anxiety

Reading time: 7 minutes

Confessions of a Control Freak is a memoir blog series exploring the impact of Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, its origins, and the rocky path to recovery. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of all featured individuals. Subscribe to receive all future posts. More about OCPD here.

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I

Less than a week after my return from China, emaciated and stricken with the flu, I launched myself headlong into my latest bid at reinvention.

This involved a flight to Melbourne, a city completely unfamiliar to me, to check out a college where I was considering, of all things, studying microbiology. 

Sure, the subject had zero connection to my previous interest in filmmaking. But now that I was back on home soil, my chances of making it as a director statistically speaking weren’t all that good.

The Australian film industry had been aptly compared to weaving one’s own baskets or churning one’s own butter. That is, the work that was available was scant and could not be relied upon with any certainty.

Success as a filmmaker I know was also heavily dependent upon networking. Given my history of delivering knee-jerk critiques and treating others as afterthought-to-ambitions, I knew this was an activity in which I was unlikely to succeed.

The decision to pursue microbiology might be, as I would later concede, premature, but it had followed a significant period of flailing. If I was adrift, a new course of study was the closest thing I had to anchor. 

My previous lack of success abroad had sobered me. Commitment to one’s passion alone would not ever be enough to guarantee success, and while I didn’t want to sacrifice my creative pursuits, I also didn’t want to languish in the unemployment line. 

The prodigal son had returned, but now the only thing paramount was securing a stable source of income. I was not willing to be financially dependent upon others—least of all my parents.

Yet after a day of dragging my flu-racked body across Melbourne, from college campus to a rental inspection, to a ratty hotel room, I realized I had no choice but to face the music. 

Over a six-month period, I had relocated not once, but twice to Germany and then to China. All that time, I had been furiously pursuing my definition of security.

It had meant staying in the saddle of anxious planning long past the point of exhaustion. But what kept me in it was the fear that my ego might be bucked.

If I were thrown from this saddle, I feared I would suffer a fall from which there would be no recovery.

I was staving off emotions that—once swept under the rug—had formed a precarious pile, upsetting the psychic furniture I’d used for concealment.

Not only had this left me physically and mentally depleted, but it had also come with the realization that I had a problem for which I would not find a name—not at least for another decade.

But until then, it would continue to hold reign over my life, my health, my relationships, and my sanity.

And while my workaholic willpower had driven me to strike out into places unknown, to defy failure and pursue new outcomes, right now, will alone wasn’t going to cut it.

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II

Microbiology was mothballed, and my original dreams reframed. 

What had drawn me to filmmaking had been the opportunity to tell stories. Maybe if I found work as a journalist, I reasoned, I would be able to scratch this itch, while also finding ready employment. 

This conviction soon sent me back to school, and the following year, I enrolled in a master’s degree in journalism.

But when this failed to improve my job prospects, I soon found myself floundering once again. 

My pursuit of certainty led me next to a career in academia, and the next year I returned to school a third time to complete a master’s in—of all things—studies in religion.

Having found a supervisor sympathetic to my storytelling interests, I set to work writing a thesis on Joseph Campbell’s monomyth narrative pattern. 

Between a busy full-time job working in a newsroom and taking weekend filmmaking classes, this proved quite the undertaking.

Not to be outdone, I immediately started planning my next degree: this time a certificate program at one of Australia’s foremost filmmaking schools.

To my delight, my application was accepted, and I passed the six-month program with flying colors, before opting to transition into a full year-long diploma program.

By the end of three years, I had completed four programs. Quite the achievement in most people’s books; but for me, this was only proof of my capacity to do still more.

I hadn’t even completed the diploma program when I started developing one short film assignment into a feature documentary.

And no sooner had the contract for a new journalism job been inked did I also begin writing a fantasy novel, one of many unpublished manuscripts I had been working on from the age of 12 onward.

I was trapped in a vicious cycle of achievement, and with every goal kicked, every bar met, the demands I placed upon myself only grew.

Did I ever pause to celebrate my accomplishments? Whoop and air punch in satisfaction at a job well done? Treat myself to a meal, a night out on the town? Nope, never, not a chance.

It was as if I were standing in some hall of mirrors, staring at reflections of some unattainable dream, stretching away into infinity.

Spending my wages exclusively on my work seemed only natural. If efforts alone weren’t winning me acclaim or shoring up financial security, then it followed that I would have to expend my money in pursuit of these goals as well.

To this end, I took no vacations. When I did plan a trip to first Turkey, and then India, it was with the express purpose of conducting research for my writing projects. 

Rather than dedicating savings toward buying my first car, I used my income to bankroll my feature documentary. 

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III

When I walked, it was with my body slanted forward. This perfectly described my psychological stance: I was discontent with the present and always leaning towards some improved future.

Attaining this future required that every thought, dollar, and second of time be sacrificed at the altar of hoped-for success.

After Germany and China, failure was forever in the rearview, a constant reminder and existential threat.

No attention was to be spared to any accolades, as minor as they were. Though my film received a national broadcast, it wasn’t as if I had made any money from it.

And though my employer had agreed to transfer me to the Los Angeles bureau, I hadn’t yet been feted by the Hollywood press. 

My film complete, my book snubbed by every agent I submitted it to, I moved swiftly onto my next obsession: screenwriting.

To this end, I subscribed to film and TV trade publications and began devouring award-winning screenplays, how-to books, and podcasts. 

Next, I attended every class and seminar I could afford, while submitting entries to every major screenwriting fellowship and program.

Somehow convincing my employer to transition me to a part-time role, I dedicated all the days in between shifts furiously writing and rewriting. 

But under the harsh light of perfectionism, my work was forever found wanting.

If I was harsh on myself, I was equally so with fellow aspiring screenwriters. Attending screenwriting classes, I would appoint myself a kind of self-made authority, dispensing vinegar in place of honey. 

While intended to improve, my feedback more often than not decimated.

“Reading this, I’m not sure who the audience is exactly,” I’d say, opting for brutal realism in favor of gentle encouragement.

“I feel like this character is just pure wish fulfillment.”

“This right here? It’s what you call ‘throat-clearing’ dialogue. You should probably cut this entire section.”

Some met my critiques with obligatory nods. And a few would simply respond with a look that seemed to say: “Who are you–one of the Seven Princes of Hell?” 

To which I would respond with a look of my own, saying: “A bloodless dispenser of facts.” 

Blaming this poor reception on a general lack of dedication on my classmate’s part, I tried my hand at leading a writer’s group.

Almost without fail, however, each member would fail to turn in pages before our meetings. 

While I wouldn’t quite call myself a stickler, I always pressed them for a reason. Death in the family or no, there was going to be no free passes—not on my watch.

The few times drafts were at last submitted, it wasn’t long before they were wilting under the scorching heat lamp of my analysis.

Many, I gathered, had submitted pages expecting unabashed praise. When they didn’t receive it, they withdrew from the group, citing a change in availability. 

But as dense as I could often be, I knew their real reason. Namely, me.

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IV

For fifteen years, I was dogged by the belief that if I stopped, some catastrophic bugbear that had long haunted my imagination would eat me alive.

So far, he’d managed to only take a few nips, here and there, during the depressive slumps that usually followed the completion of a project.

I found it almost impossible to suspend workaholism. Even in social settings, I was usually set to the “intense” setting, like a concert venue speaker dialed to max. 

Niceties I found abhorrent, preferring instead to make a judgmental comment or a tacit criticism. 

Which wasn’t to say I didn’t try to conceal my dysfunction; only that sooner or later I would find myself tearing open the tightly-buttoned coat of my psyche like some shameless streaker.

In my own understanding, I was—ultimately—a person of good intentions, and that was all that should have mattered, and not the fact it so often paved the way to hell.

There was a certain peace to be found nevertheless in resignation. No one else would ever truly understand me, and that was okay.

Others might see me as a chronic complainer, an uptight mope, a savager of egos. But in my view, I was a raging furnace of passion that converted every obstacle to fuel. 

My philosophy might have easily been summarized by the Fiona Apple lyrics: “Be kind to me, or treat me mean / I’ll make the most of it, I’m an extraordinary machine”.

Social rejection, career disappointment, unfulfilled dreams—these were burdens under which anyone else might buckle and strain. Me, on the other hand—I’d simply metabolized. 

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V

Year after year, I had donned my rubber boots and sloshed out to the paddies of fortune to sow my seeds. 

And what, ultimately, did I reap, you ask? What harvest did all this assiduousness yield? 

Over the course of twenty years, I produced one feature film, 36 short films, and 19 screenplays. 

Nine novels, 14 short stories, and 70 poems with a cumulative word count well past the million mark. Nine songs and eight podcast episodes.

On top of this, I had completed multiple degrees, masterclasses, teleseminars, and internships, while still managing to hold down several full-time jobs.

To others, these were accomplishments. But to me, it seemed that all along I had been jogging in place. 

Only afterward was I able to recognize that this “place” was actually a treadmill of achievement.

On and on I had run—roughshod over others, treating them, at best, as stepping stones, at worst, as hurdles on the path to a success I would never see or savor. 

