some days I'd just wander the playground, or start to play kickball with the kids who were supposed to stay after, but I was always angry and nervous that he wouldn't make it. Somehow I associated all this with cloudy weather, perhaps the weather change of fall and school, and for years that season depressed me. Because any lateness at all bothered me; he was supposed to be there on time, and there was never any good discussion of why he wasn't. Certainly criticism, anger, was not tolerated when directed at either of my parents. My mother, especially, was vicious in this sense.
Also, I went to a private Christian school where they beat children right in the classroom. The 2nd grade teacher, his name was Mr. DeWoody, was proud of this fact. I heard him break a paddle on a child in a little area between classrooms when I was in the first grade, heard the boy screaming, then watched Mr. DeWoody come into my room and tell my teacher, a rather elderly woman, smiling how it happened, how he swung the paddle and it broke. She was also smiling. We were threatened more than once with that man. A child from our class may have been sent to him in hysterics once or twice; I don't recall. But I do remember, vividly, Mrs. Deal, my teacher, holding the only black boy in our class over her knee and beating him with the paddle. Not one or two swats, but a whole series of vicious whacks as he wailed and the tears fell off his face. Over a chair. Right in front of my class. At a Christian school. Praise the fucking lord.
Those teachers were both gone the next year I believe. I know Mr. DeWoody was gone; much to my intense relief, my second grade teacher, who taught in the same room he had taught in, was a nice woman, generally kind, young and newly married. Later that school year she did take the outrageous step of swatting a few of the most popular boys in their underwear; she made them pull down their pants before she spanked them. I don't know what they did to deserve this. I remember hearing the story, going to find them and they were playing catch with a baseball, seemingly not much effected, but embarrassed. But she was never a DeWoody.
One final thing about DeWoody, though. I believe he had just come back from the Nam. This was 1971 after all. I do know that one day he guest taught in my Sunday school class (our little charismatic church was on the same grounds as the school) and his lesson for the day, I remember this disinctly, was how an M-16 uploads a round and fires automatically. He drew the rifle on the board. Told us how to aim one, how to handle the upkick from the bullet bouncing up out of the clip. At the time I may have actually thought this was cool, though my fear of him must have been very real. Looking back, I am astonished he was left alone with children. He used to turn his eyelids backwards, I haven't seen anyone do that in years but I still hate it, and walk up and down the line of kids outside his room talking with a fake german accent as if he were a nazi.
The fear of throwing up stayed with me a long time, especially the first day of school or when I moved to a new school. I had some hard times going into junior high I'll have to get to another time, but because I was afraid of being beat up I didn't go to the public school my friends were going to (I was young, for one thing, having skipped fifth grade against my initial objections). It's sad, really, because I was a good student in grade school and the honors people at the public junior high already wanted me in their classes; the track that might have taken me into a very different life, though perhaps not a better one. Regardless, I ended up at a Christian school, and my horror of that first day, with my mother walking me around the campus unable to relax or comfort me, horrified herself I think, the dep gel she had plastered my hair with though this was long out of style...the fact that she fed me breakfast and I ate it when I knew even then it was not a good idea. I remember staring at a spider in the assembly that morning before we went to our home rooms, staring at that spider who was certainly unaware of my own misery, and feeling as dark as I have ever felt.
That first morning, in my home room, I did throw up. It hit me, it kept hitting me, by the time I raised my hand the vomit was already coming out my mouth and onto my hand. I made it into the hallway, got some into a trashcan, then into the safety of an empty boys' bathroom.
