Life in the Loop: Essays on OCD

Too tired to get up and make dinner? Why not just stay here and check e-mail on your phone? Or tick off those little tasks you’ve accrued in your ‘Notes’ app?

But over these last few days, I haven’t had the energy to do those sorts of things. And as I’ve considered them, I’ve often felt repelled by the sheer transparency of my strategies, of my desire to do anything but spend time alone. In Buddhist terms, I’ve felt revulsion at the way my mind is constantly grasping after something – something solid, so

It’s certainly true that meditation practitioners often identify less and less with their thoughts over time. But this tends to be a byproduct of practice; as soon as we start treating it like a prize to be won, it whisps away.

As my thesis advisor, the anthropologist Michael Jackson,

I conceived of that talent as a kind of unblemished possibility, a perfect potential energy that would one day find expression in grand and noble ways.

(My teacher, Lee Ray, was one of his students.)

OCD is built on the premise that control is possible, and that there’s someone there

Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, to be enlightened is to be free of obsessions.

Like that tagline from Girls: almost getting it kind of together. But never quite.