Running from the past towards an ill-defined future, I had banked on some finish line marking the beginning of deliverance. But deliverance from what, exactly?

What, I wondered, would it take for me to feel satisfied? A ticker-tape parade? A televised acceptance speech? A million dollars? 

When would “enough” truly be enough?

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Confessions of a Control Freak continues with Part 7: “A broken hand-me-down”.

Reading time: 8 minutes

Confessions of a Control Freak is a memoir blog series exploring the impact of Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, its origins, and the rocky path to recovery. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of all featured individuals. Subscribe to receive all future posts. More about OCPD here.

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I

“Drink it,” my mother growled.

I peered down at the dirty contents of her mop bucket. It was filled with water the color of ash, the surface broken by dust bunnies, tangles of hair, and dead flies.

“No,” I said, fighting the urge to gag. “No way.”

“Drink it,” my mom hissed, teeth bared.

After refusing to perform my Sunday chores by the appointed hour, mom had decided—independent of any discussion with me—to do the task herself. 

Knowing her, this should have been expected. Mom forever seemed to run on some uncommunicated, extremely rigorous, and often internal schedule.

When I’d found her swabbing the floor, pushing the mop with the kind of force one might use to push an enemy over a cliff, I’d pleaded with her to stop.

For a while, mom had ignored me, glaring into a middle distance. Only when she’d completed a full circuit of the house did she call me back, to deliver her sadistic “drink it” command. 

This memory was fiercely disputed by my mother years later. 

“No, Essy,” she said, shaking her head. “I would never have done that. You must have imagined it.”

Yet how was it that I could recall so sharply the little details, such as the baring of her teeth and the dead flies?

Upon reflection, what resonated with me most about this memory was not so much the details, as the emotional truth that it spoke to: that my mom was, in some fundamental way, hostile.

As for denial—well, that was only just proof of her tendency to dismiss unflattering facts out of hand.

For my sister and I, “drink it” became a phrase we regularly bandied about, as much out of defiance as for the sheer hilarity of it. 

It was our way of gently parodying the authoritarian mold our mother had often confined herself to.

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II

Eventually, however, I too began to question the veracity of this incident.

This led to a grudging admission that perhaps what I recalled had in fact been a dream.

“You bastard,” my mom murmured. “All this time you had me questioning, ‘Did I really do that?’”  

“I tortured myself over it,” she groused, “making me think what a terrible parent I had been.”

My own mother calling my heredity into doubt aside, it was clear that the “drink it” affair had caused her no small measure of self-doubt.

“Look,” I began, “if it’s any consolation, I didn’t go out of my way to make the story up. I genuinely believed it happened.”

As to whether my mother ever accepted my apology, I was never certain.

But if the matter taught me anything, it was that memory was malleable…and therefore dangerous.

While the “drink it” incident may never have actually occurred, the emotional narrative underlying this memory struck me as fundamentally true. My mind had thus been all too willing to re-categorize dream memory as lived memory.

“Drink it” had not been an outright invention, but rather a psychic extrapolation upon a recurring dynamic; a dynamic that had once pushed my relationship with my mother to the brink.

Suspicious as I had grown of my powers of recall, I continued over the coming years to drag more memories from the abandoned rubble of my past.

Throughout the process, I recruited my mother as a kind of touchstone who at various times challenged, corrected, supplemented, and reinforced.

While I questioned her own reliability as a narrator, I continued to actively solicit her feedback. The result, more often than not, was two very different accounts of the same event.

My conclusion was that no one—not even infallible old me—was invulnerable to the phenomenon known as memory bias. 

All minds were capable of coloring, distorting, and even altering our recollection entirely.

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III

Nowhere was this more evident than in my perceptions of my childhood, which often skewed negative.

To some, it might have been described as idyllic, unfolding amidst the pristine beaches, sugar cane fields, fruit tree plantations, rainforests, and coral reefs of tropical Far North Queensland. 

To me, it suffered the follies of many small Australian towns: xenophobia, homophobia, ableism, and the like. 

As a biracial gay kid with undiagnosed autism, growing up wasn’t exactly easy, especially given my parents were migrants without the support network of an extended family or financial means.

One of my earliest memories involved a visit to my parent’s failing business: a sandwich bar in the neglected corner of a plaza.

In this memory, my four-year-old self, my brother, and my father arrived to find our mother standing at the counter, a tense expression on her face, with no customers in sight. 

My father asked how business had been that day, and my mother responded that she hadn’t seen a single customer the entire day. 

When my brother and I asked to take a soft drink from the fridge, my father’s standard response was: “We can’t afford it.” 

Still, my mom—ever the more indulgent of the two—would only wave his opposition away.

What I had known even then, to allusions often made in low voices, was that my parents were in a financial hole.

Not long later, they sold the sandwich bar at a significant loss. Yet long after it was gone, a splinter of what it had come to represent remained lodged in my mind. 

To my child self, the business had come to represent a pervasive fear: that my family stood upon a precipice from which we might, at any time, be swept. 

This fear I was certain wasn’t exclusive to me. I saw it now and then, in my parent’s furrowed brows, and their mutterings about bankruptcy.

I saw it also in the absence of smiles, their disinterest in playtime, and the gradual retreat into a hardened carapace. 

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IV

The selectivity of memory is such that one often settles for a tidy version of events; one that often occludes exceptions.

When I reflected on the past, for a while I only seemed to recall the most poignant of times. For me, these were when I wept and was not acknowledged.

Notes, with which one could weave a theme, and the theme I eventually settled upon for my childhood was a confusing mix of absenteeism and disciplinarianism.

In our home, disagreeing with one parent’s account of something, or committing a body function as harmless as a burp, could earn you a slap to the face.

My parents’ aversion to the latter became a source of great amusement to me and my brother. 

Every so often, we would utter the forbidden words: “pee”, “poo”, “bum”, “fart”, and “wee-wee” and await our parent’s predictably angry reactions.

Loathe as we were to the paddling and spoonfuls of Tabasco sauce, uttering these so-called swear words aloud was sure to trigger laughter. 

Though their punishments would leave us in tears, these tears would always be followed by uncontrollable giggles.

Suffice to say, my parents’ strictness struck me as not only unfathomable but unjust. We were children. It was in our nature to make mischief and to test boundaries. 

With every blow, I felt a breaking of a sacrosanct contract to cherish and protect.

“We’re doing this for your own good,” our parents would tell us. To me, however, they seemed more interested in exacting their anger.

Mom and dad were evidently of the old school of parenting, in which complete obedience was expected and children were often treated as chattel. 

Family discussions are never dialogues. Dialogues were the kind of thing best left for those “new age” parents; parents who were to be held in the utmost contempt.

Yet still, I wondered: how could my parents tell me that they loved me, even as they inflicted blinding pain? It seemed like a contradiction in terms.

It was only years later that I would recognize that this hardened carapace that had constricted my parents was not simply a product of circumstance.

Rather, it was a broken hand-me-down; evidence of a chain connecting my folks to their own, and to their folks before them. 

It was one I, in time, would inherit…and make my own.

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V

By my mom’s accounts, I was a fussy baby who refused to be suckled and hated to be touched. 

It seemed that when she later recounted these facts, it was to apportion blame to my infant self. I saw in it guilt so heavy that the only way my mom knew to get out from under was to shift the focus.

What neither of us knew, not until much later, was that these behaviors were not the result of mere temperament, but the product of an oversensitized autistic mind.

Fear and overwhelm pervaded much of my daily life. When, for example, it came time for my vaccines, I screamed and struggled. When my mother strapped a ventilator mask to my face during asthma attacks, hysterics would inevitably ensue.

To hear my mother tell it, I was also a fussy eater. But in actual fact, I was physically revolted by the sight of even a single lamb bone or a kidney bean in a bowl of stew. 

After my six-year-old self discovered the true source of meat, I embraced a highly selective form of vegetarianism, in which I might eat one vegetable but not another, on the grounds it looked “disgusting”.

When I suddenly decided at the supermarket deli counter that the chicken roll I had once avidly consumed I could eat no longer, my exasperated mother advised me that it was not actually processed meat after all.

Pressed a short while later, however, my mother revealed her deception in her refusal to meet my gaze. 

This was, in part, understandable. Food to my mother was the primary means of communicating her love. 

As such, she felt justified in removing a boundary that might otherwise hamper that communication.

A few months later, she insisted I try eating a piece of veal schnitzel. One glimpse at the brown meat however was enough to leave me nauseous.

Solemnly, I advised my mom that if she forced me to eat it, I would be ill. Sure enough, 10 minutes after taking my first few bites, I threw up.

At the time, I read these events as betrayals of trust. Even in the act of physical nourishment, I experienced the conviction that I was—and never would be—safe in the world.

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VI

In my teenage years, our household collapsed. It wasn’t one thing that did it, but rather the cumulative burden of many hardships.

Key contributors were my brother’s spiral into theft, violence, and drug use, and my guitarist and composer father’s withdrawal into depression.

