mental health

Reading time: 8 minutes

Cocktail: The Joykiller.
Description: The perfect cocktail for the aspiring wet blanket.
Ingredients: Four ounces of perfectionism, a dollop of workaholism, a splash of stubbornness. Method: Mix, shake well, strain into a glass of rigid thinking. Serve with a twist of stinginess.

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

Exploring India for most people may sound like a great way to spend a vacation, but for someone with undiagnosed Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD), it was an unmitigated disaster.

Days before my trip, I completed a web series and the first draft of an alternate history fantasy novel—one of several creative projects on a never-ending, self-perpetuating carousel of work.

Having accrued more than a month’s worth of leave, I decided that the best way to spend my time “off”, naturally, would be to start yet another project. 

No, I was not going to be going on an adventure and collecting photos for a post-trip slideshow with family and friends.

Instead, I was going to conduct research for a novel—a sequel to another book I technically hadn’t even finished yet. Talk about getting ahead of myself!

I booked a ten-day guided tour around the arid northern Indian state of Rajasthan, once a patchwork of princely states under the British Raj. 

This I figured was the very least amount of time I would need to document every inch of my surroundings. I couldn’t afford to miss a single thing.

Printing a copy of my novel draft, I packed my camera and boarded my flight. First stop: Mumbai, where I spent a few days visiting a friend, before striking out on my own to New Delhi.

The next ten days passed in a frantic blur. When I wasn’t snapping photos at some site of historical significance, I was ensconced in my hotel room bed, eating from room service trays as I scrawled notes on my already-dog-eared manuscript.

Room service would knock and I would bark a reply. My sheets and towels didn’t need changing, thank you very much. I could manage just fine with the ones I had.

If I had hoped to soak up the ambiance of my surroundings, I found myself too preoccupied to do even that. 

Instead, I found myself staring down, first in confusion, then horror at the metal nozzle projecting on from the toilet seat, not quite ready for the culture shock presaged by a bidet.

When I was outdoors, I distracted myself with a packed schedule. This meant that I was, more or less, constantly moving at a sprint, checking off sightseeing to-do lists in advance of my departure for Rajasthan. 

Relaxing, I told myself, would be a waste of my hard-earned leave time, and a plane ticket to boot. Ever the master of delaying gratification, I told myself I could take a proper vacation later, some other time, but only after I had truly earned it.

---

II

This unwillingness to relax took its toll, however, and by the time the touring car finally arrived to whisk me away to Rajasthan, I was practically manic. 

I may have already conducted a ton of research, and yet I still hadn’t completed the second draft of my novel. 

Then there was the irksome fact I’d had to sacrifice a crucial train trip to several UNESCO World Heritage sites due to last-minute itinerary changes.

Having planned my visit with the goal of literally seeing everything possible, the completionist in me ached with the idea that I might miss a single thing. 

And given my life was already bursting with other commitments, I couldn’t reasonably expect I’d be making a return trip anytime soon. 

For the remainder of the ride to Rajasthan, I sat in the back of the car, earphones in, head bowed, reviewing page after page of my manuscript. 

If I’d hoped to take satisfaction in my progress so far, I instead found the novel to be sorely wanting. The dialogue was clumsy, and the characterizations paper-thin.

Desert vistas crawled past my car window, and crumbling stonework ruins whizzed by, but I didn’t see them. 

My driver slowed the car, pointing out to me grazing antelope. I looked up only long enough to feign wonderment, before resuming striking out text and scribbling corrections.

At the end of each day, I would lock myself in my hotel room and refuse to come out. There was still too much work to be done.

When people dragged their chairs in the restaurant one floor above, generating what sounded like thunder in my room directly below, I complained about the noise to the hotel receptionist. 

Didn’t these people realize I was engaged in serious work, churning the next cross-genre literary masterpiece?

How lucky they must be, these carefree vacationers. They didn’t carry with them multiple internal timepieces that were forever ticking over. They didn’t have to fear ceaseless deadlines.

When one hostel I was staying in notified me that hot water was only available one hour of the day, I barked at the receptionist.

Didn’t he understand I ran on my own schedule? That I had places to be and things to do?

---

III

My anger was proportional only to my dissatisfaction with myself. Forever hovering over me was the dreaded realization that there would need to be many more rewrites before my novel would be fit to show to the world.

And even then, when I finally did, time and distance would reveal to me a dozen blindspots that had gone unseen and undermined all my carefully planned and meticulously researched story sequences.

This was a position I had more or less already arrived at the minute I’d wrapped work on the first draft. 

If there wasn’t a problem, I would be sure to find one. My reasoning? It was better to preempt criticism and get the jump on disappointment than suffer a sucker punch from a stranger.

With each leg of the journey, my tour driver grew increasingly agitated, hunching over the wheel like someone with chronic road rage, intent on mowing down whoever might cross his path.

He stopped offering me free bottles of water and stopped calling my name. I was no longer “Mr. Ehsan”, but someone to be addressed strictly out of necessity—and only then in a clipped voice.

When, finally, I asked him what the matter was, he revealed he had been expecting to receive a daily tip from me. 

In the years of chaperoning foreign vacationers during the height of the tourist season, my driver had apparently never met someone who clung as stingily to my purse strings as I had.

In my defense, however, I had already paid a princely sum to the tour company. 

And then there was the fact that in my home country—Australia—we simply didn’t tip. Never mind my driver was expecting only a nominal amount. Not tipping him was, I told myself, a matter of principle.

Besides, I’d practically spent all the money I had getting here. And let’s remember, this wasn’t a true vacation, but a research trip. 

I wasn’t some privileged Westerner with deep pockets, but a reluctant martyr for my own ambitions.

This approach did not go down very well with one of my tour guides. When I failed to tip him at the end of our two-hour-long walk, he stood over me, glowering. I pretended not to notice. 

As far as I was concerned, he was the one who had breached social norms by expecting payment on top of the fee he’d already received from our tour company.

---

IV

The rest of the trip slipped by like an afternoon dream: majestic hill forts of gold sandstone, soaring pink city walls, a shimmering sprawl of blue buildings at the edge of the Thar desert.

Towards the end, I climbed a hill to a viewpoint frequented by tourists. Local kids had gathered to fly kites or beg politely for pencils.

