Am I a Trope to You?

I have a condition that the world, by and large, thinks is a joke. If you've seen As Good As It Gets, you probably had a good laugh at Melvin Udall skipping over cracks on the way to the cafe he goes to every day, to sit in the same spot, to order the same egg-and-bacon breakfast from the same waitress, whose son's medical bills he footed so that she could be there to serve him.

And I have to admit, it is funny. When I read about young David Sedaris having to make sure there were exactly 187 peppercorns in the little ceramic jar in the kitchen before he could sleep, I laughed so hard I had to deep breathe to stop from exploding into unseemly laughter at the library. It's absurd, and it is funny as hell.

Here's the thing: I have OCD. I discovered late in life that there's a reason I count toilet paper squares, and why I sometimes have to double-take to see at what angle the butter knife in the sink intersects the fork. And why I spit out M&M's to see what colors they are if I forget to look before popping them in. Sometimes, I have to close my eyes for exactly 2 seconds or something terrible will happen. What? I have no clue. It's just a feeling.. a mental itch. I can tell you what I had for lunch on April 4th, 2019 because I've religiously logged and taken pictures every day for the last 2 or 3 years. (It was chicken pho, by the way.)

My phone camera is at full capacity from all the "memorable" images like the weirdly-shaped broccoli stem at dinner last night. I couldn't eat it until I snapped a photo.

A couple months ago, I was compelled to go back out to the rain, to the recycling bin at night to check whether a handwritten note was in pen or pencil. And I thought to myself, "this is crazy. This is messed up. This is a fucking joke." I guess the logic behind all of it is the knowledge that if I don't check now, I'll never know. And yet, I don't know why I have to know. So yes, I get why this stuff is such juicy fodder for mainstream media, but it's truly been a pain in the ass to live with--especially when I have to calculate the difference between the minutes on the clock and my phone battery percentage for the 20th time in a day.

Yesterday, I read Jess Sambuco's "The Delicate Art of Counting to Three," which won first place in Vocal's Little Black Book contest. Its protagonist is a fellow with OCD who couldn't accept his $20,000 prize because it wasn't divisible by 3. I don't know if Sambuco suffers from OCD herself; I could kind of give her a pass if she does. I know the premise behind fiction is that it doesn't have to mirror real life, but I guess I just felt some type of way to see another riff on the same old tropes, to the tune of a $20,000 prize. To be sure, there are OCD sufferers who do things in three's. Nikola Tesla famously calculated the cubic root of everything he ate, and was said to circle a block 3 times before entering a building. This is absolutely some people's experience of OCD. But it's a little annoying to know that most of the media out there about mental illness is created or authored by people who don't live with the condition--for instance, Sia's movie Music, (supposedly a love letter to the autistic community), which doesn't even star an autistic actress.

And herein lies the danger. When you don't know what it's like to live with a condition, all you can do is speculate. You're not doing the mental work of connecting the actions/tics and the reason for them, so you go off on what you've seen or heard. And all the stereotypes feed into each other to create more misconceptions. To be clear, I hold no ill will towards Jess Sambuco or anyone else, necessarily. But I must stress the importance of being fully aware that when you don't suffer from a condition like OCD, you can't know what it's like. So when critics or judges say they are "touched" by portrayals of mental illness by abled folk, it can feel a little raw to those of us who do suffer, and not with the endearing or touching version.

Well, that's all I have to say on the matter for now. I'm going to go and finish the rest of these M&M's, counting off the colors as I do so. (And I'm being completely sincere.)