This withdrawal was as much from his family, as it was into the cocoon of his craft—and followed a devastating job loss.

When I tried to talk to my father during one of his extended music practice sessions, his response would be to act as if simply wasn’t there.

If I persisted with my efforts, I might receive an irritable shake of the head. The gesture could be interpreted as “no” to any question posed or request made. But in reality, it was a statement: “Go away. Don’t bother me.”

Other times, I might receive a direct verbal dismissal: “I don’t know”, “Figure it out”, or “You two can sort it out amongst yourselves”.

Your brother assaulted you? Serves you right. Your brother destroyed your CD player? Not my problem.

My mother suffered her own kind of withdrawal. When I ran to her, complaining about how my brother had disappeared my pet parrot, she only turned away.

Forced to shoulder both full-time employment and various domestic duties, mom spent most of her days in a strange combination of a brood and ceaseless motion.

If there was anything she could be counted upon, it was that she would always be manning her post in the kitchen, preparing some meal or another, often for hours at a time.

Mom’s bustling could have been explained as a matter of necessity; there were always clothes to wash, a dishwasher to unpack, or a dog to feed.

Upon later reflection, I understood that it had in actual fact been her way of managing anxiety.

This bustling had a quality of compulsion to it, as did the expectations that one must follow her rules and meet all expectations to a tee.

Fail to toe one of my mom’s many invisible lines and you could find yourself in her bad books for weeks at a time. This was the rigid code by which she lived, and in turn, expected others to live.

As it turned out, the “drink it” incident—or rather, some less extreme variation of it—had actually occurred.

On several occasions, I had accidentally failed to meet a deadline for the completion of a household chore.

Usually, I’d argue with my mother to stand down, but no amount of words could convince her to surrender the vacuum or mom.

Ever the proud martyr, she would refuse to abandon the scaffold long after a pardon. 

She was in many ways incapable of slipping her head out of the hangman’s noose. For this was a position for which she wholeheartedly believed herself destined.

Which was exactly the same belief I would find myself harboring, decades later.

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Confessions of a Control Freak continues with Part 8: “A cycle of workaholism”.

Reading time: 8 minutes

Confessions of a Control Freak is a memoir blog series exploring the impact of Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, its origins, and the rocky path to recovery. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of all featured individuals. Subscribe to receive all future posts. More about OCPD here.

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I

Misattuned as I felt my mother had been to my emotional needs, I was perhaps equally wounded by my father’s growing distance.

When I was a child, however, my father and I shared precious moments in which our two worlds briefly aligned.

At bedtime, he would recite tales of Brer Rabbit, sing us lullabies, and caress our backs until we fell asleep.

Aged six, he would welcome me onto his lap. From this perch, I would read aloud the complicated Latin names of my favorite dinosaurs, my dad patiently helping me sound out the phonetics.

As a teenager, he became a loyal reader of all my derivative takes on fantasy fiction and even paid for me to attend writing classes.

Sprinkled throughout these years were spontaneous displays of generosity, such as the random purchase of a violin when I was 14, in honor of my fleeting interest in Celtic music. 

Given my dad was a music teacher, this seemed like the perfect bonding opportunity for the two of us. But 10 minutes into explaining basic fingerwork, he wandered off to attend to one of his compositions. 

Though I might be his biological child, it was my father’s creative progeny that required special attention most. 

Beg for his help though I might, it was clear by my dad’s glazed look that it was a wasted effort.

In all fairness to my father, his music was a ticket out of inner torment; a torment I suspect only later deepened by the perception he might have neglected his family.

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II

In my teen years, I came to regard my father as a boarder with whom I had been forced to lodge and my mother as a reluctant landlord.

Her chief concerns, it seemed, were custodial: ensuring her three kids were clothed, fed, and housed.

And yet when it came to talking to us, her manner could best be described as irritable and remote.

Her ability to disguise these feelings when interacting with other people, however, was remarkable.

Let’s say she was mid-confrontation with me or one of my siblings when the phone rang. Within an instant, she would go from barking at us to courting friends and distant relatives with a charm she seemed to hold in reserve for everyone else.

Should we interrupt by asking a question or requesting her intercession in a conflict, my mother’s beaming face would transform into a sheer rock face.

“I’m on the phone,” she would eventually snap, holding the receiver to her chest. “Be quiet!”

Our existence having apparently been forgotten, she would resume her call, feigning laughter at something the other person had just said. 

Mom’s ability to shift gears so seamlessly was quite the performance feat, yet I took it simply as evidence of her untrustworthiness.

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III

For someone who was so keenly interested in the big picture, mom never resisted the urge to zero in on granular details.

All of our clothes had to be ironed before we were presented in public. Every meal was to be made from scratch, with only the freshest ingredients. 

On the matter of nutrition, mom was generally adamant, refusing to let us enjoy the heavily processed treats other kids my age were buying on their lunch breaks—soft drinks, sausage rolls, and cream buns.

Sweets were a very boom-and-bust type of situation in our household. The booms were usually dictated by the hospitality of a houseguest.

My aunty might appear with a box of Whitman’s Sampler Assorted Chocolates, and the next day or so it would be gone, devoured by me and my voracious siblings.

And there were other deviations, such as the time my mother treated us to chocolate croissants, cream-stuffed eclairs, Danish butter cookies, and almond fingers. 

One time, while driving past a cheesecake shop, I mused aloud to myself how much I would just love to have a slice.

Upon hearing this, my mother turned the car around, led me to the shop counter, and helped me pick out an entire cake. Once we were in the car, I stared down at the open cake box on my lap with all the greed of a half-starved urchin looking at his first meal in days.

Two concerns were foremost in my mind. The first was that upon seeing the cake, the rest of the family would most certainly want a portion. 

But this was an opportunity that would likely never repeat itself, and so I was reluctant to divvy up my unexpected prize. 

The second concern was how I was possibly going to cram the entirety of the cake into my stomach in a single sitting.

“Have another one,” my mother said, once I had finished my first piece.

“I feel so guilty,” I groaned, licking mango-flavored glaze from my fingers.

“If you want more, have it,” my mother said.

Feeling quite the glutton, I snuck a glance at my mother, half-expecting to see a look of disapproval. But instead, there was no expression at all, save for the ghost of a smile.

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IV

The factor that perhaps left me feeling most unsafe in our household, however, was the hypercritical atmosphere.

My parents might have usually spared us the lash, yet they were quick to condemn anyone or anything who failed to meet their standards. 

We might be listening to a woman on the radio confess to eating dirt while pregnant, only for mom to snort about how much of an “idiot” she was.

At the mention of sexual intercourse on a TV program, my father would mutter angrily about “fornication” and change the channel. 

That which was deemed to be a threat often merited a full-force response. Mention a hostile comment made by a school teacher, and my mother would swing right onto the warpath, vowing to “fix” the individual in question.

This ambient judgment often took the form of no response at all. One time, I dared to play them a demo of a music track I had recorded with a local community group. 

I forced them to sit through three minutes of my nasal crooning, awaiting the praise I believed should follow, but they said nothing. Their silence spoke louder than any outright criticism might have otherwise.

waited expectantly for the obligatory praise I believed should follow, but they said nothing. And their silence really spoke louder than any outright criticism might have otherwise.

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V

Encouragement, it seemed, was about as exotic to my parents as pepper was to the early Romans; a rare commodity, to be utilized in extremely small quantities.

While I came to accept “straight-talking realist” as the family motto, I often felt crushed under the weight of things left unvoiced.

This feeling of never quite being able to measure up would eventually set the adversarial tone of our relationship. 

As teens, my sister and I learned to watch for when my parents donned their defensive carapaces during our many conflicts.

When those carapaces yielded spines, we would respond by breaking out in mocking imitation, imitation we had learned from them.

Exaggerated though these impersonations might be, they had the desired effect of silencing my parents or freezing the joints of their lumbering authority.

They called us scornful and disrespectful, but what no one seemed to realize was that this scorn and disrespect were rooted in untold agonies. 

As children, we had turned to our parents in search of comfort and reassurance, and time and time again, we had found them to be fresh out. 

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VI

My brother’s rule-breaking ways may in part have been a reaction to this, a kind of one-child rebellion against a perceived abandonment.

Try as my parents did to overcompensate after his many apparent cries for attention—for example, by excusing the disappearance of money, the breaking of glass, the bruising of faces—nothing seemed to work.

In the absence of their protection, I took to hiding in my room, avoiding shared spaces for fear of a violent attack.

Even after my brother moved out, the tension that descended upon our home did not lift.

If my parents ruminated already about financial woes or lack of career success, they found new gristle for the mill by worrying endlessly about what end my wayward brother might meet.

Their preoccupation with his fate drained what little stores of patience and tolerance they had left, until at last, they ceased in my mind to be my parents, becoming instead mere functionaries.

Their only role now was twofold: administering the basic necessities of life, and putting me right if I ever strayed from the (very) straight and narrow.

It was only a matter of course, therefore, that I also don the carapace that would become my own personal iron maiden.