One of them was singing, accompanied by a wizened man on the harmonium. 

As I watched the sun dip toward the horizon, I was struck by the realization that for all the beauty that surrounded me, I was not moved. I felt in some ways cut off, my feelings trapped behind a rigid, impenetrable shell. 

Since my late teens, all I’d was a steely determination to survive in the face of whatever hardships might be thrown in my path.

The skies turned from gold to amber to umber. The young singer crooned a final, wistful tune. A crack appear in the shell, and suddenly I was crying.

I felt like a jack-o-lantern that had its insides scraped out. Empty, and exhausted.

Then came the profound sense of loneliness—a stalwart companion from earlier days.

---

Rigidity as a survival mechanism

This same loneliness I credited for launching my never-ending crusade of workaholic perfectionism. 

Since my late teen years, I felt perpetually harried by a need to be productive. I’d create lists of things I wanted to achieve and, one by one, ticked them off with machine-like efficiency.

My default was “bustling”. When I wasn’t running to catch buses or bolting from commitment to commitment, I was writing a new story, shooting a new film, and undertaking a new degree.

My home was not a sanctuary—it was a workplace. I spent most of my time in front of my computer, taking the occasional break to tidy, clean, cook, and work out. When I wasn’t running on a physical treadmill, I was always running on a figurative one.

Nothing I did was ever good enough; I could always do better. Everything was a problem to be fixed. There was forever room for improvement. 

This philosophy extended to not just my life, but that of others as well. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and I hammered away to the detriment of my relationships.

In my mind, this behavior had the perfect rationale. I was someone with big dreams, the job I was doing wasn’t my true passion, and I lacked any sense of financial security. 

The only way I was going to rise above these obstacles was by applying myself. 

These standards I had set for myself, however exacting they might seem to others, were in my estimation fair.

If I could learn to follow them with religious zeal—so why couldn’t they? 

As righteous as I felt on this path, what I failed to acknowledge was that this work I endlessly generated for myself was really just a kind of coping mechanism. 

For too long, I had been troubled by the sense that something fundamental was wrong in the world; something that threatened my sense of wholeness, worthiness, and safety. 

But so long as I stayed in the saddle of workaholism, I could avert the many impending crises I imagined loomed large over my life.

Grandiosity, or Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder?

My behavior, I would later learn, had all the hallmarks of Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD).

OCPD, according to the DSM-5, involves a more “a pervasive pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control, at the expense of flexibility, openness, and efficiency”.

Key traits of OCPD include:

• Preoccupation with details, rules, lists, order, organization, or schedules
• Perfectionism that interferes with task completion
• Excessive devotion to work and productivity
• Being overly conscientious, scrupulous, and inflexible about matters of morality, ethics, or values
• Being unable to discard worn-out or worthless objects without sentimental value
• Reluctance to delegate tasks or to work with others unless they follow your precise way of doing things
• A miserly spending style
• Rigidity and stubbornness

A distinction should be made here between OCPD and the better-known Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. 

People with OCD experience uncontrollable, persistent thoughts (obsessions) and behaviors (compulsions), which they often have some degree of insight about. 

People with OCPD on the other hand cling to their way of doing things and seem comfortable with their self-imposed systems of rules, believing nothing is inherently wrong with their style of thinking. 

A positive diagnosis

My trip to India represented a crisis point in my life. The rigid habits, rules, and structure by which I’d lived my life had been challenged, and the control I was forever grasping was slipping from my grasp.

When presented with demands to change, rather than making the necessary concessions, I dug in. Unstoppable force, meet immovable object.

The misunderstanding and misery that had resulted could, in hindsight, have easily been averted. 

I could, for example, have surrendered my constant need for productivity and been more mentally present, and actually enjoyed this once-in-a-lifetime experience.

I could have also smoothed ruffled feathers by tipping my driver and guides, rather than stingily withholding.

It would take some years—and many more immovable objects—however, before I would achieve true insight into my behavior. 

And even then, surrendering my self-appointed moral high ground would prove no easy task.

---

Confessions of a Control Freak continues with Part 2: “An excess of perfection”.

Reading time: 9 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

“Police car!” I murmured.

At the far end of the alley, a police van had crawled into view. No sooner was it glimpsed, however, did the vehicle reverse back the way it had come.

My filming companion Nia looked up from the camera viewfinder.

“I can’t see anyone?” she said. “I think we’re good.”

At that very instant, we were standing a few feet from the McDonald’s parking lot, recording a scene for one of my college film assignments. 

By scene, I am referring to a few shaky shots of me approaching the storefront, toy handgun in hand.

It was meant to be a cinematic allusion to a shooting that had occurred in the 80s. Minus, of course, the shooting part.

Nia and I had spent the past 15 minutes filming me doing multiple takes of me walking up an alley in a hoodie and taking a few bold strides across the lot.

After each take, we’d return to the alley to review the footage, whereupon I would identify some fault. Either I was walking too fast, the shot was too shaky, or the framing was somehow off.

I’d asked Nia if she didn’t mind “getting one more in the can”. A freshman keen for more filming experience, she’d obliged.

Soon, what had started as a quick-and-dirty exercise had ballooned out to become my own private Ben Hur.

“I’m pretty sure I just saw a paddy wagon,” I said, after a moment.

“Well, they’re gone now,” Nia said, raising the camera for another take.

“OK,” I said warily, “but this is the last take.” 

Certainly, this wasn’t the first time today I’d said it, but this time I meant it.

I was part way across the McDonald’s parking lot when I heard a shout.

“Drop the weapon!”

Officers burst from cover, surrounding me like in some scene from a cop show, guns pointed in readiness to shoot.

Instinct took over and I squatted, placing the toy gun on the ground.

“On your knees,” one of the officers shouted. “Hands behind your head.”

Next thing I was being cuffed and forced onto my face. Somewhere nearby I heard Nia’s voice. 

“We’re making a student film,” she cried, playing the part. “The gun isn’t real! The gun isn’t real!”

“Shut up!” someone barked. My pockets were searched and a barrage of questions followed.

Did I have anything on me I shouldn’t have? Did I not realize that from a distance my gun had looked real? That I had been this close to being shot?

“Not that I’m aware”, “apparently not”, “it never entered my mind”, went my responses.

