1995 to 2000, York, Pensylvania and New York, New York

By Megan McGee

“The things you do are called obsessions and compulsions,” said the young brunette psychiatrist who’d been asking me questions and showing me multicolored inkblots over the past week.

She told me I had an anxiety disorder called Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I’d heard of this illness, even though it was the mid-90s, before they started making movies and detective shows about it, before it became the most overused psychological buzz term since “schizophrenic.”

It was the one that made people wash their hands until they bled or check the lock on a door over and over. I wasn’t surprised to hear this. During the tests, she’d asked me if I did those things, and I’d guessed that was where it was all leading. I didn’t do either of those things, though (in fact, the thought of anyone doing the former made me physically ill). I didn’t have a phobia of germs or untidiness. The fear that ignited the strange rituals I performed was a fear of Bad Luck.

I had just turned 16 and the Bad Luck I feared included things like failing a test at school or a loved one dying in a car accident. I had developed some unique rituals for warding off this Bad Luck I thought some unseen force was waiting to unleash on me.

Over the past couple of years, my family had noticed me doing strange things, like putting something down, then picking it up and putting it down again. I often repeated my actions because I was afraid I wasn’t thinking the right thoughts when I did them the first time. I would be setting the table and when I put down a fork on a placemat, if I was thinking of something of which I was afraid, I would have to pick up the fork and put it down again.

A ritual I had well into my college years involved praying. Every time I had an optimistic thought about something, I was afraid it would bring on the Bad Luck. If I felt I might have done well on a test in one of my college classes, it would supposedly cause me to get a failing grade. If I thought I was making friends with someone, it would cause the person to hate me. Then I would say a quick prayer to God that the Bad Luck would not come. The prayers went through my mind all day, every day, like pinballs bouncing around in my head. After a while, I got the feeling I was annoying God, and after each prayer I would make sure to apologize to him.

During the spring semester of my sophomore year in college, I was at my obsessive-compulsive peak. I had countless little rituals to ward off Bad Luck. I did all my daily tasks in a certain order. The previous semester, I had gotten a poor grade on a test, and I remembered how the night before I took the test I had put on my pajama top before my pajama pants. Somehow, I drew a connection between these two occurrences and resolved to always put my pajama bottoms on before the top.

I carried the key to my dorm room on a green lanyard and kept it on a shelf over my bed, coiled up in a little pile. Every morning as I was about to leave for class, I would pick it up, put it back down, then pick it up again several times until I was sure it had uncoiled the right way.

As I did this, my roommate Rhiannon was still in bed across the room. One morning as I stood performing my ritual in the semi-darkness, I heard her yawn and say, “What are you—?” She must have figured out there was something not quite right about me by then, because she didn’t finish her question.

My fear of humiliation winning out over my OCD, I quickly grabbed my key and backpack and left the room. As far as I can remember, that was the end of that ritual.

By this time, my rituals were about protecting not only myself from Bad Luck, but the world at large. At some point, I decided it was Bad Luck to look at a clock when it read 13 past the hour. Whenever this happened, my solution was to stare at it until the number 13 changed to 14. I figured I could live with this if it would keep, say, an asteroid from hitting the earth and destroying life as we know it (I’d seen “Armageddon” the previous summer and it was the most disturbing Bruce Willis experience I’d had since “North”).

Soon, however, it became unlucky to look at the clock when it was 13 minutes to the hour, as in 8:47, and the next thing I knew it was dangerous to check the time when the clock read 17 or 43, because those numbers were 13 minutes away from half past the hour.

The compulsion I felt to do this began to recede the afternoon of my last class before finals that semester. My American history professor led us through a review for the exam, which would focus on the Vietnam War. He dismissed us early, and as I hoisted my backpack onto my shoulder I looked at the clock over the dry-erase board to see how long I had before I was to meet my friends for dinner in the cafeteria. It read 4:43. The small classroom was quickly emptying out, but Professor Mulvaney was still seated at the front table, reading. I had to decide if I was willing to stand there and stare at the clock until he asked what I was doing. Then what would I say?

Oh, hell, I thought. This is getting ridiculous. I left without another glance at the clock.