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VII

Personality disorders, as it turns out, are as much a product of nature as they are nurture. 

The development of my obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) thus was likely the result of an existing genetic predisposition and the perceived lack in my childhood environment.

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed similarities between my behavior and my own. While my mother would never seek an OCPD diagnosis, the traits of this condition I believe were present from the earliest.

Mom was, for example, an avowed perfectionist who managed to carve out a successful career for herself as a chef. 

From humble beginnings flipping hotcakes at a cafe and making traditional Iranian stews and jeweled rice at home, to running her own successful fusion-style restaurant, my mother had a kind of culinary Midas touch. 

Once she turned her hand to recreating a range of cuisines, few would remain outside of her wheelhouse.

From my childhood onward, I was spoiled with a variety of dishes: multi-layered birthday cakes, stir-fried noodles, tandoori curry, and chicken fajitas.

My mother’s successes however were as much a matter of talent as dedication. Much of her time was spent poring over cookbook after cookbook, recipe testing, and attending community college.

But the obsessiveness she brought to her work when taken to the extreme, as it so often was, had other consequences.

Long hours, little pay, abusive and exploitative bosses—there was no challenge, it seemed, which my mother was willing to rise to in the name of workaholism.

If the special work shoes she had to wear were too small for her feet, she would shove them on the same, until the little toes had become permanently deformed from the near-constant pressure.

If the cost of mom’s grueling work was that she returned home exhausted, stressed out, and manic, it was one she would happily endure. 

The solution to such feelings, as it turned on, was to take on more work.

While downtime may have been a luxury my strung-out mom didn’t believe she could afford, her entrapment inside an anxious cycle of workaholism was, as I would later realize, self-perpetuated.

Mom had chased this career not simply because it provided a sense of mastery, however fleeting. 

She chased it because the only antidote she could imagine for her perennial anxiety was by pursuing new challenges. 

---

VIII

The extent to which this pattern was hereditary would not become apparent until later when my mom told me of the hardships her Iranian mother—my grandmother—had undergone.

Married at the age of 14, grandmother had been shipped off to live with a man 10 years her senior.

Iran had been wracked by famine at the close of World War II, and grandmother’s only choice had been to leave her newborn infant at home with the in-laws while she stood in a food line for days.

The single loaf of bread she received for her efforts was littered with the droppings of cockroaches and was by no means enough to sustain the family.

Just a few weeks later, after largely subsisting on sugar water from a sponge, her son died of malnourishment. 

The profound suffering that followed would leave an indelible mark upon my grandmother’s household—and the psyches of her surviving children.

The mark was most visible in the way my mother held herself, as one in a constant state of tension. She lived as one awaiting catastrophe.

I saw the mark also in how she kept the fridge and pantry stocked to the brim, as if in anticipation of food shortages.

This was a habit I would find myself adopting in time, justifying my purchases by mentions of discounts or convenience, never quite understanding that the legacy had begun well before my time.

---

Confessions of a Control Freak continues with Part 9: “A lantern of hope”.

Reading time: 7 minutes

Confessions of a Control Freak is a memoir blog series exploring the impact of Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, its origins, and the rocky path to recovery. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of all featured individuals. Subscribe to receive all future posts. More about OCPD here.

---

I

My mother’s status as a domestic warrior was well-earned. When confronted, she always knew how to stand her ground, and was willing enough to go to war—if the situation called for it.

For how else was she to keep our always endangered, and now-fragmenting family together?

And so she fought, punching up when necessary, combating a seemingly hostile universe.

At age six, a traffic cop issued my mom a ticket after my brother was found not to be wearing his seatbelt. 

This affront was meant with aggression, my mother muttering her defiance at the officer.

The issue at hand wasn’t that she was responsible for the actions of my rule-breaking brother. It was that this so-and-so had dared to correct her, and so doing, pierced her shell.

My mother’s force of will, the finality of her conviction, and her calm command in other situations had a magnetizing effect, forever drawing others towards her. 

As her son, her presence could inspire at various times admiration, awe, embarrassment, and resentment.

The immaculate appearance she demanded of us when it came time for family photos, led me more towards the latter. 

In these situations, our hair was always combed and parted just so, our shirts tucked in, and our shorts practically hitched up to our armpits. 

Never mind that this presentation was forced and uncomfortable, and would almost certainly result in some form of childish defiance: pouting or pulling silly faces.

As a teenager, my mother would comment on the size of some new zit, then descend on the offending whitehead with her nails.

Choosing to receive this as some form of devotion, I would stand there, braving the painful sting. Only later would I realize I could have just as easily told her “no”.

My mother might justify impositions as acts of love, but perhaps what I wanted most was an acknowledgment that my feelings were not immaterial; that any request for help merited more than a glance or an outright dismissal.

---

II

During one visit to the dollar store, I bent to sniff a bath bomb—an ill-fated decision that resulted in a fit of sneezing. 

Such was the violence of these sneezes that I ended up throwing out my back. 

“Ow, ow, ow,” I cried when even the simplest movements sent pain arcing through me. 

Complain though I might to my mother, she only continued with her browsing. 

Having failed to extract a response, I hobbled out of the store to sit on a bench.

Three days of excruciating pain later, I had been contorted into the shape of a hunchback. 

The surfeit of visual evidence meant my plight was no longer deniable, and so my mother made an appointment with a chiropractor.

Until then, however, she seemed taken by the conviction that perhaps I had been exaggerating my affliction, in some undeserved bid for sympathy. 

That I was, to use the term so often bandied about in our household, a “hypochondriac”.

Another time—in what was to be our first and last family cruise together—I came down with a mysterious illness.

For days, I lay in a cot, drifting in and out of sleep, weak, exhausted, my gut wracked by agonizing spasms. 

“Something’s wrong,” I remember telling my mom. “My body’s not even processing food anymore.”

“You just have a stomach virus,” my mother told me. “It’ll pass.” 

“Please take me to see the ship doctor,” I begged. 

Similar symptoms had plagued me from puberty onwards, so my arguing for treatment was, by now, an old battle for recognition.

“No,” went my mother’s response. “The doctor charges $100 for a consultation. Besides, all he will do is take an aspirin. It’s a waste of money.”

Justified as she might have been in questioning the quality of the on-board medical services, the result was three days of potentially avoidable suffering.

It would be more than a decade before I arrived at a diagnosis of Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and learned of the existence of antispasmodic medications. 

But until then, other fits of related illness would—for lack of any other explanation—receive similar treatment.

---

III

Six months later, while reaching across our kitchen’s island counter to hand me a bowl, my mother accidentally smashed it into the edge.

The movement carried the broken-edged shards directly into my hand, cutting open my left index finger. 

For a moment, all I could do was stare in shock at the open flag of skin, the blood that welled and ran down my hand.

“Mum, I need to go to the doctor’s,” I said.

“Don’t be silly,” she said, dabbing a blob of Johnson’s Baby Cream on the open wound and binding it with sticking plasters. “It’s not that bad.”

But even as we watched, the plasters darkened, the blood soaking through. 

“Please take me to the doctor’s,” I repeated. 

“Go yourself,” she said, walking away. “I’m not paying for you.”

Determined to hold her to account, I continued to nag and guilt-trip my mother, knowing that forcing her to spring for the doctor’s fee was the only concession I’d ever get.

Yet each time she would deny me, insisting the wound would close on its own. It did not. 

A week later, the deadlock was broken. After showing the unhealed wound to a houseguest, my mother dropped me at the doctor’s office. 

I sat on an examination table as the doctor studied the flap of dead skin and the raw tissue beneath.

When I explained to her my mother’s promise that the wound would close, he scoffed.

“It was never going to heal,” he said. “And even if it did, it would have healed properly. You would have had a deformed finger.”

And with that, he raised a scalpel and severed the flap.

That my mother would be willing to deny the extent of the injury now beggars belief. It also contrasted sharply with her terror when my 11-year-old self was attacked by a neighborhood dog. 

Back then, there had been no war of words between us; no refusal to admit harm, no aversion to being proven wrong. 

Rather, my mom had immediately flown into action, driving full-speed to a medical clinic and carrying me to the reception, shouting for a doctor.

So why now the refusal to admit that I had been injured? Why the denial?

Eventually, I came to see that denial was one of many defenses mom employed. 

If my mother was a battle-ax, admitting error only dulled her edge. 

And yet where this stubbornness brought success in other avenues of her life, it ultimately drove a wedge between us.

---

IV

While my peers spent their weekends partying and binge drinking, I spent most days locked up in my room studying. 

These efforts would ultimately lead to outstanding academic success. And yet storm clouds seemed to forever hover over my mother. 

Had she looked closely enough, she might have taken pride in the fact I had gradually become a carbon copy of her perfectionist workaholic self.

Not that, at that age, I saw any problem with this. Rather, I had chosen to cast my behavior as a valiant attempt at overcoming the relentless bullying I’d suffered at the hands of my brother and peers. 

Fear also had fuelled my efforts. I remained as conscious as ever that my family stood on the precipice, after learning our private school had agreed to partially waive fees on the grounds of financial need.