Little did the officer questioning me know that a few hours prior, I had considered painting over the toy gun’s fluorescent orange tip “for the sake of realism”, only to change my mind at the last minute.

This reflexive decision may have been what ultimately saved my life.

I tried, lamely, to explain myself, while the officer chastised me for my recklessness. It was revealed that just before Nia and I had shown up, a McDonald’s patron had called the police to report her child missing.

This patron had been sitting in her four-wheel drive, parked in the McDonald’s lot when I’d rolled up, toy gun in hand. Our eyes had even met on the first take.

By the second take, however, the woman had vanished. It was only now I realized that she in her panic had somehow connected her child’s disappearance with my appearance and called the cops on me.

---

II

I was 19. Just a kid, really. And I was about to be arrested and charged. My fledgling film career—if that was what you wanted to call it—was, as of that moment, over.

But after a few minutes, the police officers realized the extent of my naivety, and Nia and I were let go with only a warning.

We drifted back to the college campus, shell-shocked, trying to process what had just happened.

I eventually made my way home, vowing to never do something so stupid again. A few hours after my brush with death, I worked up the will to look through the footage on my desktop.

The resulting footage proved rather dramatic. Applying a black-and-white filter conveyed a certain impression of documentary realism. Our little gambit, it seemed, had paid off. 

But there was one problem. We had plenty of takes of me approaching the McDonalds, but none of me firing the gun. We hadn’t, in short, got the money shot…pun not intended. 

And given the gun was barely visible in my low-res MiniDV footage, how would viewers ever realize what I was trying to depict?

The solution was obvious, if unpalatable, but I summoned my courage all the same. I was a serious filmmaker, and no serious filmmaker should be stopped by some fear of being arrested. Or say, killed.

Having honored my resolution not to take my life into my own hands again for a total of three hours, I collected my filming kit and went out to the front lawn of my apartment complex. 

Mounting the camera on a tripod, I pointed it towards the sky. Then, checking that the coast was clear, I hit record, extended the toy gun into view, and proceeded to hammer the trigger.

I played back the shot on the camera’s built-in LCD. The result was gloriously realistic, the toy pistol’s slider flicking backward with each pull of the trigger.

Tucking the toy gun out of view, I packed up my gear and returned indoors to begin work editing my masterpiece.

---

III

A few days later, the assignment was complete. It wasn’t due for a few more weeks yet however, which left me with time—time should be spent sharpening the filmmaking saw.

When the due date rolled around, I had not one but three films to submit from. I showed my classmates what I had accomplished and their only response was to stare. 

What person in their right mind would do a school assignment three times?

But this was, I told myself, what was required if I wanted to become a capital P Professional.

So I continued to film, adding new techniques bit by bit to my repertoire. Spooling through the raw footage, I would marvel at what I’d accomplished.

But I also wavered between a celebration of my artistic ability and insecurity.

Would my stilted acting pass for naturalistic? Would viewers appreciate that my choice to weave the camera around subjects was inspired by the rich tradition of cinéma vérité?

What I ultimately ended up with would be either worthy homages to my favorite films or confused pastiches: a little bit of everyday Italian neorealism here, a little bit of classic horror tension-building there.

As my skills improved, the bar rose. Determined to rise with it, I agonized over the little details: the choice of camera angle, the position of a prop, the lilt of an actress’s voice.

My growing competency meant that while my classmates were mastering basic editing in iMovie, I was trying to recreate Apple’s classic “silhouetted dancer” ad. 

My strategy was something that may best be described as…unique. 

One attempt at creating a chroma key effect involved assembling a green screen on my tiny balcony (because it offered the best lighting). 

Recording myself singing the backing track required that I crouch beneath a tented mattress (because it dampened reverb). 

Then, finally, performing the actual dancing required I shimmy and pirouette in my underwear for all my neighbors to see (because wearing clothes interfered with pulling a key).

As time went by, my experiments grew bolder. I taught myself how to operate a soundboard and assemble a 5.1 surround soundtrack, tasks which involved spending days locked in the sound-dampened gloom of a mixing studio.

I taught myself to composite live footage with special effects, creating complex tracking shots across Photoshopped fantasy landscapes.

The plastic shell of my Macbook laptop was literally going to pieces, and yet still I would sit patiently as it rendered its shot, sometimes for hours, sometimes days, leaving the entry-level computer basically inoperable.

For a final project, I directed a short film set in both modern and 1980s East Germany (despite being in Sydney, Australia), with dialogue written exclusively in German (which I didn’t speak fluently), using native Germans (who weren’t actors).

The only limits, I told myself, would be those set by my own imagination.

---

IV

These various projects were so time-consuming that I was barely able to hold down a job.

On one hand, I was content to live on the smell of an oily rag, but on the other, the absence of funds meant I had to serve multiple roles on any given project: storyboarder, scriptwriter, sound recordist, mixer, composer, producer, director, and editor.

And when there were no actors, I would hit “record’ and insert myself in front of the camera instead.

I cast myself in a variety of roles: cosmic fetus, creepy Hollywood executive, political terrorist, medieval village boy, zombie, time traveler, and barbarian warrior. Limits of my imagination, indeed.

When one role called for me to shave my head and don a monk’s habit, I didn’t hesitate. I was a card-carrying anything-for-art-ist.

As for having no funds or actors, there were always friends I could beg to shoot, star, or be interviewed. 

None of them proved immune to my approach, which could perhaps be best described as “exacting”. 

I’d dominate group meetings, interrogate doubters and argue detractors into silence. If someone gave me an inch, I’d take 10 miles. 

Some may have dared crack a whip or brandish a chair against this onslaught, but fewer still would be able to back me in a corner. 

During a shoot, I’d niggle and micromanage. Inevitably I would learn that my volunteer crew members either weren’t up to snuff or didn’t share my level of dedication, I’d shoulder them aside and take the camera or boom.

When an actor didn’t hit their mark, I’d overcorrect with detailed instructions. A dozen takes were, as a general rule, mandatory. 

My “leadership”—and to call it that would be generous—was met with hostile silence and exchanged looks.

“Can you believe this guy?” my collaborators seemed to be saying to one another.

I was unrelenting; exhaustive in my film-from-every-angle approach and exhausting with my endless stream of instructions. 