And once I vomited, how calm, how much better I felt; the fear was gone! Almost like the feeling after crying. The terror exorcised. But I had to go back to that classroom. Kids teased me, though not viciously. I was so distressed I left the school, left my stuff in my locker and got my parents to transfer me to another Christian school that started a week or two later. I think I threw up that first morning too though I had the sense to skip breakfast, but I got out of the assembly (in the bethany sanctuary, for those of you who know) and took my little seventh grade (should have been sixth grade) self into the bathroom before I let it out. That fear, the fear of throwing up in public, became a large part of the agoraphobia, my fear of going into public places, for years. Finally, as I said before I think, I realized about tenth grade that if I had to throw up I could just go and do it. And I had a pastor, someone who became famous for a while in the Christian recovery scene years later, who after trying to literally exorcise demons out of me actually had a good talk with me, did some cognitive therapy. He asked me what I was afraid would happen if someone threw up in public, and I said I felt people would laugh, think I was stupid; he said he believed most people would feel sorry for the person, want to help. That made sense. Those two things worked in tandem, and since then that particular fear has not been debilitating. I no longer get that feeling, or only very faint echoes once every few years on a very big day. And I tell myself, go ahead, go someplace and puke if you want to, and I'm okay.
OCD is a devious, insidious master. It is a loud and boisterous and relentless madness in the mind of an otherwise sane individual. This series on Mr. Doom will have to have many parts, some very unsettling to write and difficult to read. I said once, years ago, to a pastor trying to help me that 'I walk in places in my mind I should not walk.' That is not true now as it was then; I've made significant progress. But my plan is to take these posts into those places, to relieve those hours which felt like years, which then, tragically, became years. It's healing for me to do it. Maybe it will help someone else. Maybe, as a good friend once said about himself, I just need to articulate my life in language.
One truly final thing about the vomit reaction (which felt like such unbearable weakness at the time; I judged myself so severely for having this problem) is that many of us with ocd are afraid of committing some insane, uncontrolled, or dangerous act. I have to wonder...was there some link to all that and to the fear of vomiting? Surely vomiting was some way of trying to handle my terror, perhaps one which went all the way back to the hospital, when my grandmother would feed me custard and then I'd throw it up all over the sheets and according to her piss off the nurses who then had to change them. Throwing up, probably, was a way to release the anxiety, and to cry for help, as ocd is also a way to manage anxiety and underlying feelings. Unfortunately, ocd develops a strength of its own, a proprietary circuitry right in the brain. Thank God, thank God, thank God, I've come as far as I have; I intend to go farther still. There really is hope, and I've done it without being on psychotropic meds of any kind for many years.
These posts will head down darker paths yet, but hope, I've found, is more real than the dark.
Since I'm trying to name the different part of my suffering, and this also helps shape my narrative into blog entries, I've changed the title of my posts regarding my ocd to Mr. Doom. This just fits. I considered Mr. Terror, Mr. Loop, but something about Doom is just right. That feeling, that sense of impending catastrophe, underlies all things ocd. Obsessing feels like my own death is just about to happen, or that some great dread event is coming; a silent, singular apocalypse. So Doom it is.
I left off when my stepmother moved in when I was 16, but I neglected significant content from before that time. One thing I mentioned only a little, but it deserves more treatment here: I had an intense fear of vomiting in public. My am. lit. class recently discussed Tenessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie; I had forgotten Laura, the borderline and fragile girl in the play, has the same problem: she vomits on the floor during a typing speed test her first week at business college and never returns. How that scene haunts me now, haunted me as I discussed it in class. That, apart from my separation anxiety, was my first great fear, the terror of committing an embarassing, uncontrollable, act. It was with me from about six or seven until high school, though it will still creep on at rare times.
My mother tells me I did throw up in class in kindergarden, and I have only the vaguest memories of some students standing around talking about this event (and what was their tone, they seem like shadows now, murmuring...were they setting me apart like a weak animal, were they laughing, were they sorry and supportive, all the above...I don't know). But that memory lay buried for a long time. All I knew was that when the first day of school rolled around, especially by second grade, third grade, I would be throwing up in the bathroom that first morning, telling my mother I was sick, terrified to go. She, of course, was mocking. Critical. Absolutely without nurturing empathy. Telling me to stop being nervous and to snap out of it, or that I was undergoing some spiritual trial (perhaps that came later). But the fear of throwing up in public escalates exactly like the cycle of ocd: first the thought, then the anxiety, then a stronger thought, the water in the mouth, the feeling of lightness in the stomach...it happens fast. The only release seems to be to let the stomach contents go. Then, if one actually vomits in public: the great horror has come.
