Time Loop

Scrub, scrub, scrub, 
Never good enough
I’m stuck in a time loop
Of endless handwashing

Touch the faucet 

Scrub, scrub, scrub again

Touch the soap dish

Scrub, scrub, scrub again

Water too hot

Go to the other bathroom 

Scrub, scrub, scrub again

Take three steps from the sink

Have to turn around and 

Scrub, scrub, scrub again

Forget where I was going

What I was doing

Repeat from the beginning

Scrub, scrub, scrub all over

Wash all the dirt off my hands

And my mind

Clear my brain to focus

On the task ahead

I can’t stop until I’m ready

I’m perfect.

Or the idea of having unclean hands 

Slithers around my head

A poisonous snake.

While I’m washing and clearing my mind,

Time ticks on

Aggressively,

Relentlessly.

I have nothing to show for my hard work

But clean hands.

Hamster Wheels and Rabbit Holes

Nine years ago, reeling from having the rug pulled out from under me, I entered a therapist’s office and asked, “what is wrong with me?”

The same question everyone around me has been asking for decades.

After years of sorting through my life, there was a diagnosis:  Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.  The symptoms were there—fear of contamination, handwashing, checking things over and over again—but every time I tried to challenge those compulsions, my head filled not with fear, but rage.

Recently, I discovered the reason why treatment wasn’t working.  I don’t have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.  I have the rarer and difficult to diagnose Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. 

You know you hit the right disorder…when you read the description and are flooded with memories that completely match the symptoms.  It’s a relief to finally, finally have the right name for all this discomfort.

Then you realize you have a personality disorder.  Like, my personality is so far from normal that it’s “disordered.”  Time to resurrect that exceptional people book club, huh?

A man who turned his ALS diagnosis into great things...so why can't I?

Less than a week earlier, in response to a birthday text where a friend asked me how I was doing, I replied, “stuck on hamster wheels and lost down rabbit holes.”  Ironically, it’s a great description of what living with OCPD is like.

I feel like I’m on a hamster wheel, working so very hard to get things accomplished and checked off the list, but by the end of the day, having little to show for my efforts.  Even in these times, when the minutes drag by like hours, the days like weeks, and the months like years….the to do list seems to be growing instead of shrinking.  (Don’t ask about the bank account.  Spoiler alert:  it’s not growing nearly as fast.)

With OCPD, the organization and procedure for each task is detailed and precise.  Every step in the process has to be carefully thought out and planned.  If my brain even has one molecule of anxiety, I have to walk away and calm myself down.  And if the task isn’t done perfectly, I have to start from the beginning and redo it until it is perfect.

I probably look just like that hamster, expending all that energy with no forward progression. 

Pretty much my entire life....via GIPHY

Probably because I’m constantly getting stuck in rabbit holes I dug for myself.  You know when you put one thing away in the junk drawer, which leads you to organize the junk drawer, where you find that button that popped off a shirt a couple weeks ago, which leads you to find the shirt to sew the button, which leads to doing a load of laundry?  Rabbit hole. 

Well, I tend to dig a lot of them, and then proceed to get lost wandering around the resulting maze of tunnels.  It starts innocently enough with one task, like putting an item away in a drawer, but then I notice that the drawer needs to be cleaned.  As I’m taking out one item from the drawer to clean it, I notice it belongs in another room, but that space needs to be decontaminated before anything can go into there.  I start making a list of how to clean that space, and well, now that first item won’t get put away until I get that list completed.

Of course, life is what gets in the way of plans, and before I can finish that list, I have to sort the mail for an important document or clean out the car or get the laundry room ready for the possibility of something breaking and needing repair….

As I’m trying to fill up one rabbit hole, another dozen or so appear.  

At least, I keep thinking I do...

For years, I believed the issue was that I was lazy or disorganized or, dare I say it, stupid, to figure out how to function like a normal person.  I’ve spent a lot of time trying to fight my brain, which always wins, but now it’s time to figure out a life that works for how I’m wired.

It’s time to step off the hamster wheels and come out of the rabbit holes….and start writing the first chapter of the rest of my life.

Alone with My Thoughts….and My Fears

As the months of mask wearing and lockdowns drone on, how are you doing?

Last spring, when we locked down and started to fight the virus, my focus was on survival.  I needed to make a certain amount of money every day just to keep the bills paid, so 100% of my energy was on getting that income.

I made it, thanks to making the most of the opportunities in front of me, the stimulus checks, and a tax refund.  Now I’m juggling three different jobs and starting to rebuild my emergency fund.  I’m good until April, when hopefully there will be an uptick in tutoring.  There won’t be a repeat of last spring’s grade forgiveness this year.