There was one person, Nia—poor, indefatigable Nia—however, who weathered it all, always with a bounce in her step and nary a broadside. 

From her very first on-camera debut as a victim of spousal abuse, Nia carried herself with total aplomb.

When asked if she would be willing to smear her face with fake blood, she didn’t so much as blink and even offered to do it herself.

When handed a frying pan and instructed to wail on a phonebook in lieu of her onscreen abuser, Nia summoned rage with the ease of a seasoned pro.

When her role called for an emotional breakdown, Nia melted into hysterics so electrifying I almost didn’t dare to yell “cut”. And all of this on the first take. 

After the incident outside McDonald’s, I wouldn’t have blamed Nia if she’d decided to back out of future projects. 

Yet time and time again, Nia would turn up, eager to do anything that was asked of her.

---

V

There were many things Nia was prepared to tolerate in the name of my cinematic vision, but hectoring was not one of them.

Some months later, Nia turned up on a set we were both volunteering on, waving a script I had sent her several days late.

Fearing that her little flourishes might somehow signal to the crew we were amateurs, I asked if she wouldn’t mind putting it away.

“Stop bossing me around,” Nia snapped and walked away. 

This show of defiance was not only out of character—it was also just plain confusing. Couldn’t Nia see I was trying to save her—and by extension, me?

Despite our little row, Nia agreed to feature in another film of mine. She was to star as a wood nymph: a malevolent, shape-shifting seductress.

Not only did Nia agree to brave the cold, sludge-filled waters of a public lake—she also did it topless. 

While Nia was her usual no-questions-asked self, I sensed for the first time some reluctance. This proved our last collaboration together, and we soon fell out of touch. 

Then, some years later, by pure accident, I happened to spot her crossing the campus. 

“Hey, Nia!” I called. Nia turned and saw me.

“Oh, hi Essy,” she said, without so much as breaking her stride.

“How have you been?” I asked, catching up to her.

“Sorry, can’t talk—late for class!” Nia explained and left me in the dust.

This was, I understood, a dismissal…and possibly a deserved one at that.

The loss of my chief collaborator proved a blow to my filmmaking ambitions. It also left my conscience burdened more than ever by the realization that maybe—just maybe—it was my obsessiveness and not others’ lack of staying power that was driving them away.

My drive to reach some always-out-of-reach destination had meant not only that I had failed to truly make the journey, but that I also made it hospitable for my travel companions.

If people like Nia had been the cement foundations of my aspirations, I was like the workman with the earmuffs and jackhammer.

The problem wasn’t so much that I was a workaholic as that I—barring all obstacles save complete physical incapacitation—refused to settle for anything less than absolute perfection. And absolute perfection, for anybody, is a pretty tall order. 

I convinced myself all the same that it was one I absolutely had to meet. That road to success was not paved by half-measures, after all.

But very quickly the pursuit of perfection would bleed into other aspects of my life, sometimes quite literally. I brushed my gums so hard that they bled, then eventually started to recede. 

While trying to meet one of my many perpetual deadlines, I sat at my desk, absently cramming the contents of a salad bowl into my mouth.

Thinking I was biting into a piece of capsicum, I chomped down on the tine of a metal fork instead. 

Later that week, while surveying my normally perfect pearly whites in the mirror, I saw that the bottom part of one front tooth had broken off. 

Most people I expect chip their teeth through genuine misadventure: a drunken faceplant or a brawl. 

But not me. I had managed such a feat with nothing less dramatic than an eating implement. 

This was, I realized, a case in point. My perfectionism and untiring ambition meant I was also forcing outcomes and rushing processes. Processes as basic as eating.

My little accident not only landed me in a dentist’s chair with a hefty bill—it also led me to a troubling realization. 

Sooner or later, there would be another accident just like this. And the results, potentially, could prove far, far worse.

---

Confessions of a Control Freak continues with Part 3: “A rebel yell”.

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

“About this holiday,” a friend began via instant message, “I’ve changed my mind. I’m not really sure if you should join us.”

This friend—Mig, we’ll call her—and I had been planning to spend a few days vacationing with a few others in the neighboring city of Wollongong. This sudden reversal threw all my plans into disarray.

Mig’s comment was the first indication we’d had some kind of miscommunication, the nature of which I didn’t yet understand. 

“Because the whole point of this trip is to chillax, you know?” Mig went on to say. “And I’m worried you might mess with the vibe.”

This wasn’t the first time someone had performed a heel turn in my company. In fact, it was a pattern that had resulted in what few friends I had vanishing, often without explanation.

Something about my presence seemed to unsettle people, and I suspect it had something to do with the fact that I had a rather dry sense of humor, and was reliably direct and to the point.

This was a quality that both endeared me to some while setting others on a swift exit trajectory. 

Though it would be many years before I received a diagnosis, my brutal honesty was in fact closely tied to the fact I was on the autism spectrum.

Autism would also in part explain my rigid approach to life and my perception there was only one “right way” of doing things. 

My Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD) helped push this to another level, the most obvious example of this being my bossy domination of shared creative endeavors.

Suffice to say, when those in my life turned on me over my differences, my standard response was to raise two figurative fingers. 

In Mig’s case, this involved me logging off the messenger app without the courtesy of a farewell.

When Mig later apologized for their words and renewed her invitation to join her on the holiday, I didn’t graciously accept. 

Rather, I declined, citing my finances, all-too content to nurse my grievances.

---

II

The problem with declaring one’s self the eminent enforcer of rules is that it inevitably culminates in a one-man dictatorship.

When challenged, one feels compelled to silence critics, impose curfews, and enforce martial law. 

Yet my tendency to claim and never cede the moral high ground would almost always land me in steaming hot water.

While producing my final college project—the quixotic piece set in both present-day and 80s Germany—I clashed with my first meeting with a college professor.

“That doesn’t look like Berlin,” was Dr. Javers’ first remark upon seeing a rough cut. “It’s obvious it’s been filmed in Australia.”

The scene in question had been staged in a pine grove and featured a Stasi officer—a member of the German Democratic Republic’s secret police—shooting an informant. 

It was to serve as the film’s dramatic lynchpin, the coathanger upon which I would hang the thin plot of my spin on the mumblecore genre. 

On that note, if there was anything Dr. Javers was going to criticize, you’d think it would be the long sequences in which characters monologued at one another. 

