On Observing Wires Cross [amanda]

I hate my thoughts but they are what I have. They follow me to the grocery store, to history class, to the mall and to dinner. I know my mind has to be doing something with itself in order for me as a mental and physical person to live, but my thoughts are extra. They are an excess of natural disposition, an unwanted voice in conversation, a groping hand for the light switch in daylight.

An obsessive personality does not struggle with an obsessive-compulsive disorder; their obsession is not compulsive. I don’t wash my hands excessively and don’t mind picking candy up off the floor to plunk on my tongue. I don’t even arrange my M&M’s according to color.

I have often tried to discover the triggers for its mania because my obsessions are picky. Emotion triggers it here and there but only on occasion. Am I chemically imbalanced? Maybe once a month. Ideas come into my head and maybe that is where the obsession lies waiting even while I was a child, about nine or ten. My mother asked me why I set out to memorize all the mailbox numbers within a two-mile radius of our home and I told her it was so that when I grew up, I wouldn’t have to look in a rolodex for the house number of a friend, I’d already know where they lived. As the car whizzed down the road, my mind fired, 1049, 1051, 1053, 1057, 1063, 1065, 1067, 1069, etc., etc., etc. When I got a few years older and drove myself to high school, the obsession deepened into calculations. 1049. 1 plus 4 is 5, 5 plus 4 is 9, 1 plus 9 is 10, and I have room for the 0. If I add 1 to 9, then it’s 10 but if I minus 1 from 9 it’s 8 – which is better, 10 or 8? They’re both even, so if I add 2 to 9 it’s 11 and if I subtract 2 from 9 it’s 7. 11 is higher and 7 is lower, which is better the sky or the ground? I think the sky’s prettier, but if I didn’t have the ground, then what would I be driving on right now? The grass? But the grass is the ground, too. 1051. 1 plus 1 is 2 put that together with 5 and it’s 7 and then the 7’s match.

To this day I don’t like driving. The calculations are on a consistent basis, but I don’t count stairs or bathroom tiles and don’t add digital clock figures. In fact, I hate math altogether and hardly skidded through passing a basic Community College Mathematics class. The obsessions are finicky and entirely unpredictable. A mischievous child racked with boredom. For weeks, months, sometimes years, my mind is at rest until I in horror realize my eyes are stuttering and mind racing for an unintelligible, dead-end solution to a question I did not ask, but asks itself again, again, a thousand times like the stammering repetition of a skipping CD.

A few words or a single phrase from a movie iterates through my head. “Stop. Stop, please, stop.” The words of Scarlett O’Hara played by Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind when she ran outside her aunt’s house in Savannah, Georgia. A Confederate officer is galloping away, and Scarlett runs out and cries, “Stop! Stop, please, stop!” Of course, he stops, but my mind doesn’t, or it can’t, I don’t know which it is. I’ll hear the Southern-accented, high-pitched voice of Ms. Leigh shrieking out in my head as I take a shower, eat breakfast, try to read, go to the store with my brother, as if she’s play-acting on the TV-set in my head. Begins to sound like a musical score – flat, flat sharp flat. I could play my violin to it. Down-bow, down-bow up-bow down-bow. I have tried different methods to exorcise the obsession. Watch the scene, which doesn’t work so I’ll watch the entire movie, which doesn’t work either so I turn to reading a book or calling a friend or bury my head in a pillow, moaning, ‘God, take it away.’ After she has had her fun, her voice vanishes, entirely, ‘yes, we’re leaving you to the Yankees,’ and allows rest for my exhausted and ringing head.

Qualities in obsessive personalities frequently deceive both the onlookers and the personality in question. People praise, ‘you have such determination! I wish I had your passion. What makes you tick?’ For a long time I believed my swollen vanity, ‘It’s my genius, my natural talent for super-human capabilities. I have mastered the art of discipline.’ (Being awarded the senior superlative Biggest Slacker in high school roused me to the realization that my head was actually filled with aimless calculations and fiction characters rather than the War of 1812 or linear equations or necesito ayudar, por favor.) ‘Do you have A.D.H.D.?’ No, I prefer lectures and can sit calmly in a single position for hours. Besides, my personality is too relaxed to be hyper, not at two p.m. or at two a.m.