There was also the realization that so long as I remained under my parent’s roof, I would be denied a modicum of emotional safety.

Withdrawing into my studies served as a lantern of hope in the deepening darkness. A solid work ethic offered a clear path forward, out of my misery.

If I was industrious, if I kept busy, I would one day enjoy success, and with it the vindication of my shame-riddled self-esteem.

For experiences had led me to believe that all that had gone awry in my life was a direct result of my own actions. 

In the back of my mind, I entertained the belief that I was a bad person entirely deserving of the lot I had been given.

---

V

For my last two years of high school, I walked a tightrope of constant study and near-total social isolation. When I strayed from it, I was punished.

Having caught my brother caught dealing weed from our house, my parents kicked him out for good, and so their anxieties found a new focus in me.

Once, following a fight with my sister, my mother refused to hear my side of the story, declaring me the sole wrongdoer. 

For two weeks, she refused to speak to me, until at last, I snapped.

“You’re emotionally blackmailing me,” I said.

It was a term I’d heard on Oprah, a term that seemed to explain my feelings of injustice about the situation.

My mother barked scathing laughter.

“Oh, you think you know everything now, don’t you?” she said.

This response by now was rote. Trying to explain my feelings often resulted in them being argued, as in a court of law.

“If that’s how you choose to feel…” my parents would say as if emotions could only ever be a matter of choice. 

After one such confrontation, I declared I was moving out and demanded my mother sign a social welfare form stating I was financially independent of her.

Mom’s response was flat-out refusal. When I promised to follow through with my plans, she threatened to call the police to assist in keeping me at home, if necessary.

According to her, I wasn’t ready for independence. The fact I had “wasted” savings from my part-time job on an Xbox game system was only evidence of this. 

My mother was still trying desperately to hold the family together, even as it came apart. To her, letting me go would only spend its end.

---

VI

If ours had become a household largely devoid of affection, it was no surprise I began looking for it elsewhere.

Using a phone text chat service, I struck up a relationship with an older man in New Zealand. 

A few kind words, an interest in my emotional wellbeing, a promise that all would be well—these were the morsels for which I had been desperately searching, on my hands and knees no less. And now, it seemed, I had found them.

Always one for honesty, I told my parents that I planned to meet this charming stranger, and they immediately swooped in to stop me.

Evidently, I was not well in the head. Firstly, I was at risk of being taken advantage of by a man more than 10 years my senior.

Secondly, my homosexual inclinations were evidence of a hormonal imbalance that would need to be treated by a professional. 

In my parent’s view, I was a drunken motorist skidding toward a fatal conclusion. In my view, they were a mounting weight under which I had begun to suffocate.

If they were indeed trying to protect me, as they claimed to be, why then had they allowed my volatile brother back into the house time and time again? 

It no longer mattered to me that they were fulfilling their parental mandate—had ensured that bills were paid, clothes were washed and school lunches prepared.

None of it could compensate for their blatant disinterest in my emotional wellbeing. And so I fled.

---

Confessions of a Control Freak continues with Part 10: “A tug-of-war”.

Reading time: 5 minutes

Confessions of a Control Freak is a memoir blog series exploring the impact of Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, its origins, and the rocky path to recovery. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of all featured individuals. Subscribe to receive all future posts. More about OCPD here.

---

I

Long after I moved out of my parent’s home, the methods of survival I’d developed endured.

The drive to find safety and self-worth in rules, rigidity, and productivity only intensified with each passing year, becoming like a sea wall against an ever-hungry tide of uncertainty.

When others condemned my neurotic behavior, assailing the castle of my mind, I retreated into the inner sanctum of solitude.

Sure, I might have independence now, but my freedom was not total.

Though I might have removed my parent’s critical voices, I had somehow internalized them in the form of a malignant bully who forever questioned, undercut, and gloated. 

“I told you so, I told you so,” he would shrill, the instant misfortune struck.

Everyday decisions seemed fraught with the possibility of crushing failure, and by extension, annihilation. 

If I overspent, I wouldn’t be able to pay bills or everyday expenses. If I couldn’t pay bills, I would end up homeless and destitute.

And so I ran, on and on, towards what I didn’t know, and away from a terrible secret. Something had happened to me, to my family, something for which I didn’t yet have a name.

My flight left me oscillating between depressive collapse and anxious over-functioning. 

No longer did I live in the present. Rather, my head was now forever lodged in a catastrophic future, while my body was reduced to a mere vehicle for never-ending prevention work. 

Pursuing my zillionth degree or writing the latest novel, I would later realize, was less a question of passion than sandbagging doors and taping window panes against the approaching floods.

Every effort towards which I devoted myself must therefore be in the service of financial security and the semblance of safety.

Yet so long as I continued to go through life in a crouch, burdened with grief I did not understand, that safety would remain elusive. 

Part of the challenge was the inaccessibility of that grief, like a dangerous blade kept behind lock and key; a blade whose mere prick could poison and corrupt.

But that grief could never be completely contained, leaking out instead in the form of strange beliefs: that one day I might completely lose control, go mad, or die having ever been truly understood.

To experience this grief in its totality, therefore, brought the risk of mental obliteration; my dissolution into a human puddle.

Those few times I did weep, emotions did not flow so much as erupt from the faucet at full blast.

Within seconds, however, that flow would cut off, quite randomly.  Not now, my brain would tell me. Later—always later. 

---

II

All it took to remind me that this legacy of unresolved trauma, as it turned out, was a visit to my parents on college break.

“Go and get a job,” my mother hollered at me once.

The comment came as a response to my showing her a playful, synth-infused pop song I’d spent some hours throwing together.

According to my mother, the lyrics had been found wanting.

“‘You know you’re treading on thin ice/Everybody loves my sugar and spice’,” my mother jeered. “I mean, what kind of crap is that?”

I mean, okay, it wasn’t my finest work. But come on—I was 19! And how many 19-year-olds are winning songwriting awards? 

Old unresolved hurts had been tapped, and my anger surged. Despite having lived out of home for two years now, my mother’s disapproval still carried all the weight it had when I was six.

Yet the same tactics my mother had deployed against me could just as easily turn upon her. So now when slapped, I had begun slapping back.

The first blow from my hand had come in the form of a silent departure when I was 17. Packing my bags, I had left, offering neither of my parents a farewell hug nor a kiss. 

“Think you have control over me?” was my intended message. “Well, think again.” 

If my folks refused to give me the satisfaction of a reaction, there was gratification alone to be found in the act of slapping in and of itself.

Still, no matter how strong a stance I took, boundaries continued to be encroached upon, and resentment fanned anew.

Upon discovering I had asked the hairdresser for a mini mohawk, my mother’s critique was immediate. 

“What were you thinking?” went the demand.

Prompted by a round of unprovoked needling one time when I was helping my mom in her restaurant, I snapped.

“You’ve already lost one son,” I spat. “Do you want to lose the other one?”

Not, admittedly, my finest moment, but I was desperate. Nothing, it seemed, was getting through to my mom. 

---

III

Again and again, we would revert to the old pattern.

During one two-week visit, mom—apparently resenting my freeloading off her hospitality—told me to “get a job”.

At the time, I was on college break, but that didn’t exactly mean I had been loafing around. In actuality, college break was when my workaholism tended to swing into overdrive.

In this case, it meant I was now spending my waking hours juggling multiple creative projects.

Yet my mother’s comments had had their apparently intended effect. My self-confidence thus demolished, I spent the next few days steeping myself in her scorn. 

No matter how hard I worked, nothing it seemed would ever be “enough” for my mom. 

One morning she found me sitting on the front steps of their house, weeping. 

“You know Essy, you don’t seem to be enjoying your stay here,” she declared. “There’s no point staying here if you’re going to be miserable.”

“I’m miserable because you say and do mean things to me,” I said.

“If you want, you can leave early,” my mother continued. “I’ll pay for you to change your flight.”

But this callousness in the guise of care only made me cry more. 

My mother’s subsequent withdrawal without acknowledging my words felt like a thousand prior abandonments, and overcome, I donned some boots and went marching off into a nearby thicket. 

For an hour, I sat on a log, wrestling with my despair, until my mother—evidently worried by my absence—began calling and texting, trying to entice me home. 

Her calls and texts however went ignored, and when I finally did return, I noticed immediately a softening of her tone. 

The batch of freshly baked cookies on the counter wasn’t exactly an admission of guilt, but it seemed to suggest some contrition on her part.

---

IV

The more I learned to divorce myself from parental expectations—to discern my own internal voice from the one I’d inherited—the less content I became with our status quo.

Soon my visits precipitated some form of clash; a collision of views, a savage tug-of-war.

“Essy, when you use the microwave, can you please make sure you clear the timer?” my mother once said.

“Why?” I demanded.

“Because displaying numbers will wear out the LCD screen,” she said. I rolled my eyes.

“LCD…” I muttered. “More like OCD.”

“I am not OCD.”

“Son,” my father began intervening, “don’t argue with your mother. Just do as she says.”

“Even if it’s incorrect?” I replied.