Instead, his words merely struck me as a rather lazy attempt to undermine our efforts. Didn’t he see the nobility of our intentions? The rich thematic potential of exploring life after a surveillance state? 

“We’re happy with the scene, actually,” I said, knowing full well I was probably coming across as defensive. 

“The location was the only one we had access to. Anyway, what are you suggesting we do? Throw out all of our footage and start from scratch?”

This was, I went on to explain, a no-budget student production. The only places we could film were at school or a handful of public locations. It wasn’t exactly like we had a ton of options.

Dr. Javers stiffened, and instead of responding to my questions directly, spent the remainder of the meeting addressing everyone else in the room but me. 

In the weeks that followed, Dr. Javers failed to show up for production meetings and stopped returning emails and calls. 

Then, finally, in the final week of school, my producer forwarded some backchannel communication she’d had with Dr. Javers.

In it, the two had spoken with casual friendliness, neglecting to mention me, as if I—the visionary director—was an inconvenient fact neither wanted to acknowledge.

I was steamed. If my mother had taught me anything, it was never to take an insult lying down—least of all from people in positions of authority. 

Thus I set myself to composing the most passive-aggressive response I could muster, asking—no, demanding—Dr. Javers CC me in all future correspondence.

Dr. Javers’ clap back appeared in my inbox mere minutes later.

“Hardly the way you should be speaking to a staff member, Essy. Expect your communication scores to be docked!”

Rage took possession of me then. Just who was this tenured sellout with next-to-no filmmaking experience to criticize me, auteur filmmaker ascendant?

A wiser move would have been to cut my losses there; maybe even go over Dr. Javers’ head, if needed, and pleaded his defense to someone further up the food chain.

Instead, I let my fingers perform a furious tap dance over my keyboard.

“Wow,” I typed. “I was really…expecting more professional conduct…from you, Dr. Javers.”

My cursor moved to the “send” button, then stopped. As intent as I was unleashing my indignation upon this hack, part of me knew that a cooler head would prevail.

So I gave myself ample time to fully consider my countermove and the potential fallout. This amounted to approximately 30 seconds. 

But within minutes of sending the email, I was having second thoughts. By replying, I had only stoked the fire. 

What would I do if Dr. Javers rose to the challenge? I couldn’t possibly let him have the final say in this battle of wills. 

The only sensible thing to do now, then, was to block the professor’s email address, and therefore the possibility of a reply.

An hour later, remembering I was meaning to migrate to a different email host, I took the nuclear option and deleted my email account entirely.

In terms of severing contact completely, deleting one’s account was about as final a method as they comeno more final a method.

And yet for all my attempts at creating closure, this little exchange with Dr. Javers had left me feeling somehow dirty. 

Underneath my anger, there was a bitter suspicion that I myself might be culpable of some wrongdoing. One I had tasted when Mig had uninvited me, and when my filmmaking company Nia suddenly ceased contact.

---

III

My willingness to steamroll over obstacles was as much a matter of determination as it was inflexibility.

While my peers coasted through their undergraduate programs, spending their downtime partying or going to the beach, I put all of my time, effort, and money into teaching myself the craft. 

Given this investment, I felt justified in fighting for my success…even if my definition of “success” verged on questionable. 

So what if I alienated people in the course of following my own north star? 

For as long as I could remember, people had seemed never quite “got” me”. My intentions were often mistaken and my actions subject to criticism, so much so that I felt trapped in an ever-deepening hole of futility. 

Thus in my teen years, I decided to defy the aphorism and become the man who was the island. 

My inspiration was the eponymous protagonist of Charlotte Bronte’s classic “Jane Eyre”, a woman who seemed entirely sure of her purpose, and resilient in the face of opposition.

“I care for myself,” went Jane’s declaration. “The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”

I took Jane’s proclamation as an endorsement. Others might see me as self-righteous or inflexible, but to me, these were qualities born of strength.

---

IV

In reality, they were born of low self-worth. Deeming the world to be a threatening place, I wore them less as a badge of honor than a protective carapace.

When others attacked this carapace, they were in effect attacking me. Point out my shortcomings, and you were like to receive a rebel yell in response.

And so I became a stranger to my blind spots, and despite my best efforts, continued to trip over my own feet.

When I was not trampling the feelings of friends, I was offending would-be allies, trying desperately to set others right—even when I myself was in the wrong.

Once, on a flight home to visit my parents, I noticed the man next to me had put the armrest down prior to take-off.

“Excuse me,” I began in a brittle voice, “but I think the armrest is supposed to be up.”

The man, a brawny Asian man who could very well have been a fitness instructor, continued to look down at the inflight magazine he was reading.

“Actually, it should be down,” he replied.

“Well you’re wrong,” I retorted, barely stopping myself from saying more. 

Brawny acted as if he hadn’t heard me, and my face burned with anger as I waited for the pre-flight safety demonstration that would surely vindicate me.

Attendants donned life jackets and took their positions in the aisle. An attendant chirped instructions over the P.A. system.

“In the interests of all passenger’s safety all seatbacks should be stowed prior to take off, and all armrests placed down.”

And suddenly it was not anger but shame that scalded my cheeks. My gaze, formerly fixed on my seatback in front of me, slunk to the floor.

Brawny would have been well within his rights to smirk, and yet for all his feigned indifference, I knew—I knew—that deep down, my enemy was gloating. 

I spent the rest of the flight contemplating the decidedly un-petty ways I might exact my vengeance. 

There was always the “accidental” coffee spill or elbow to the face when getting up to use the toilet, but those verged on blatant.

By the way Brawny failed to glance in my direction, it was clear that our little tiff did not occupy him in the same obsessive way it did me. 

When, at the end of the flight, he hoisted his tote bag out of the overhead locker in preparation to leave, I stared daggers at his back. 

There, I thought, run away, like the coward you are.

And savoring my unearned sense of triumph, I followed.

---

Confessions of a Control Freak continues with Part 4: “A flight from shame”.

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

When Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder takes the reins, there are no truces or compromises—just scorched earth.

And looking back upon my years in college, frenziedly working to advance my filmmaking career, that was mostly what I saw.

My explanations for what had gone wrong demonstrated the extent of insight one might have expected of a bacterium grappling with astrophysics.