Why did school scare me so much? I know in part because my father would forget to pick me up, actually would pick me up late, many days. Second grade for some reason stands out as especially bad for this. I'd wait behind the yellow line where all the kids waited, one side playground and one side parking lot, and no dad; sometimes I'd only wait a few minutes, a half an hour, sometimes hours; once he didn't show until after dark. That night I was finally put into a room with the few kids who were left and we were supposed to be watching television I think; I remember some boy I didn't know, some strange and predatory looking boy, holding out his hand to me to show that he had stuck a pin entirely through a callous in his palm. It didn't hurt, he said, as he showed me his hand with that pin completely through the skin. I felt very sick then. It felt like the darkest night of my life. Perhaps I had some memory of the pins that were in my elbow for so long in the hospital, perhaps the scene was simply too surreal to manage.
And when my dad finally did show that night, and I clung to him in the dark outside the little classroom where the handful of kids were being kept (by then the school had called him) one of the few times I ever remember holding him, he told me it had completely slipped his mind. He had gotten caught up at work and it had completely slipped his mind. His mind, you see, is not very good with things like that.
But most days he was not that late; I had memorized exactly what his car looked like, a brown Plymouth four door, and one would always drive by a few minutes after school would let out. My insides would jump, I'd think for a second that he'd made it, but then I learned the other car had an orange 76 ball on the arial. Some days I'd just wander the playground, or start to play kickball with the kids who were supposed to stay after, but I was always angry and nervous that he wouldn't make it. Somehow I associated all this with cloudy weather, perhaps the weather change of fall and school, and for years that season depressed me. Because any lateness at all bothered me; he was supposed to be there on time, and there was never any good discussion of why he wasn't. Certainly criticism, anger, was not tolerated when directed at either of my parents. My mother, especially, was vicious in this sense.
Also, I went to a private Christian school where they beat children right in the classroom. The 2nd grade teacher, his name was Mr. DeWoody, was proud of this fact. I heard him break a paddle on a child in a little area between classrooms when I was in the first grade, heard the boy screaming, then watched Mr. DeWoody come into my room and tell my teacher, a rather elderly woman, smiling how it happened, how he swung the paddle and it broke. She was also smiling. We were threatened more than once with that man. A child from our class may have been sent to him in hysterics once or twice; I don't recall. But I do remember, vividly, Mrs. Deal, my teacher, holding the only black boy in our class over her knee and beating him with the paddle. Not one or two swats, but a whole series of vicious whacks as he wailed and the tears fell off his face. Over a chair. Right in front of my class. At a Christian school. Praise the fucking lord.
Those teachers were both gone the next year I believe. I know Mr. DeWoody was gone; much to my intense relief, my second grade teacher, who taught in the same room he had taught in, was a nice woman, generally kind, young and newly married. Later that school year she did take the outrageous step of swatting a few of the most popular boys in their underwear; she made them pull down their pants before she spanked them. I don't know what they did to deserve this. I remember hearing the story, going to find them and they were playing catch with a baseball, seemingly not much effected, but embarrassed. But she was never a DeWoody.
One final thing about DeWoody, though. I believe he had just come back from the Nam. This was 1971 after all. I do know that one day he guest taught in my Sunday school class (our little charismatic church was on the same grounds as the school) and his lesson for the day, I remember this disinctly, was how an M-16 uploads a round and fires automatically. He drew the rifle on the board. Told us how to aim one, how to handle the upkick from the bullet bouncing up out of the clip. At the time I may have actually thought this was cool, though my fear of him must have been very real. Looking back, I am astonished he was left alone with children. He used to turn his eyelids backwards, I haven't seen anyone do that in years but I still hate it, and walk up and down the line of kids outside his room talking with a fake german accent as if he were a nazi.