As the immediate needs cleared, the pandemic….didn’t.  One of the biggest negatives to this lengthy isolation is that I’m spending way too much time alone with my thoughts, especially as the cold winter weather kept me indoors and at home.  I realized I have spent so much time in survival mode—most of the past decade—that I have failed to do a lot of the planning and maintenance to avoid bigger crises.

Instead, when the unexpected happens, I fly into a panicked tizzy.  I can’t think, I can’t breathe, I can’t find my way out of the box.  I become a drama queen of epic proportions, making impulsive decisions that end up costing energy and time and money I don’t have, my mind racing through all the possibilities and breakdowns and failures and what else could go wrong.

No wonder I often feel like I’ve built a house of cards with my life, constantly holding my breath, waiting for something to blow it all down with one puff of air. 

When you have a 20 step procedure to make a cup of coffee in the morning and have a panic attack every time your laptop reboots, everything is a ticking time bomb of calamity.  The efforts to diffuse one stressor creates a downward spiral of compulsions and rules and steps.  Suddenly, I’m trapped within the maze of my own creation, filled with dead ends and monsters with no way to escape.

Well, there are plenty of ways to escape, from going out for coffee or playing on my phone or watching Marvel movies or just dreaming.  I’ve spent more time than I care to admit using these distractions to avoid the inevitable, but I always end up back in the maze with no end in sight and the time bombs even closer to 0:00.

The only way out of the maze of my mind…is taking one step at a time, moving to ease the anxiety and prepare for the emergencies.  Like getting my oil changed.  Scheduling the physical that was supposed to be my birthday present last year.  (I’m going to have to figure out this calf-cramping issue if I have any hope of qualifying for Boston, right?)  Even the baby step of making an Outlook task with whatever needs to get done, so I can start listing the steps that need to take place, gets me closer to the exit.

What I see every morning when I wake up and get out of bed.

You cannot live in fear and succeed.

If I am going to live the life of my dreams, I cannot be so afraid of what life could throw at me. 

The Labyrinth

Lost

In the labyrinth of my head

The giant maze of all my responsibilities

My brain on overload

 

I need to press forward

To stay ahead of my bills

To stay ahead of my life

Before the house of cards falls down

 

It’s like the game we played

On the first PC we owned

An IBM 286

Walking around a castle gathering treasures and fighting villains

With no end, no victory

 

So many twists and turns

Too many dead ends

And the fear of finding a monster around the corner

There are no good surprises here

 

I rush down the path

Many miles traveled

Just to find another wall

Turn around and go back the way I came

So much time wasted

 

A monster comes out of nowhere.

Emergency!  Panic!

Rush, rush, rush to another corridor

Completely lost in the chaos

Start again from square one

 

I need to find the map

The guide, the key

Until then I am trapped

Unable to escape

 

I tire easily, my eyes close.

I dream about being free

Away from the monsters and cold, thick walls

Happy.

 

Until a monster roars me awake

Back into the darkness

I continue on, step by step

Trying to find the exit

Before the maze consumes my mind

The Grind

I’ve been a chemistry tutor for over five years.  What started as helping out a friend has become a new career, and I’ve added math, including calculus, to the mix this year.  Gosh, I so missed solving hard math problems.

Many people think they’re bad at math because they don’t have all the answers instantaneously.  They don’t even know what skill they need to start a problem.  Chemistry is challenging because it’s usually the first time you’re using math to solve science—an entire year of those dreaded word problems.

One of the many secrets to mastering math and chemistry isn’t a formula or a cheat sheet or having mad skills.  It’s being able to attack each problem, each test question.  Look at what you’re given, look at what they want from you, and go from A to B.

How do you do that?  Practice.  The practice of doing many, many problems until you are able to attack anything that might be thrown at you.

It’s no different than anything else you practice—an instrument, a sport, an art.  In order to master any subject, you have to do the grind.  The grind of waking up and doing the same thing day after day.  The grind of focusing on perfecting each little detail.  The grind of continuing to move forward so slowly that you see more failure than success.  The grind of brushing yourself off after each failure and getting back on the path.

Over the years, people are in awe of my chemistry degree, like I have this amazing talent.  To be honest, it’s just that my love of the subject gave me the determination to grind out problem after problem.  I can’t sleep on an unsolved chemistry or math or computer programming problem, often waking at 2 am to finish what I started.  It just tumbles in my brain, crying to be solved, just like the baseball player down the street throwing curveballs at a net late on a summer evening or the oboe player next door playing the same measure of music over and over again on a Saturday morning.

