OCD only impacts the things you love most
How OCD showed up for me during Inkhaven and what helped
Today, I’m graduating from Inkhaven, a writing residency where you need to publish every day for 30 days or you get kicked out. This month, I was visited by a wild goose named OCD. It squawks and chases me around. It’s rude.
OCD only impacts the things you love most. I don’t have OCD around brushing my teeth, for example, because I don’t obsessively care about dental health. It shows up more often when it comes to my children. I’ll research the health impacts of palm oil in peanut butter to the point where I can’t make a decision on what to buy for them.
Apparently, I care about Inkhaven a lot. I care about learning how to share my thoughts with others. I care about being known. So the goose was a constant companion.
It snuck up on me. After publishing on the fifth day, I went home and couldn’t sleep. Sitting alone in my dark bedroom, my skin buzzed with worry. The anxiety was like a refrigerator, always on in the background. It seemed to be getting stronger each day. I reluctantly admitted I was probably having an OCD flare-up from the residency. I contacted my OCD therapist to meet weekly and we came up with interventions.
A compulsion in OCD is an urge to do something that gives you some relief, but then gives you an even stronger urge afterwards. I know its signature now, a dark force that sucks you in. You might think compulsions are obvious things like touching the door handle 50 times. But for me, they show up in small, everyday moments, like, “I’ll research that idea just a little bit longer.”
To combat them, you design interventions that make you uncomfortable.
Here’s how OCD showed up for me during by 30-day writing residency, and what helped.
1. Editing
Two professional writers I respect told me that my lowest-hanging fruit was low-level polish and grammar.
In the past, I wrote and published with very little editing. During Inkhaven, when I tried to work on my writing polish, OCD quietly took over.
I could feel the process of editing go from fun to buzzing obsession. I’d edit a sentence for clarity over and over until lost its aliveness. I would edit a piece for hours alone in the computer lab at night, turning it to mush. I left the campus feeling guilty for spending time away from my kids on something that clearly wasn’t important.
I asked my OCD therapist how I could apply the feedback to increase polish without cultivating obsessiveness. She suggested the intervention: set time limits on editing.
Later, when I started to obsess over how to structure a piece, I stopped and divided up my remaining work into five editing questions. For example: “should I order my main points this way or the other way?” I gave myself a time limit for each question, like 10 minutes. After each editing pass, I compared it with the original, and if I liked it better, I kept the change.
2. Feedback
On the second day of Inkhaven, I was nervous to publish a piece, so I asked my coach for feedback. He had a few suggestions and said it was good. I felt reassured.
The next night, I asked him again, and he offered similar feedback. The third day, I asked again, and this time I felt slightly sick when I did.
Later, I asked a professional writer for feedback multiple times, and user-tested my writing online, to see how people reacted in real time.
The more insight I got, the less self-assured I felt. A friend in the program was learning a lot from asking for feedback, but for me, it felt mixed.
My therapist suggested asking for feedback might be a form of “reassurance seeking” for me. I can’t know how people are going to experience something I write. Asking for feedback tries to reduce that uncertainty, but it can never go completely away, so I’m never satisfied.
One night, my writing coach wasn’t available, so I published my piece without any feedback, and it felt good. After that, I tried to notice if asking for feedback felt like reassurance seeking, and if I wasn’t sure, I wouldn’t ask.
I got feedback from the professional writers when it felt easy and fun, but otherwise I let that go.
My therapist and I didn’t work on this more together, but my guess is we’ll design an intervention that gets me the benefits of feedback, while keeping it contained, like “ask every other time you publish”.
3. Checking Stats
One night, I published and then refreshed every 10 minutes for the next hour to see if I got any likes. If I did, I would feel a rush of satisfaction. If I didn’t, my spirit sank, and questioned myself: “Was this bad? Am I annoying people?” Another day, I wrote a controversial piece, one subscribers left, and I felt a wave of self-doubt about publishing it. When my obsessions about stats were at their worst in the residency, I’d check in the middle of the night when I couldn't sleep.
The therapist suggested the intervention of not looking at any stats until Substack sends out a once-a-day summary email. That’s still my goal, but I often cheat. It’s still useful, though, to see how checking will cultivate more OCD for me.
My primary goal for Inkhaven was to learn what was in the way of me writing things publicly. Before I started, I was feeling isolated, not sharing my writing and opinions. I would write a tweet, and then seven out of eight times delete it.
Now, I’ve written and published 30 pieces in 30 days. Some people have started to tell me that they’ve read my pieces and got something from them. It means a lot. I’m sitting in the closing ceremony now, radiating with warmth.
The wild goose named OCD is still here. But when I stop giving it as many snacks, it stops bothering me as much. Sometimes it even lies down and takes a nap.