OCD Keeps Death Close—But Friendship Keeps God’s Grace Even Closer
By Colton Bernasol, a PhD student in theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.
Therapists told me I have obsessive compulsive disorder. My first therapist told me this while I was in my third year at college. My second therapist affirmed this a few months ago, while I was in my first semester of a PhD. During both periods, I was falling apart under the scrambling of my mind, unable to separate truth from fiction, reality from the nightmares conjured by my zealous fears.
OCD is a disorder of distrust. And anybody who has it knows how exhausting it can be to distrust the world: to have one’s whole living, moving, and being framed by totalizing suspicion.
Recently, OCD has manifested in a flurry of medical obsessions provoked by a physical injury that required multiple emergency room visits, indifferent medical staff, and healthcare costs that wiped away years of savings in a matter of days. Having discovered the cost of my vulnerable body, I have fallen into the habit of watching it with suspicion and terror.
It has also manifested as hyper-vigilance over the current political situation. Will I be harassed, as I was a few years ago, by police simply because I am brown? I worry that my participation in protests and my support for the local university encampments will be used against me. Will I, too, be accused of a political radicalism that justifies state violence against me?
The obsession of wanting to do the right thing—of fearing the consequences—makes me hide. But hiding makes me feel guilty. And the guilt returns me to the question of my politics. This obsessive cycle is OCD. Fear, guilt, and possible catastrophe unite in a terrible exposé of my vulnerability.
I fear chest aneurysms, bird flu, cancer, rabies. I fear police harassment and being punished as a student with political commitments. I fear the terror that my body will betray me, break down, and I will die. I fear state violence and its power over me. I fear myself. I fear my mortality. I fear my potential nothingness. I fear all these and more.
Once I gather my calm and come to terms with the obsession of one particular fear, another strikes, and the cycle begins again.
As I write my chest ripples and I wonder if this is the end. Of course, isn’t it? it could be.
The first time my therapist told me about OCD, he also said that its symptoms may leave and that I may think I’ve gotten rid of it for good. Keep watch! he said, with calm and distance—an expert who sat across the cold, fluorescent-lit office, separated as if by a chasm that places all the trust in the world on one side, with him, and all that is threatening on the other side, with me. I was too anxious to register his insight. My obsession became hours, weeks, months long. Rumination extended across seasons—fall became winter, became spring. Nothing felt more real than the catastrophes imagined by my obsessive and suspicious mind.
But eventually, symptoms lessened. I returned to a more regulated life.
I now understand what my therapist means. For years after that first provisional diagnosis, OCD had been mostly manageable, and I believed the beast had left. But this year, it returned with exceptional power, haunting me while I tried to read and write and live, making me an enemy to myself.
Incurvatus in se, said Augustine. OCD turned me obsessively inward.
I write as somebody living within the experience of the disorder, not as an expert in what psychology has to say about it, though I have been trying to learn from these experts. Therapists on podcasts that I’ve been listening to say that OCD often boils down to “moral scrupulosity” and “existential terror.”
The obsessively compulsive person is typically attuned to two inevitable outcomes: the moral compromises this world forces us to make. And death, the eventual termination of our lives.
For I do not do what I want but I do the very thing I hate, says Saint Paul. I am being-toward-death, says the philosopher Martin Heidegger. OCD makes these insights tangible minute by minute, each moment in life a symbol of its compromised termination.
Of course, this story of moral compromise and death is not entirely untrue. The death that marks the early history of Asian migration to the Americas tells us this. Asians, the historian Diego Javier Luis tells us, first arrived in the Americas in the 16th century upon Manila galleons, ships that sailed from the port of Cavite, the Philippines, to Acapulco, Mexico. They carried the treasures of New World Asia to patrons in New World Mexico and Old World Spain. These networks of ships, merchants, slaves, and sailors across the Pacific served as an economic center of the Spanish empire in Asia and the Americas. But the journey across the Pacific was fraught with catastrophe. In the early period of the galleon trade, many who sailed across the Pacific died on the journey, taken as they were by the cold, sickness, seastorm, and probably despair. Javier Luis writes about a ship that appeared on the coast of the Americas, 150 of the 200-person crew dead before they completed the journey. Mexico welcomed ghosts.