After a few years, I mused that it could, possibly, be used for a meaningful function. Could I not employ this vice for some sort of purpose? I thought I could, so in middle school, I started writing a fiction story and purposefully chose to keep writing it for nine years until the speedometer of my obsession pushed so hard that the all-terrain wheels starting losing their grip on the road. With red-rimmed eyes, I approached a friend and could hardly raise my head as I confessed, ‘I can’t stop writing the story.’ ‘What do you mean? I haven’t seen you writing a story.’ I was too exhausted to explain further than ‘it’s always in my head.’

Admitting that my mind has a screw loose is humiliating, degrading, lonely. I make fun of nature’s miscreations as much as the next person, but it is a different story when the sweating spotlight turns on me. All of a sudden, what I have tried to hide, what I have sought to stuff down into the pit of forgetfulness climbs out into the fresh, revealing air and inhales the shared oxygen of real living people. They are always surprised to see it. Do I hear voices? Other than Vivien Leigh every now and again, no. Do I see hallucinations? If I did, I probably would not be able to tell, but I don’t think so. My cousin and I tested the theory one afternoon – we were not entirely certain that the other person was real so I pinched his arm and he poked my shoulder and that was enough for us and we walked into the kitchen to share a pint of Perry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream. But I don’t ask the questions anyway, that is my counselor’s job. I have had four. The latest prognosis claimed that my mind is a giant movie-screen, and my wild imagination and editorial disposition finds the appeal too great to pass up and stories of inestimable fascination flash across the silver screen. My obsessions find a massaging satisfaction in watching the characters dance to a beat, sing to a tune, walk, talk, think, feel – anything they want, always in different ways and as many times as my obsession pleases. It is a balm to my frantic mind giving it something to hold on to while I work on my English homework or pray to God. Creating stories sooths the straining elastic tension into a calm, distracted hum.

Making peace with myself takes manipulation. After much trying and failure and tears, I have discovered a few methods to either ignore or redirect the rushing channel into a state of normalcy. With considerable effort I taught myself to snub the passing mailboxes and to slap my hand telling it that the stentorian crush on John or Kevin or Nathan is another useless game for the intellect, another endless challenge for the pride. Chastisement makes me listen to myself and in many ways repent of flailing in a near-intoxicated rout – but without close monitoring, again it picks up its feet and runs wild in frenzied disobedience. Frustration blinds me until I argue with myself for hours ‘Why that? How come? So what?’ and through slow persuasive reasoning, admit that I cannot answer back. The obsession loses its vim. I have worn it out. Then it disappears in unhappy surrender, and sometimes does not return and sometimes later and sometimes in its stubbornness refuses to leave at all. I will not always bow to reason because it needs more convincing, for an obsession is what it chooses to be.

Then comes the vital question, Is it getting worse? I don’t know. No formula I have employed ever manufactured a final reversal to the stubborn flow. Some obsessions I hardly recognize. The cares and duties of years waft them into a state of accepted normalcy. I forget that waking up at 4:30 a.m. from a recitation of Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken is odd or that upon closing my eyes I always see a stop sign at dusk, standing tall at an intersection by my home in upstate New York. But when the situation turns especially desperate, when sleep refuses to visit me because a short story weaves itself word by word in continuum throughout the night, I play music so that my hands will stop shaking or recite a Bible verse to lull my mind back into its metronomic pace. After all, little else gives me power than the virtues God sent to us – music and stories and time. An obsession likes time. Because I suppose deep down in its volatile instability, it wants finding out. I have not found it out. But I pray that I will.

And then, extinguishes.