Of course, it’s easy for someone with a passion for baseball or a talent for playing the oboe to do the grind, but have you ever heard someone express a huge passion for being a cog in a Corporate America cube farm?  How do you grind at something you don’t love?  That doesn’t come easily for you?

How many of you loved school when you were in second grade, but hated it by the time you were in high school because the classwork was just so hard?  How many of you grew up playing Little League or taking dance lessons or studying piano, but quit when it seemed that you had hit your limit? 

I joke that I’m the utility ballplayer of life because I’ve done so many things, but quit before I had mastered them.  I’m competent in a lot of skills, but not exceptional.  My resume goes from research chemist to quality consultant to executive director of a political party to tutor.  I’ve taken dance lessons and piano lessons and figure skating lessons.  I played clarinet in the school band, nine years total.  Even where I do have talents, math and science, didn’t help me push through the challenges in college.  I graduated with my degree, but barely.

It’s hard to believe that a year ago, I was on top of the world with my running, having negatively split New York through the hardest part of the course to break 5 hours and get my second fastest time.  2020 was supposed to be the year I took a break from racing to focus on how I could get that Boston qualifying time.  Then the world shut down, and my focus turned to survival.  As the months tickd by, and races continue to be cancelled, delayed, postponed, and modified, I thought about my quest to finish all six majors by my 50^th birthday.  The deferments, the cancellations were definitely going to impede my ability to grab slots in Toyko or London once things returned to normal.  There’s usually half a million people who apply for those lotteries in a normal year, but what now?  As for Boston, losing one, if not two years for charity runners will make it even harder to get one of those coveted spots, and I’m so busy trying to survive that running has taken a back seat, derailing my efforts to qualify.

I have five years to get into three major marathons.  I’m barely scraping by, financially, my mental health is a mess, and there are now millions of runners who didn’t get the spots they thought they’d get this year.  How on earth am I going to finish this quest?

Then I thought of my students, past, present, and future.  How many of them feel dumb at school?  How many hate doing homework because they just don’t even understand the lesson?  How many want to give up and say they can’t do chemistry or math?

Tutoring isn’t just about AP exams and letter grades.  It’s about helping these kids overcome challenges, solve problems, and learn how they learn so they can apply these skills for the rest of their life.  Odds are that you won’t have to use the ideal gas law or Rolle’s Theorem in your 40s, but the skills that got you through those assignments and tests, will.

Just like my quest; it is more about the journey more than the end result.

In 2021, I need to figure out how to do the grind when it’s something that isn’t easy or fun or exciting or interesting.  After some soul-searching, I came up with three things I’d like to accomplish this year for three very different reasons.  They are all going to take that grind, though in different ways:

1. British accent.  As a high school drama kid, I was always jealous of my classmates who could switch into a British accent without even thinking about it.  When I got a part in the fall play and had to do five lines in accent, I spent hours and hours listening to Brits read books on tape, trying to figure out the intonations and pronunciations, but never feeling like I got it right.  Now, with YouTube and Zoom and all sorts of tools (there has to be an app, right?), as well as maturity and wisdom, perhaps I can master something that I was convinced I couldn’t.
2. Daily routine.  It’s been a year, right?  As I navigated the roller coaster of part time work and furloughs, I saw a lot of my regular maintenance routines falling apart from running to brushing my hair every morning.  I’ve put down the list of things I do want to accomplish every day.  It may not be fun or exciting, but going through the steps to get my life reset will do wonders for my mental health.  (If you were wondering about running, it’s part of this routine.  Baby steps.)
3. Blogs and Coffee.  As part of my daily routine, I’m reading blogs I find on Twitter over my morning coffee.  I had a great idea a couple of days ago to use the hashtag #blogsandcoffee to share the blogs that I’m reading.  Now, I’ve had a lot of great ideas over the years that get lost on the wayside for a number of reasons, so my goal here is to post #blogsandcoffee every single day in 2021, even if it’s a tweet to say why there wasn’t a #blogsandcoffee.  Maybe it will develop a following, maybe it won’t, but at least I ground through the challenges and finished what I started.

Unlike most New Years resolutions, which have an endpoint, I am creating a focus, an intention, to grow as a person, regardless of whether or not I meet my goals.  If I figure out how to grind through things I don’t enjoy, it’s powerful—and it’s a power I can teach my students so they can succeed, whether it’s third grade math or AP Physics.

Also, rather than a personal, specific goal, it’s a theme we can all take together.  Let’s face it.  2020 was a struggle in many ways.  We survived, but not without damage.  We’re not the same people who started this year, but to continue to thrive, we need to continue to evolve.  We need to grind through our challenges, whether it’s AP Calculus or working from home or figuring out how to change the oil on the car.  What are you needing to grind through in 2021?