The fear of throwing up stayed with me a long time, especially the first day of school or when I moved to a new school. I had some hard times going into junior high I'll have to get to another time, but because I was afraid of being beat up I didn't go to the public school my friends were going to (I was young, for one thing, having skipped fifth grade against my initial objections). It's sad, really, because I was a good student in grade school and the honors people at the public junior high already wanted me in their classes; the track that might have taken me into a very different life, though perhaps not a better one. Regardless, I ended up at a Christian school, and my horror of that first day, with my mother walking me around the campus unable to relax or comfort me, horrified herself I think, the dep gel she had plastered my hair with though this was long out of style...the fact that she fed me breakfast and I ate it when I knew even then it was not a good idea. I remember staring at a spider in the assembly that morning before we went to our home rooms, staring at that spider who was certainly unaware of my own misery, and feeling as dark as I have ever felt.
That first morning, in my home room, I did throw up. It hit me, it kept hitting me, by the time I raised my hand the vomit was already coming out my mouth and onto my hand. I made it into the hallway, got some into a trashcan, then into the safety of an empty boys' bathroom.
And once I vomited, how calm, how much better I felt; the fear was gone! Almost like the feeling after crying. The terror exorcised. But I had to go back to that classroom. Kids teased me, though not viciously. I was so distressed I left the school, left my stuff in my locker and got my parents to transfer me to another Christian school that started a week or two later. I think I threw up that first morning too though I had the sense to skip breakfast, but I got out of the assembly (in the bethany sanctuary, for those of you who know) and took my little seventh grade (should have been sixth grade) self into the bathroom before I let it out. That fear, the fear of throwing up in public, became a large part of the agoraphobia, my fear of going into public places, for years. Finally, as I said before I think, I realized about tenth grade that if I had to throw up I could just go and do it. And I had a pastor, someone who became famous for a while in the Christian recovery scene years later, who after trying to literally exorcise demons out of me actually had a good talk with me, did some cognitive therapy. He asked me what I was afraid would happen if someone threw up in public, and I said I felt people would laugh, think I was stupid; he said he believed most people would feel sorry for the person, want to help. That made sense. Those two things worked in tandem, and since then that particular fear has not been debilitating. I no longer get that feeling, or only very faint echoes once every few years on a very big day. And I tell myself, go ahead, go someplace and puke if you want to, and I'm okay.
OCD is a devious, insidious master. It is a loud and boisterous and relentless madness in the mind of an otherwise sane individual. This series on Mr. Doom will have to have many parts, some very unsettling to write and difficult to read. I said once, years ago, to a pastor trying to help me that 'I walk in places in my mind I should not walk.' That is not true now as it was then; I've made significant progress. But my plan is to take these posts into those places, to relieve those hours which felt like years, which then, tragically, became years. It's healing for me to do it. Maybe it will help someone else. Maybe, as a good friend once said about himself, I just need to articulate my life in language.
One truly final thing about the vomit reaction (which felt like such unbearable weakness at the time; I judged myself so severely for having this problem) is that many of us with ocd are afraid of committing some insane, uncontrolled, or dangerous act. I have to wonder...was there some link to all that and to the fear of vomiting? Surely vomiting was some way of trying to handle my terror, perhaps one which went all the way back to the hospital, when my grandmother would feed me custard and then I'd throw it up all over the sheets and according to her piss off the nurses who then had to change them. Throwing up, probably, was a way to release the anxiety, and to cry for help, as ocd is also a way to manage anxiety and underlying feelings. Unfortunately, ocd develops a strength of its own, a proprietary circuitry right in the brain. Thank God, thank God, thank God, I've come as far as I have; I intend to go farther still. There really is hope, and I've done it without being on psychotropic meds of any kind for many years.
These posts will head down darker paths yet, but hope, I've found, is more real than the dark.
Comments
In some ways, these posts feel self-indulgent, but putting everything in narrative form is helping me make connections.
thanks again for all the love,
t