Today I walked into a store just in time to see a man standing at the counter explaining to the person working the register that he didn't want to touch some kind of protein bar that had just been rung up for him. He was holding a napkin in one hand and was very intent on making sure he didn't touch the counter in case the contaminated protein-bar wrapper had come into contact with it.
He started saying that he wanted to buy the protein bar just to make sure it didn't get put back on the shelf. Apparently it had fallen on the floor or something. He explained that he has "a lot of anxiety"—which I immediately recognized as a kind of advanced-stage case of OCD. I stood there and listened patiently as the employee did everything she could to stay calm, which was clearly getting harder and harder for her.
He kept asking, "You promise it's not going to go back in the box, right? I mean… can you promise that that won’t happen?"
I wasn't in a rush, even though I needed the employee to help me find something. I just kind of soaked it all in. As someone with a more moderate form of OCD, I could relate to being stuck in a loop perseverating on a single idea—and also kind of desperately requesting reassurance in spite of the fact that he had to know he was asking for something that just doesn't compute as urgently for anyone else.
It's very isolating to be out on that kind of limb. At the same time, I could see the difference between this person's predicament and my own. I mean it was pretty far beyond the pale of anything I would be compelled to push for, and I felt grateful for that. But I think it's always important to try to see where other people's behavior reflects in your own…
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I’d just come from taking my five-year old kid on a six-and-a-half-mile bike ride. Of course, since she doesn’t even fully know how to cross the street on her own yet, this requires a level of hyper-vigilance on my part that’s both necessary and unhelpful. My daughter isn’t especially attentive to what’s around her, and I think it’s more than just a matter of her age—I just think that’s who she is at heart: more loose, less concerned with precision for its own sake than I am.
Except that the need for precision isn’t arbitrary. Life requires that we be fluid and laser-accurate. One thoughtless mistake on my part when my daughter and I are out biking—when she’s counting on me for proper instructions that she can understand and follow—and the unthinkable could happen. At the same time, the poor kid has to have fun after all, and it doesn’t help for her to be so on-edge about what decision to make that she gets paralyzed.
We do the bulk of our riding on a trail, btw, but we also ride through neighborhoods. Where there’s too much traffic, we walk. And where the intersections are just too complex, I walk have her walk right next to me while she holds my arm and I walk both bikes on either side of us. But I have no idea whether I’m instilling a proper sense of “crossing the street is serious business and needs to be approached with caution to say the least” or whether I’m laying the foundation for a future complex.
What I can say is that we both enjoy these rides immensely. My daughter’s only been riding for a few weeks, but it’s quickly become one of my greatest joys in life. She’s been asking “Daddy, when can we ride our bikes together?” since she was two years old. I’d always assumed that that wouldn’t be until way off in the future, so my heart swells with joy, like “OMG, here we are actually doing it!” On our ride today we talked about how free we felt. I could see in her face how gratifying it is for her to be able to move around this much and have some volition, to be getting herself far from home with the power in her own legs. I told her that, for me, riding feels like the closest I can come to the feeling of being able to fly.
That said, I often think to myself when we’re out there: “holy cow, I have to be competent enough to make snap decisions—and somehow relay them to her in real time. Honestly, I sometimes doubt whether I’m up for the task. I mean, not only do I have to be competent enough for her to be able to trust me, but her life is literally in my hands, which means my judgment has to be razor-sharp and on-point without fail. I mean, I check every driveway and go out into the street first every time to make sure no cars are coming, but I wonder, ultimately, how effective—or sustainable—all of this precaution is.
My kid has exceptional agility, even though she can often be clumsy. Which means she’s more likely to fall or bump into something when she’s just standing there at an awkward angle than she is when she’s performing more complicated physical tasks. She’s an excellent climber, and she rarely falls on her bike. Even when she hits bumps, she regains her balance really well. I often find myself reassuring her as we ride “You got this… you got this…” Which is pretty much the same thing I have to tell myself before I leave to take her on these rides.
At the end of our ride today, her mom came to pick her up after we’d had to dip into a restaurant for her to use the restroom. I ordered a chicken pita wrap just out of courtesy, and stayed calm when my daughter couldn’t unlock the door to the tiny bathroom from the inside even though we’d practiced flipping the little metal slider beforehand. I calmly talked to her through the door over all the noise in the dining room and encouraged her not to panic.
She managed to get it open just as I was about to go get someone to unlock it from the outside. And as she emerged from the bathroom, a waitress dropped a whole tray of food. The dish shattered with a loud crash, followed immediately by multiple calls of “it’s okay!” from other employees. Outside on the restaurant’s front deck, I let my daughter start eating the pita wrap, which she continued eating after I strapped her into the back seat of her mom’s van.
Unsurprisingly, after a few minutes she let it fall onto the floor. I tried to hold back from making her feel bad, but after three hours of being on my best parenting behavior, I let my disappointment show. In fact, I was still pissed when I walked into the store about 20 minutes later—pissed at her, at myself, and at some invisible oversight committee that looks down on all of us parents from on-high. The truth is: if I’d shown her how to hold the wrap in the aluminum foil, she’d have probably held onto it. And I was starting to admit that as I pulled up to the store.
I was also upset with myself for making her feel worse and for guilting her even as I could hear myself and didn’t like what I was saying. I was, in fact, more angry at myself than I was at her because I knew I’d soured our trip for her. But I was also legitimately aggravated that, most likely, she’d dropped the pita because she was done eating and had lost interest, so she wasn’t nearly as mindful as she would’ve been had she cared. The chances of her dropping a popsicle, for example, are probably 95% lower. Then there was this nagging sense that, after doing everything right on our little expedition together, it was a real slap in the face for my reward to be my dinner splattered on the ground.
“Thanks a lot” I kept sneering in my own thoughts. But sneering at who exactly?
After the transaction at the cash register was finally over and the customer had left, the employee explained to me that the man is a regular who drives all the way from Syracuse. I'm sure he has his reasons for going to such lengths. I can only imagine, but I'm sure whatever they are they have him so bound up that he'll get in a car and drive an hour and a half in order to avoid whatever hellish discomfort awaits him if he tries to shop closer to home.
A close friend said something years ago that I'll never forget, which is that the human brain is so much more developed than what we actually need that it almost has no choice but to turn on itself.
I felt compassion for this guy at the counter—and for the employee, not to mention that I also felt very aware of my own, um… challenges, roadblocks, and limitations (let’s just call ‘em that), almost in an impartial way, without much judgment. But I also felt like there's something that makes us sicker than we need to be. That we're "afforded" this false sense of comfort that sets us up to feel like we can indulge in an illusion of control that will wrap itself around you like a boa constrictor if you're not careful.
There but for the grace of god...
<3 SRK