I was, the argument went, a unique, intense person. So intense in fact, I often offended the sensibilities of my fellow Australians.

The long and short of it was that, for whatever reason, I hadn’t bloomed where I’d been planted. The natural conclusion, therefore, was high time I transplanted myself to fairer climes.

Overseas, I might begin life anew, free from the brooding thunderheads of others’ disapproval and the lingering shadow of shame and self-doubt.

What I envisioned was less a relocation than a reinvention; an opportunity to become someone successful and well-liked, whose company was sought by all and sundry.

My first place of choice was Germany. Germans were, according to my general understanding, about as direct and upfront as they came. They surely would be able to tolerate—no, appreciate—my blunt honesty.

As an outsider (or Ausländer, according to Pimsleur German Level One), I could also expect to enjoy the kind of interpersonal amnesty normally afforded to visitors. My differences in temperament and character would, I hoped, go excused.

And Germany, as it turned out, had a sturdy, if not small, filmmaking industry. Not quite Australian cottage industry level, but neither was it the European version of Hollywood.

Then again, Hollywood couldn’t really hold a candle to a country where belting out an enthusiastic “Das stimmt!” or “Super!” was readily tolerated.

And the menus in Los Angeles, I was certain, would never yield such warble-worthy compound nouns as “Schweinebraten mit Semmelknödel”.

There was also the fact the United States had never had any monarch, let alone one of equal caliber to “Fairy Tale King” Ludwig II, a closeted eccentric who commissioned the Neo-Romanesque wonder that was and is Neuschwanstein Castle.

Sure—I might be cherry-picking reasons, but for someone intent on escape, any justifications would do.

And so I booked my ticket, and mere weeks after completing my undergraduate degree, I departed for Germany.

---

II

It was my first northern hemisphere Fall. The weather in Berlin was, according to locals, mild, but walking the streets of Kreuzberg in November 2008, I often felt like I was wandering the Siberian tundra in a pair of briefs.

On blustery days, the wind would tear right through my frame, transforming my exposed fingers into half-frozen cocktail weiners. 

At night, the mercury plunged and I was stricken with bouts of asthmatic coughing. 

When my host offered to turn on the heating, I—conscious of the gas bill I would partially be responsible for—insisted in between coughs that no…I was not sick…and would do…perfectly fine…with the heating…off…thank you.

Though I had scrimped and saved in the lead-up to my trip, I had only a few thousand dollars in my bank account. 

Even Couchsurfing with a friend and a distant relative, I had nowhere near enough to cover the basics of my stay.

The only way I would survive was, at least in my fear-riddled mind, to cling to my miserly ways. 

But hiding from the weather in the confines of the apartment, as poorly insulated as it was, I could only do so for so long. 

In my defense, Australia was a country without true seasons. Growing up in the tropics, I recall spending most days wearing little more than a shirt, board shorts, and sandals. 

But in Berlin, dressing proved a cumbersome process, involving at least the application of four layers of clothing.

Even then, rugged up, I was in a constant torpor, shuffled from train station to supermarket with all the speed of someone using a walking frame.

“Could we perhaps move a little faster?” my host called back one time, from a distance of 12 feet.

But haste could not be coaxed out of me, not at least until I was within dashing distance of a store or cafe with indoor heating.

Sitting in the furnace-like interior, I would wait for various parts of my body to defrost, removing articles of clothing piecemeal to compensate for my sudden-onset sweating. 

Then, when it came time to leave ahead, I would have to put each of them back on, one by one, a process I quickly came to begrudge.

Despite these challenges, I managed to drag myself to and from German lessons in neighboring Neukölln on an almost daily basis. 

The short ride took me past an overgrown graveyard, corner cafes, and roast chestnut vendors, and might have been enjoyable, had I not often found myself caught in horizontal sleet, cursing into the thin summer scarf I was using as a muffler.

After the first month of furiously studying German and applying for jobs, I paid a visit to a nearby film college, where I was told in no uncertain terms that I could not apply until after I had become a fluent speaker.

Still, I told myself this obstacle, just like my dislike of the cold, was one that could be surmounted with enough time and diligence.

Yet my bank account balance was rapidly depleting, and to make matters worse, the world—as my mother soon advised me—was on the cusp of a financial crisis.

Crisis, schmisis, I said, when she first broke the news. What point was there in dwelling on forces outside of our control?

Besides, I had come this far—wasn’t that proof enough of the power of determination?

---

III

But with no job offers forthcoming and my account balance perilously low, I outgrew this conviction.

By late December, I conceded defeat and advised my parents I was going to head home. 

“You know I’m really disappointed,” my dad said. “I thought at the very least you would try to stay and make it work out.”

Apparently, he was under the belief that I’d spent the past three months strolling through French Provence vineyards or lapping cocktails at an Amsterdam dive bar.

Little did he know I had been locked in a frantic hunt for a job that had taken me from the Czech Republic to Barcelona, Spain. 

Highlights of my trip—if that was what you could call it—had included acquiring public lice at a youth hostel, racing through a frozen forest in pitch darkness to catch a train, and cramming my starving face at a 10-euro all-you-can-eat sushi train in Barcelona.

All that time, I had been in limbo, not knowing where I would land, or how I would survive. 

To remain in Europe would have been stubborn beyond reason—a description that in other circumstances, I would have eagerly lived up to.

And so, wanderlust temporarily slaked, I returned to Australia with my head hung and was met with a surprisingly strict reception. 

I could crash at folks’ place on the condition I paid rent and worked as a server at their restaurant until I had paid back all the money they had loaned me during my trip.

By February, my death grip on the filmmaking future I had once envisaged was failing, and the angst that had first propelled me to travel abroad remained as strong as ever.

But given the deplorable state of my finances, I was grounded indefinitely.

In my search for an exit hatch, I decided I would put my Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages certificate to use by teaching English in China.

Outside of the big metropolitan centers like Beijing and Shanghai, life for an English teacher—according to the forum posts I read by expatriates currently living in Asia—could actually be quite comfortable. 

The immediate consideration at the forefront of my mind was not the language barrier, but my dietary requirements. 

For years I had suffered what I’d concluded were gluten and dairy intolerance, the existence of which was not common knowledge in mainland China.

Eating out would therefore prove particularly difficult—an inconvenience I would nevertheless need to have to overcome. 