Petty? Sure. But this conflict wasn’t simply about a microwave LCD display. It was about me refuting my mother’s desire for control.

Yes: I wanted the embrace of a family—but only so long as it was on equitable terms.

And for equity to exist, there would need to be some recognition. Healing couldn’t occur until we had first dragged everything we’d left shut out in the dark was dragged back into the light.

The times I did try to broach what had gone down in our household, however, the conversation was quickly shut down. 

“We did the best we knew how,” went the refrain.

“We put a roof over your head. You never went hungry.” “There’s no point in bringing any of this up. It’s in the past now.” “We’ve already put this behind us. Why can’t you let this go?”

Discussion of individual wrongs during family gatherings was usually enough to incite return fire, resulting in a kind of battle royale, as each member reclaimed old, familiar positions and dug in.

Breaking the pattern, I realized, was not going to be easy. And the only way I could truly begin the process was by looking beyond the family unit.

---

Confessions of a Control Freak continues with Part 11: “An eater of poison”.

Reading time: 8 minutes

Confessions of a Control Freak is a memoir blog series exploring the impact of Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, its origins, and the rocky path to recovery. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of all featured individuals. Subscribe to receive all future posts. More about OCPD here.

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I

The decision to undertake kickboxing in my early 20s was as much motivated by the novelty as I was by the chance to channel my anger.

Until this point, all I’d had for outlet was my workaholism—hardly the most healthy outlet. 

Kickboxing promised to take me away from my desk, but also provide me with the opportunity to meet new people.

During weekly group practice sessions, I befriended a man by the name of Miles.

Miles was an event planner who’d recently split with his partner of seven years after making the painful discovery that the other man had been cheating on him with a work colleague.

Following the breakup, Miles had come into a newfound spirituality, an experience that had prompted him to give up his well-paid job to study homeopathy full-time.

To finance the career move, he’d sold his apartment in Potts Point, Sydney, using the proceeds of the sale to acquire a significant collection of crystals, these Miles credited as being central to his recovery.

While I didn’t quite share Miles’ belief in the restorative power of crystals, he struck me as a kind man with a maternal instinct that rivaled even that of my mother. And yet that instinct, just like hers, came with strings attached. 

Upon learning I was suffering from Irritable Bowel Syndrome-type symptoms, Miles went into full mother duck mode, insisting on treating me himself.

This treatment involved holding bottles of various homeopathic concoctions to my thyroid gland. Next, Miles would press the index and middle finger of one hand to the skin, while making rapid air quotes with the fingers of his other hand.

According to Miles, he was measuring “the vibrations”, seeking confirmation that I was deficient in this or that vitamin. 

This formed the basis for his decision to then serve me diluted amounts of each concoction in a glass of water.

Days later, Miles would inquire as to whether I was feeling better, a question prompted less by genuine curiosity than confirmation bias. 

Miles I realized wasn’t so much interested in the truth; to tell him that his medicine had had no appreciable benefit on my health I sensed would have incited hostility. 

And so I learned to keep my responses vague and evasive. 

“Uh, yeah…I think I feel better.”

After months of these treatments, I advised Miles that I didn’t want to continue receiving, whereupon he bridled.

“This stuff is liquid gold,” he said, hoisting one of the amber glass bottles into view. “Clearly you just don’t know how to appreciate quality.”

It was not the first, nor the last, swipe Mike would take at me; a tendency I realized spoke less to my own wrongdoings than a deep bitterness on his part.

“You know Essy, I really hate people,” he confided one time.

“Come again?” was my response.

“I just think they’re all so stupid,” he said. This confused me.

“I thought you changed careers because you wanted to help them.” Miles shrugged.

“I know that doesn’t bode well for my chosen profession. But I can’t help it.”

---

II

Some weeks later, while sharing breakfast with Miles and two of his best friends, I recognized someone I’d seen in a TV documentary.

The documentary was about aspiring directors attending an exclusive film school in New York. 

Excited by the chance to meet what I considered to be a minor filmmaking celebrity, I announced that I was going to go over and say hello…only for Miles to suddenly round on me.

“Just sit the f*** down,” he snapped.

Shame colored my face. For an instant, I was a child again, subject to the stern chastising of my parents.

Stunned that none of Miles’ friends had even come to my defense, I withdrew into myself, saying nothing.

Afterward, we were walking down a narrow alley towards Miles’ car when a hatchback sedan came zooming down the road, almost clipping one of Miles’ friends.

Miles kicked the trunk, causing the driver to stomp on the brakes. 

A bespectacled man climbed out, peering up at what he took to be the source of the assault. Upon seeing no one standing on the balconies above, he turned his attention to us.

“Did you just throw something at my car?”

Relishing the chance to put someone in their place, Miles accused the man of almost hitting his friend. 

Rather than refuting the claim, the man responded by screaming at Miles, who in turn screamed back.

Where before I had felt shame, I now felt secondhand embarrassment—a feeling I suspect was shared by the motorist’s wife, who remained in the car, head bowed. 

Half-afraid Miles might turn on me if I raised either of the incidents, I decided to let them slide.

But a week later, I found myself finally speaking out. We were in Miles’ blue Ford Mustang convertible, en route to my apartment, where he was due to help with moving some boxes to my new home.

This time, it was he who was speeding down a dark alley. A figure appeared in the beam of Miles’ headlights, just a few feet ahead—a man carrying shopping bags.

“Miles, seriously, slow down!” I shouted.

The pedestrian, reacting on instinct, jumped out of the way, narrowly avoiding being struck.

“You realize you’re doing exactly what that other driver did, right?” I asked.

Miles didn’t reply, though I could tell by his expression I had hit a nerve. 

When we arrived at my new home, I invited Miles in and immediately busied myself with unpacking a box of kitchenware he’d just donated.

I was still unpacking the box when I felt Miles’ hot glare fall upon me.

“You know it’s really rude not to offer your guests drinks,” he said.

“You’re more than welcome to help yourself,” I replied absently, indicating the fridge. 

As we’d been hanging out for months, I’d hoped such formalities were no longer necessary. Miles stiffened.

“You should really be offering me something,” he insisted.

From the very first time Miles had sniped at me, a feeling had begun germinating: indignation.

Several times now, he had overstepped personal boundaries, attempting to browbeat me into compliance. The dynamic was not all that different from the one shared by me and my mother.

But if that relationship had taught me anything, it was that backing down was almost always tantamount to defeat. 

Turning to Miles, I fixed him with my stare.

“Stop bullying me.” 

Miles’ angry response was as sudden and fierce as a flash fire.

“After everything I’ve done for you…” Miles seethed. 

“Miles,” I began, “stop…bullying…me.”

“You need to think long and hard about how much of a good friend I’ve been to you,” he spat. “Such ingratitude.”

Thus confronted, Miles turned then and swept out of my apartment.

The two of us had become like two abutting mountains for whom compromise was categorically impossible.

No surprise then that Miles and I never spoke to one another ever again.

---

III

In hindsight, I can now recognize the forcefulness with which I responded to Miles, and how that only served to escalate the situation.

It’s possible that I could have negotiated my boundaries with Miles more tactfully. Yet for someone who had struggled so long to find his voice, that moment felt like a true triumph.

Not merely because I had stood up for myself, but because it involved recognizing—and breaking—a pattern.

Miles as it turned out was one of several maternal or paternal figures to whom I became attached after moving out of my folks’ home.

What I had desired from their presence was the certainty of familiarity. Yet having fled the old, I’d settled for more of the same under the guise of something new. 

This time, however, I had not waited for things to take their course. Rather, I had resisted, and in so doing, started to become my own person.

Even so, the situation had revealed to me startling parallels between Miles’ behavior and my own. 

When in the heights of my workaholism and perfectionism, I too could be rigid and bossy; had tried to exert control over others.

---

IV

My growing self-awareness about these challenges began with a song I wrote during a brief music-making phase. 

“Bow your head, my friend, this path is best taken,” the lyrics ran. “These hammers flatten, these whetstones sharpen / Like a manufactured object, we come out no weapon / But a tool—a tool of self-salvation.”

This song, titled “Lord of Industry”, was penned in tribute to my own version of the Protestant work ethic. 

It was more or less a rationale for my worshiping at the altar of workaholism; a recognition of productivity as a healthy coping mechanism.

Like the peacock in an anecdote often told in mindfulness circles, I was a creature with a singular appetite for cobras. An eater-of-poison, capable of drawing nourishment from the most unlikely of sources.

This ability enabled me to transform the toxic into the beautiful: to yield the iridescent tail feathers for which my kind was so renowned.

“Lord of Industry” was therefore an attempt to persuade myself of the immaculacy of this philosophy—one that tended increasingly towards atemporal claustrophobia.

If time was a currency, I seemed to be forever running short. Every hour of the day was now earmarked for work. Yet how else could I have otherwise met the daily quotas I’d declared necessary to reviving my deflating self-worth?

For peak performance to be possible, full control of myself, my circumstances, and others I believed was entirely necessary.

