9781422272398

1 chapter

What Is Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?

My mother walked into my room with some laundry to find me breaking open an old computer disk, slicing apart its filmy guts. “Why are you doing that?” she said. I glanced down at the torn-away disk label marked with my name. I was going to tear that up next and scatter it in many garbage cans, so that no one could piece them together and trace me to it. I looked back up at her, scissors poised. “I don’t know,” I lied, unable to break her heart and let on that I was terrified of the Internet and the people lurking behind its frantic electrons; that I couldn’t occupy a chair a man had just been sitting in for fear of becoming pregnant; that I was afraid of contracting AIDS from library books; that I was terrified of the numbers three and six and had no idea what to do about it. 1 The author of this passage suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). She intellectually understood that her fears were groundless and unusual, but she was overwhelmed by them. Nearly every minute of every day was marked by fear, frantic handwashing,

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