The only alternative open to me was, after all, stasis. And after months of living under my parents’ roof again, I needed this out.

---

IV

When I asked my dad if he would be willing to spring for a plane ticket, promising that I was good for it, his response was completely unreasonable.

“But what about the money you already owe us?”

Catching wind of my plan, my mother’s anxiety finally boiled over.

“You know, you’re just like your siblings,” she said during one car drive when we were alone. 

“Always making bad decisions. Never learning from your mistakes.”

I bridled at these claims. To compare me to my brother and sister was completely uncalled for. There was no contest. I won every time, hands down.

As for my mother’s criticisms, was it really my fault she could see the inherent genius of my plan?

Another attempt to establish myself in a country where I knew next to no one wasn’t a continuation of the same broken logic that had inspired my last trip. Rather, it was a strategic evolution.

And anyway, what did she know of my overwhelming need to prove my worth—if only to myself?

Rather than responding, however, I fidgeted with levers and knobs on the underside of my car seat.

“How do I put this thing back?” I asked.

“First it was Germany, now China,” my mother said, refusing to be thrown off. “When are you going to realize?”

“Are you going to help me or not?”

“You know, it’s a simple thing, Essy,” my mother retorted. “Why can’t you just work it out?”

“Because it’s not my car!” I shouted at her.

I spent the rest of the trip stewing over my mother’s accusations. By the time we got home, I had reverted completely to my resentful teen self, announcing my anger with the slamming of my bedroom door.

All of a sudden, I found myself wrestling with old feelings of failure; the sense of being trapped in a relationship I had run from four years prior.

When I had first moved out, I had made it clear that if my parents wanted me to continue being an active part of their life, things would need to change. No more maternal dictatorship, no more paternal criticisms.

My parents, for their part, had tried to honor the terms of our truce, but this latest attack represented, at least in my imagination, the worst kind of violation.

There was nothing for it—I was going to leave without notice, and so send a very clear message to my mother: “You’re not the boss of me!”

I tossed my suitcase onto the floor, thumping books into it and yanking clothes from hangers. 

Hearing this commotion, my mother appeared at the door.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Leaving,” I said. Mom took a step into the room.

“Where will you go?” 

“I don’t know,” I said, fighting back tears. 

“Please don’t,” my mother said, her manner switching from stonewalling judge to frightened child.

Part of me had believed that nothing—not even my unexplained departure—was capable of breaking the hard shell of my mother’s resentment. 

And yet the mere possibility of it had exposed the terror it sought to protect.

My mother wrapped her arms around me, half-pleading, half-restraining. 

“Let go of me,” I said.

“Please,” she said. “I’m begging you. Don’t leave.”

“I have to,” I said. And it was the truth.

---

Confessions of a Control Freak continues with Part 5: “An enforcer of standards”.

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

“What are you doing?

I was seated in the teacher’s office at an English school in Dalian, Liaoning province, China. The room was rectangular, rather pokey, and lined with chipped tables that looked well past the age of retirement.

The question had come from directly behind me. I turned and found Lucy, one of several of our school’s many super-competent assistant teachers, standing there.

She’d plastered a gummy smile to her face, and yet her eyes held raptor-like interest.

Lucy had caught me in the act of editing a classic novel: The Forsyte Saga by British author John Galsworthy. I froze, pen poised above the opening passages.

“What am I doing?” I repeated. “I’m fixing it.” And as if to punctuate my point, I crossed out another phrase and scrawled a correction.

Already, I had removed “pale eyes”, “pale and well-shaved”, “pale, brown face”. Next to go were “his cheeks”, “lean cheeks”, “cheek-bones”, and “in her cheeks”.

These minor repetitions were, upon later reflection, probably intentional; meant to convey the blandly similar appearances of Forsyte family members.

Still, the repeated use of the words irked me in some unexplainable way. So much so, in fact, I’d taken it upon myself to address the problem directly, leaving the book resembling something closer to a D-grade paper. 

Lucy’s smile remained frozen on her face, but her eyes were now bulging, much in the same fashion they had that one time I’d patted her shoulder. 

The gesture had been my way of softening a joke I’d just made. By her response, it was clear that all I’d succeeded in doing was violating a personal or cultural boundary.

When it happened, Lucy and I had been in a van on a freeway. Escape had not been an option for her. Now, however, she had an exit and was steadily inching toward it. 

In Lucy’s mind, I was a certifiable weirdo. But what my colleague didn’t understand was that I was simply trying to be equitable.

If I was going to criticize someone, I should be willing to criticize everyone. No one should be spared…least of all a Nobel Prize-winning author.

---

II

I’d arrived in China a month earlier, on a one-way ticket purchased with the help of an unexpected tax return windfall.

My timing perhaps could have been better. Dalian was on the tail-end of a protracted northern winter.

Drifts of hardpack snow still littered the sidewalk, forming muddy, compacted slipways which had to be navigated with the utmost delicacy, lest one be sent skidding into oncoming traffic.

My latest venture abroad was fueled by a single resolution: no matter what, I was going to spend the next year in my current post.

To this purpose, I had brought with me a single, trundling suitcase packed with clothes, boxes of gluten-free bread mix, and a stack of Penguin classic paperbacks.

Having jettisoned my filmmaking ambitions—for what alternative did I have?—I now dedicated myself instead to a new project. I was going to read the best literary works Western culture had to offer. 

For this purpose, I had drawn up a regimented reading schedule. The schedule guaranteed that by the elapse of two full years, I would have read the top 100.

It was an ambitious goal, and one that would not have been possible were it not for the fact my job teaching elementary, middle, and high schoolers basic English only demanded 22 hours of my time a week.

I also had a multipronged strategy. Walking the cobbled streets of northern France months prior, I had managed to complete the 50-hour-plus audiobook adaptation of Les Miserables. By combining traditional reading with audiobooks, I stood a good chance of exceeding my goal.

Of course, aspiring to live abroad while planning to remain indoors reading isn’t exactly the definition of sensible. 

I had promised myself that I would go out and experience the people, the places, and the culture, but a combination of factors was rendering it rather difficult.

Namely, the self-consciousness that began the instant I entered any unfamiliar social setting. Coupled with my minimal working knowledge of Mandarin, I found myself more or less housebound.