This need for control was often viewed by others as a kind of megalomania. And for someone who already believed themselves fundamentally misunderstood, their accusations only served to deepen this conviction.

Knowing that those around me could not be relied upon for acceptance, I turned ever more towards the twin refuges of workaholism and perfectionism, substituting pain for defiance. 

In the words of the protagonist of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Prometheus Unbound: “Pain is my element as hate is thine. Ye rend me now: I care not.”

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V

Yet I soon began to question: just how much of my ritualized behavior was a strength, and how much of it was thinly disguised self-flagellation? 

From whence came this compulsion to forever measure my worth by my output?

And: by forever working, managing and perfecting, was I learning to accommodate the many ambiguities of life, or merely dodging them?

With each passing year, the sun only dipped further towards the horizon, lengthening the loneliness that followed me like a shadow.

That shadow had appeared following the erosion of my family: a development I increasingly seemed unable to recall.

Trauma, I would discover, had slammed shut the doors of memory, fragmenting the coherent narrative of the past into a million shards.

All my attempts to piece that narrative back together had only served to wound me, drawing blood. 

In order to survive, I had learned to compartmentalize, splitting off a part of myself. 

This alienated part of my identity was like a neurotic homunculus; a representation of all the injuries unacknowledged, the emotions suppressed; the severed childhood no longer accessible to me.

If the homunculus was a testament, then I was a tomb-keeper, sealing him away in the depths of my psyche. 

He now sat in an interior driver’s seat, turning wheels and pulling levers, operating largely unobstructed and unchallenged.

The result was the complex of behaviors and compulsions I would later call Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. 

All the fear and rage I’d denied my child from feeling had gone unvented. The absence of an eruption had led me to believe that I was fine.

But all that internal pressure still sought release, forcing its way to the surface, oozing and hardening into blackened fields of frustration and cynicism.

While physically I had matured, emotionally I remained stuck, blind to the resulting attrition of my mental health.

For me to reverse this decline, something would first need to shake me back to full wakefulness. Turned out that something was a car crash.

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Confessions of a Control Freak continues with Part 12: “A secondary gain”.

Reading time: 6 minutes

Confessions of a Control Freak is a memoir blog series exploring the impact of Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, its origins, and the rocky path to recovery. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of all featured individuals. Subscribe to receive all future posts. More about OCPD here.

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I

Two years after moving to Los Angeles, I found myself racing as ever from one contrived priority to another.

My latest ambition was to break into TV screenwriting, and to this end, I had started taking classes at UCLA. 

My tendency to try to squeeze every drop of productivity out of my day usually meant I labored away at my laptop right up until the very last minute. 

As getting to class already involved crossing the city, this usually meant a mad dash through peak hour traffic.

One night, however, I found myself stuck in near gridlock conditions.

At my departure, Google Maps had advised me I would be arriving 10 minutes early, but now the app was estimating I would be arriving 20 minutes late.

One of my greatest pet peeves was tardy people, closely followed by those who failed to follow rules. Now it looked like I was going to become both the former and latter.

My gut clutched at this realization. Just what would the others think of me, when this former paragon of timely attendance snuck into class 10 minutes after roll call? 

More to the point, what would I think? Arriving even a few minutes late meant breaking one of my own cardinal rules.

To become like many of my peers, washing in often 15 minutes or more after class had started, just wouldn’t do. 

But the only thing in my power to do at this point was to ensure I didn’t add insult to injury, by eating my dinner during class.

It was a habit I saw many class members indulging, in flagrant violation of the reminder on the whiteboard reminding attendees that food wasn’t permitted in the room. 

So intent was I myself on upholding this rule that I had taken to eating my own meals on the way to class instead.

Stuck as I was in traffic, I figured now was as good a time as any to eat. Transferring the microwaved Pyrex container resting on the front passenger seat to my lap, I cracked the moisture-beaded lid. 

With my eyes on the road and one hand on the steering wheel, I began shoveling spiral spaghetti into my mouth.

The lights changed, and I eased my foot off the brake, allowing the car to roll a hundred of feet or so to the next set of lights.

As I drew close to the next car up in our line, I eased my foot onto the brake to slow my progress. 

But rather than stopping, I felt the car continue to crawl forward until my bumper love-tapped the fender of the car in front of me.

It was the slightest of contacts, but enough to send a small shock through my chair.

Cursing, I put the Pyrex container on the floor and climbed out to inspect the damage. At first glance, all I could see was a single dark streak on the other car’s bumper.

A man in nurse’s scrubs emerged from the other car, scanning the bumper before eventually pointing out a peppercorn-sized hole.

It was nothing really, but I apologized all the same and provided the fellow with my insurance details.

But by the following day, Scrubs had lawyered up and was demanding that I detail the limits of my insurance. 

Figuring there was nothing to be gained by withholding this information, I complied. Then to my astonishment, my insurer informed me that the driver was claiming not only damages but injury to both himself and his passenger.

When pressed, my insurer advised that neither had any evidence to show for it, beyond a general doctor’s note claiming “soft tissue damage”—a condition I was almost certain neither of them had.

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II

By this point, wouldn’t have been surprised if Scrubs had claimed injury to his elderly parents twenty miles away. 

Considering I’d scarcely made contact with the other car, the whole business reeked of good ol’ fashion fraud.

Yet rather than challenging the claim, my insurance company ultimately capitulated, issuing a payout in excess of $10,000. This had the effect of causing my premiums to practically triple overnight.

Of course, this whole incident might have been avoided had I not been in a rush in the first place. 

Sure, I could have left home earlier. And I could have also set aside time beforehand to eat, rather than wolfing down my meal when I was supposed to be minding the road.

Then there was the fact that just a few months earlier, a mechanic had warned me that my brake pads were overdue for a change.

Having just splashed out on the UCLA screenwriting course, however, I hadn’t had the money to spare.

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III

At the root of this incident was anxiety, a wellspring that drew its waters from a bedrock of alienated emotions.

Growing up, I had often felt like there wasn’t a space in which I could express my feelings and have them validated. So over time, I had learned to swallow them. 

This had left me emotionally crippled; an automaton functioning at partial capacity, subject to the inflexible routines with which I had programmed myself.

My life was governed less by my heart than by pure intellect, and as a result, it was a life void of true wisdom.

As much as I would reassure myself that my responses were rational and my plans error-proof, they lacked true insight and often landed me in just the kinds of difficult situations that I now found myself in.

Planning to leave at the last minute had been in the name of maximizing productivity. Yet it had also meant ignoring my own bodily needs and subjecting myself to undue stress.

Spending all the spare money I had on advancing my screenwriting skills had made sense strategically. It had contributed to the failure of my brake pads. 

When I considered what this had cost me—hundreds in premiums, along with a month of fearful anticipation as I awaited the verdict from my insurance provider—it became apparent that maybe my calculus was askew.

Always trying to “maximize” values, bartering for the best, and fighting for the most optimal outcome, had only been possible so long as I lived under constant austerity measures.

In my imagination, these austerities were guarding me against difficulties, disappointments, and failures. And yet more often than not, they ended up being a leading cause of these experiences. 

If it had not been entirely clear to me before, it was more than apparent now: unless I challenged my OCPD, I would continue to go through life with one hand tied behind my back. 

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IV

Letting go of my obsessive-compulsive ways however was no easy task, largely because I was still benefiting from it.

These were the marginal benefits that come with any addiction: the kind of gratification one gets from scratching a persistent itch.

And if work was my drug, I was most certainly an addict. When my access to work was threatened, I fretted. And when it was cut off, I became jittery.

Yet for all the misery it had caused me, I had kept my mouth practically glued to the drip-feed supply. 

My reasons for sticking with it can be explained by a simple principle addiction scholars refer to as “secondary gains”. 

During the hardest, unhappiest times of my life, my OCPD served as an invaluable crutch. But what started as a crutch had eventually morphed into an iron lung, from which escape now seemed impossible.

By pursuing a life as a hyperproductive overachiever, I had been able to lay my hold, if only briefly, upon the mantle of success and perceived superiority.

Knocking out goals, working my way through priority lists, and being thrifty—these things not only felt good, but they also kept the deeper fears at bay.

But so long as I was sprinting, I could not savor. So long as I was warring for control, I was unable to find peace of mind. 

When in the grips of OCPD the world was rendered exclusively through black and white; a chiaroscuro through which I marched with both my ears stopped and my eyes closed.

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V

Part of what had delayed any exploratory work around the OCPD effort was the threat it posed to the illusion of invulnerability. 

Namely, the belief that my logic was faultless, and that I could therefore never be wrong.

It was an illusion others struggled to pierce, but one in which I contradictorily failed me when I needed it most.

After working on a project for months, if not years, the pendulum would begin to swing from head-held-high to flatlining pride.

My physical and mental health depleted, I would find myself overtaken by illness, spells of suicidal ideation, and bingeing behaviors.

When my therapist had first suggested a diagnosis of OCPD, I hadn’t been ready to hear her. 

But a full year later, after the crash, I found my attitude changed. No longer was I willing to live alternatively as a pointed finger and clenched fist.