Outside, the late afternoon sun was shining on my bare arms in a way that sometimes made me feel content just to be alive, a rare occurrence in those days. As I walked along the footpath to the student union, however, I was plagued by worry. What if that little defiance caused me to fail my final exam for that class? That would be the perfect punishment, wouldn’t it?

Punishment by whom? I wondered.

At that time in my life, I believed there was absolutely nothing I could be sure of, that being sure could only lead to being wrong, and that being wrong could have tragic results. As I neared the student union, I looked at the entrance to the building and thought that I couldn’t even be sure I would make it there. Something could fall from the sky and crush me. I could have a stroke. I could simply disappear.

It struck me that this was a fear Holden Caulfield had had near the end of The Catcher in the Rye, shortly before ending up in a sanitarium, and that that had been the point where it became clear he was losing his grip on sanity. I told myself if I made it to the building, that would mean the clock fear was unfounded and I would never bother with it again.

I made it.

In my third year of college, I lived in an apartment four blocks off campus. As I walked along the sidewalk through the quiet residential neighborhood each day, I realized I was developing a ritual in which I purposely stepped over the cracks between the slates. I remembered seeing Jack Nicholson’s OCD-afflicted character do this in “As Good As it Gets,” and decided this was way too clichéd. At least up until then I had been original with my OCD.

One warm spring afternoon, I was walking home from class, the Red Hot Chili Peppers song “Otherside” playing in one of the nearby houses, making me feel like my life had a soundtrack. I found myself performing this ritual and said to myself, “The hell with this.” I began stepping on the cracks like it was an act of rebellion, not even caring that the two elderly women sitting on their porch were probably looking on in bewilderment as I passed. The compulsion soon disappeared.

In November 2000, I went to Game 3 of the World Series between the Mets and the Yankees with my father. In the nosebleed section at Shea Stadium, cheering for the Mets, I wondered how my actions and thoughts would affect the outcome of the game. If I was standing when my team scored a run, then I had to stand up each time the Mets were at bat.

During the 8th inning, however, as I stood surrounded by hundreds of cheering fans, something occurred to me. How, I wondered, could one ordinary young woman have the power to cause a Major League baseball team to win or lose a game with her thoughts and meaningless actions? If I could do this, wouldn’t that make me the most powerful person on Earth, like that creepy kid on The Twilight Zone who wished people into the cornfield? More importantly, if I truly believed this, wouldn’t I be trying to harness this power and start working toward world domination?

I did not, however, really believe any of this, and never had. On some level, I had always known it was just a macabre game I’d been forcing myself to play all these years. It had no more substance than the invisible monsters that had made noises in the darkness of my bedroom when I was a child.

I looked at my father, and at all the other people having fun around me. Then I put down the burden of determining the fate of the world and joined them.

When the Mets won that night, I stood along with the rest of the crowd and screamed until my vocal chords were sore. I danced to “Who Let the Dogs Out.” Then, as my father and I got on the subway back to where we’d parked our car, I resolved to make this mean something. From then on, I wouldn’t do anything to avoid Bad Luck. I would have optimistic thoughts and do things out of order. I would be like everyone else.

These days, OCD is all the rage. Several celebrities have gone public about having the disorder since I was first diagnosed. People are fond of saying, “I’m so obsessive-compulsive,” whenever they’re caught doing something quirky. I always feel like saying, “Whatever. I’m the real thing.”

I’m not always so easygoing about having OCD. Every week, I have at least one illogical thought that makes me think if I ever expressed it out loud to anyone, I’d be in a straightjacket the next day. Sometimes I make jokes about how crazy I am just to make the people closest to me uncomfortable. I do this out of anger, and because I figure if I have to feel awkward, there’s no reason they shouldn’t also. I may never be that well-adjusted person who comes to grips with her affliction at the end of the Lifetime movie.

Still, I try not to believe in some unseen force that’s out there, waiting for me to screw up. Now and then I find myself offering a random prayer that no freak accident will befall me or my loved ones. The difference, though, is that now I’m better acquainted with the fact that praying is all I can do, that I can’t prevent misfortune by, say, naming all the Best Actress Oscar nominees from 2001 by the time the water in the tea kettle boils.

I’m still not like everyone else, but then again, I don’t think anyone is.

Megan McGee graduated from Western Connecticut State University. She is currently pursuing a career in the nonprofit sector.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 | Email This Post

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