My fellow English teachers—expatriates from countries like the US, Canada, and New Zealand—made token efforts to include me, including an invitation to eat hot pot. 

This was followed a few weeks later by a boozy outing at a bowling alley. I attended with the understanding that this was to be a kind of test; my opportunity to prove that I could be one of them.

The expected method? Demonstrating masculine prowess…prowess I was certain I lacked. Strutting, boasting, and carousing was about as natural to me as oil painting with my toes.

As a gay, clumsy, socially inept teetotaller, I sensed immediately my own status as an outsider among hetero social drinkers and seasoned bowlers.

I was helped by the fact my hand-eye coordination began and ended at the computer keyboard.

Nine out of ten times, I gutter-balled. And like the good sport I was, I took these losses bravely, grumbling and slinking back to my seat. 

The other teachers offered praise and encouragement, but I was trailing behind in the scorecards—and I hadn’t even had a single drink!

Listening to my peers taunt one another and exchange playful digs, I realized that when it came to me, they were all pulling their punches. 

It could have been an act of courtesy. It wasn’t like we were long-standing friends after all.

But when I really thought about it, it was probably also the fact they knew better than to kick a killjoy when he’s already down.

Fifty gutter balls later, I excused myself and trudged home through the bone-numbing cold.

---

III

Like many expatriate communities, my fellow teachers had formed a fraternity based on their status as outsiders looking in.

Membership in this fraternity required the daily trade of outrageous stories involving acts of cruelty or brutality; a trade that was always conducted in the spirit of oneupmanship.

Have you heard about the children who tied lit firecrackers to the tails of rats? What about the man who bricked a stranger in a drunken rage?

Discussions of corporate corruption, oppressive one-party rule, or the incompetence of government officials were so commonplace as to have become almost banal.

One time, my colleagues offered biting commentary about the 2008 Chinese milk scandal, in which a company was charged with adding melamine as a filler to baby formula. 

Another time, they mocked the installation of giant perfumed fans during the Beijing Olympics, meant—apparently—to disguise the stench from an adjacent garbage dump.

As my coworkers looked down their noses upon the local populace, I in my supreme self-awareness looked down my nose at them. 

While they remained faultlessly polite, I desperately needed to find some reason to dislike them…if only to cover my own insecurities. 

Special resentment was reserved for one individual in particular: fratboy-in-chief Trevor.

Tall, loud, and boyishly handsome, Trev, as he liked to be called, would often lean in one corner, as cool and casual as James Dean in khakis.

From this position, he would proceed to orate, relating foreign media news reports usually confirming his own negative biases about China.

“Did you hear about that case in Harbin where someone started stealing manhole covers?” he said one day.

“Turns out they were selling them for scrap metal. The police only noticed after someone fell into an open hole and died.”

The other teachers exchanged a round of knowing looks—the symbolic equivalent of an elbow jab.

“That’s so f***ed up,” someone said.

“Doesn’t surprise me,” another added.

But if the shocks and scandals had ceased to outrage you—well, that was to be expected. People in China were, after all, not exactly trained to be civic-minded, but rather selfish to the point of sociopathy.

Trev’s accounts would inevitably inspire more, teachers piling on with scathing narratives until the idea of China-as-aggregate buckled under all the accumulated proof.

Sitting at my desk, I glowered at Trev, irritated not so much by his arrogance but by the fact he always seemed to be gloating. 

“You think you’re so goddamn superior, don’t you?” I’d fume…silently. “You with your strapping physique, your perfect Aryan looks, your molasses voice.”

“If you hate living here so much, why don’t you just go home? It’s not like anyone’s stopping you.”

Listening to these hard-bitten accounts, day in and day out, one had to wonder. Any English speaker with a TESOL certificate and college degree could find ready employment in China.

For many, it was an easy gig with few responsibilities. An escape from the realities of life back home. A chance to disappear over the horizon.

Then again, wasn’t this more or less why I myself had come? 

---

IV

My first months in China were spent with my backside firmly planted in an armchair, working my way through my book pile.

Occasionally, I would venture outside to visit a local park, restock my fridge, or hazard a restaurant meal—the latter of which often resulted in vomiting spells.

In my eagerness to avoid future illness, I removed eating out from my ever-narrowing list of things to do and started making all my meals at home.

But even this presented a challenge. Food labels were almost never in English, so vetting ingredients for potential cross-contamination was impossible.

And given how narrow the list of items I could safely eat was, I found myself forced to branch out and try such novel ingredients as dried fungus or Chinese red dates. 

Using seasonings was a rather dicey proposition. The most widely available were fermented sauces such as soy, but as many contained wheat gluten, I avoided where I could entirely.

Even finding meat I was willing to eat was difficult. Most of it often came packaged bloody and with veins intact, a sight that had the effect of quelling all appetite.

After a period of experimentation, I managed to nail down a rotation of new dishes: shrimp and vegetable stir fry, goat curry, purple rice pudding, and potato-and-sweet-corn salad.

But eating the same meals over and over quickly grew tiresome. Worse still, none of them seemed to be particularly nutritional. 

Weight fell from me like water. Cheekbones protruded, lending my face a gaunt aspect. A sty appeared on the bottom of one eyelid.

Three months in, I stood before my bathroom mirror, taking in my transformed appearance. According to the scales, I had already dropped a total of twenty pounds.

At my current rate, in 21 months’ time, I could expect to weigh exactly zero pounds. Which was, coincidentally, when I was due to finish my reading list.

Given that a weight of zero pounds and my future survival happened to be mutually exclusive things, it was probably safe to assume that I’d never achieve my goal.

I was torn. My trip to Europe had ended in failure, and I had been adamant from the outset that this one would not.

China was to have been my gap year; an opportunity to enjoy the kinds of formative experiences I knew I had hitherto missed out on.

But now, I was being sabotaged, and the culprit this time wasn’t a financial crisis, but my own body. 

“Cutting yourself slack” wasn’t exactly an idea I kept in my ideological phrasebook. But given my current state of health, I really had no choice.

Once again, I was going to have to pack it in and return to Australia.

---

Confessions of a Control Freak continues with Part 6: “A treadmill of achievement”.

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

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.

---

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. 

---

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.

---

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. 

---

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?

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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. 

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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