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Confessions of a Control Freak continues with Part 13: “A maker of good habits”.

Reading time: 7 minutes

Confessions of a Control Freak is a memoir blog series exploring the impact of Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, its origins, and the rocky path to recovery. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of all featured individuals. Subscribe to receive all future posts. More about OCPD here.

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I

“What about this?” my mother asked, reaching into a shopping bag and producing a beige long-sleeved V-neck.

The shirt was one of many bargain bin purchases my mother regularly made. 

“I’m not sure it’s really my style,” I said, unfolding the garment and holding it out for inspection.

“You can just wear it around the house then,” my mom said.

I caught the pleading note in her voice and felt a pang of inexplicable sadness. 

“Okay, fine,” I said. “Thank you.”

Eying the shirt, I realized though that I was now obliged to hang it in my closet as if in preparation for later use, though I knew right now that this would never come to be. 

But throwing out, donating, or regifting the shirt just felt wrong. I knew if my mother were to ever find out, my mom would view it as an act of rejection.

My mother’s gift was just one of the countless others she made to my adult self over fifteen years. 

Like her gourmet dinners at home or the frozen meals she sent in the mail in an overnight postage bag, these were her way of expressing her enduring devotion.

The food was always gratefully received, but the clothes? These almost always had been discounted for a reason. Either they were unfashionable or had an unconventional cut. In many cases, they were at least two sizes too big for me.

When I tried to explain to my mother why I was refusing the gift, she would often try to suggest some other use for them. 

And wanting not to hurt her feelings, I would defer.

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II

The frugality that motivated my mother’s purchases spoke to a fear that she had harbored much of her life.

And it was only in my 30s that I learned the source of the fear. Mom had grown up in a household marred by constant financial anxiety and marital tension. 

With time and trust, I was able to coax from my mom brief accounts of her disappointment and anger towards my grandparents.

What was clear to me was that when she spoke of not ever feeling truly understood, what she meant was that there had been a deficit of attunement between parent and child.

But try as I did to connect the dots for my mom between past griefs and present neurosis, time and time again, I would run up against a wall of resistance.

Decades of carrying this story had led to resignation. Revisiting mom’s relationship with her own parents did not, according to my mother, did not equal revelation. 

Instead, she received my discussions about the dynamic between herself and her own parents as an extended criticism of her own parenting.

To my mom, I was a relentless excavator of grievances. My dredging of the murky waters of our past could only be motivated by one desire: to find evidence of her own failings. 

To me, I was merely trying to understand the geological forces that had sundered us from each other.

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III

Generations of families are linked by a causal chain of genetics, behavioral patterns, and shared circumstances.

My Iranian grandmother had survived famine, and her response had been to hunker down in anticipation of catastrophes still to come.

To prevent impoverishment and starvation, she had scrimped, saved, and stored food in bulk.

Yet in living in readiness for a worst-case scenario future, she’d never been able to truly enjoy the present.

In one example of this related to me by mom, my grandmother had insisted her husband buy two washing machines as future wedding gifts for her daughters.

These had remained in their boxes, untouched, for years, and after moving abroad to Australia neither of her daughters had been able to benefit from them.

The most astonishing part of the story was the fact my grandmother had complained bitterly when her husband hadn’t then purchased a third washing machine for their own use.

Looking upon my mother’s only fully stocked walk-in pantry, the second freezer, and garage shelves with their numerous cans, containers, and jars of dry and preserved food, it was hard not to see some similarities.

But mom’s amassing of supplies didn’t end there. Walking into my mother’s dining room, I would discover she had amassed a sizable collection of home and kitchenware.

Trips to the store often resulted in my mother returning with various discounted items: multiple cutlery and tea sets, an assortment of towels and tea towels, and entire collections of kitchenware.

What I saw as mindless hoarding, however, had merely been a survival instinct to which I too had found myself succumbing.

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IV

Where my mother collected objects, I curated to-do lists.

These lists represented an inability to take satisfaction in my existing accomplishments or to find solace in the status quo.

There was always, it seemed, one more short film to edit, novel or blog post to write, or topic to research.

Never one to rest on my laurels, I made sure to fill any free time I had leftover with still more activities oriented toward personal and professional self-improvement, such as consuming podcasts, books, and courses.

When I considered the considerable volume of these to-do lists—and there were many—I eventually had to acknowledge that I could not have possibly completed all of them within my lifetime. And yet despite this knowledge, the lists continued to grow. 

By amassing tasks, I was ensuring I always had something to do, thereby sustaining a state of anxious preoccupation. 

The act of collecting in itself was an attempt to reassure myself I had taken every necessary step possible to ensure my future success. 

That success, I believed, would help avert the old feared descent into poverty and obscurity that surely awaited.

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IV

Some months after making the connection between my mother’s fears and my own, I decided it was time I broached the matter during one of our weekly phone conversations.

I did this, of course, with all the delicacy becoming of a human bulldozer.

“Do you think maybe you might be hoarding?” I asked.

“I am not hoarding,” my mother replied. “I’m keeping these things for you kids, for whenever you have homes of your own.”

The logic was there, and yet it was not impeccable. The increasingly cluttered dining room by this point had more than enough goods to furnish several homes.

Not that either my siblings or I were anywhere close to buying a home.

Entering into my third decade, I had few savings, no spouse, and no semblance of stability. 

Over the past few years, I had moved homes and changed careers with an almost clockwork regularity.

The prospect of me ever owning anything more than a spare change of underpants was, at this point, laughable.

Of course, in justifying her scrupulous collecting for the future, what my mother did not realize was that this was an inheritance from her own mother.

Yet the crisis that had given that habit birth was more than a half-century old. It was no little more than a ritual, designed to preempt and appease the unpredictable whims of fate. 

When, at last, my mother gave in to my appeals and started donating her excess items to charity, I knew I no longer had any excuse.

My time to figuratively clear the house had at last come.

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V

Many of my OCPD traits could—in moderation—be considered advantageous.

Being a goal-getter who is great at managing time and money is, in most people’s estimation, an invaluable quality. 

Taken to excess, these qualities become detrimental. Saving for the future devolves into miserliness, self-discipline teeters towards self-deprivation, and perfectionism corrodes one’s sanity.

Often underpinning OCPD behaviors is a superb ability to delay gratification—a skill that without a doubt is key to the success of human endeavors. 

Keep at the delaying, however, and you’re to experience a dissatisfied, if not joyless, existence.

And yet these behaviors were so deeply embedded in my psyche, that I could not imagine surrendering them, let alone renouncing my identity as a proud eater-of-poison.

If I could not escape OCPD, maybe the best alternative then was finding a middle ground. 

For this to be possible, I would have to reckon with the entombed homunculi; to unify thoughts with alienated emotions.

For as long as I could remember, I had resisted opening up about my feelings, believing—often with reason—that they would not be received in an atmosphere of warmth and kindness.

But with the help of an affirming therapist, surrendering the shield of rigid protections behind which I’d long hidden was suddenly possible.

No longer did I need to sort everything I experienced according to a good-or-bad dichotomy, or hold myself—and others—to impossibly high standards.

This change was further facilitated by my decision to carve out a meditation practice. Through mindfulness, I learned to observe, rather than be subsumed by, the incessant chattering of the “monkey mind”. 

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VI

Over the course of a few years, I went from not acknowledging my emotions to being present with them.

Rather than viewing them as universally destructive, I began to see their value as a means of catharsis and communication.

Expressions of feeling need not be fraught with shame but regarded instead as an opportunity to forge new understandings of both myself and others.

In moments of distress, I stopped resorting to denial and dissociation, but instead listened to the feelings that arose, and offered myself the self-compassion I’d long lacked.

When my mind and body cried out for rest, I obliged, taking breaks, listening to guided audio meditations, stepping outside for a walk, and setting aside for fun activities and friends. 

Treating self-care as a daily practice rather than a rare and reluctant indulgence allowed me to offer comfort and create serenity where it was otherwise lacking. 

In doing so, I had created a space in which I could become more than just a certainty addict. 

But my path to accepting ambiguity was by no means straight, but rather, a journey of a thousand stumbling steps; of gains made and sometimes lost; of backsliding and self-sabotage.

One day, I might forget to take breaks and miss a meditation session. In the absence of self-care, my anxiety would creep back up, and I would act once more like a man possessed. 

While shaking off the OCPD demon again might take hours, if not days, poise no longer seemed unattainable. 

Obsessions and compulsions might remain, but they were no longer an inextricable part of my personhood.

My OCPD was not so much exorcized, as removed from a position of equal footing.

Thus banished, I could now see him not as a crippling curse, but as the tiny black dot of yin in the white expanse of my yang; the necessary part of a greater good.

Together, he and I had cut our way through the thorny thickets of adversity. Now, with those thickets far behind us, a single ritual remained. 

This ritual involved a speaking of the vital words; words that would formalize our severance: “Thank you, and goodbye.”

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This concludes Confessions of a Control Freak. If you enjoyed this memoir series, please check out my previous series, Anxious Seeks Canine.