He also writes about the first Asians who traveled north into modern-day California. They were employed on a Spanish ship to scout the terrain. While disembarked on land, natives ambushed and attacked their group. One sailor – an Asian “indio” from Luzon – was killed alongside a Spaniard. According to Javier Luis, this is the first recorded account of Asians in the land we now recognize as the United States. The deaths of Asians employed under settler speculation mark the early presence of Asians in the Americas. Compromised termination seems to be my community’s beginning. And if it is our beginning, will it also be my end?
Daily, I remain frighteningly aware of death’s inevitability and ugly manifestations. Am I like those sailors on that boat, trapped in inevitability, perpetually reminded that I move, sometimes slowly, and sometimes quickly, toward that mystery we call death? Am I like the Asian killed under the employment of Spanish colonization? Has this history forced my hand, too? Coercing me to act against my best political and moral intentions?
The struggle with OCD has laid waste to my mind. Mostly, I feel like I finally understand what it is to be afraid, which has meant becoming attuned to the frail little creature that I am, burdened and weighed down as I feel by the nothingness witnessed by the history of early Asian immigration.
The writer Ocean Vuong, thinking about American identity, makes the astute observation that it is “founded on death.” If God created ex nihilo, bringing something out of nothing, the United States was born from the opposite act: a beginning willed into existence by pulverizing into nothing all that stands in the way of America’s national becoming. This is a negative creation that is ongoing: turn natives to nothing, so that all we are left with is the land upon which they dwelled. Turn flora and fauna into nothing so that we may make way for industry. Turn foreigners into nothing. Criminals into nothing. For Americans, past, present, and future are marked by the unjust nothingness perpetually reproduced in our living. Moral compromise and death are thus America’s beginning, too, despite the attempt by national myth to render this truth blurry.
OCD, which has made me weary of my mortal immorality, attunes me to this vulnerability, the vulnerability of the finite, sin-embedded creature, of a finitude bloated by moral compromise. I see this bloated compromise in the history of Asian immigration aboard the galleons, in America’s violent national beginning, and in the current anti-immigrant, anti-Palestinian, anti-student political moment. And I see it in myself. I often wonder if bourgeois therapy (in which I participate) attempts to reconcile the inner life to a world in irreparable mortal conflict, to accept it, to leave it as such. “You must accept the truth of moral failure and death,” I imagine therapists saying to me.
But for what am I to hope? And more specifically, what am I to do? Medicate? Contemplate? Pray? Philosophize? Theologize? Protest?
The options are many, and I’ve considered all of them, and some I’ve tried. I’m talking with my wife and friends now about whether anxiety medicine will help. Then, I begin thinking about the side-effects and long-term complications.
Beheld by an ocean. Watery eastward wake trailing toward ghosts. Drowning in fear in my head in history again. Am I on the way to nothing?
Amid this fear OCD remains instructive, even if it has taught me to give up my sense of control and has forced me to welcome the intuition that we inhabit a world bound by death and our manipulations of it. We are weak creatures. We are creatures who are morally compromised. We are creatures who are going to die. Anybody who has lived with any real attention to the world knows this and is probably horrified by it. OCD is moral scrupulosity, says one therapist I listen to. OCD is existential terror, says another.
Last week during the afternoon when, after what felt to me like an elongated couple of days of low and impenetrable cloud coverage, I met a writing group that consisted of friends from college and a professor who, while remaining one of my teachers, has also become a good friend. On this day, the grey, cloudy coverage had broken away to brightness, and gold light pushed past the blinds into the professor's office, where we discussed our writing. During a moment of quiet, the professor—a philosopher whose attention to texts, students, the present, and life has always astounded me—looked quietly at me. He asked if there was anything on my mind. He said he noticed I was carrying a lot.
Really, I was carrying nothing. My own nothingness. The world’s nothingness, too. But this nothingness has felt like a heavy burden the past few months as my mind fought against me to keep it close, to remind me of the nothingness in which we live, move, and have our being.
Yet my friend’s question moved me, for a moment, out of myself. And in the question, I felt as if I had received a moment of grace, a quiet assurance: as real as my OCD is, so too are my friends who don’t abandon me to it, who insist on their accompaniment alongside the hyperfocusing of my mind.
Protests have moved me out of myself, too. At the last protest in which I participated, I ran into my friends, friends who have seen me at my lowest—those I’ve laughed and cried with, those who knew the terrors housed in the hold of my soul. But all these people have helped me carry on even while I was afraid. All these people have helped me to live a life not determined by my fears, even if OCD has kept those fears close.
Whenever I think of OCD, I think of Mary of Magdalene, who also knew something of this nothingness when she sat and wept for the death of her teacher and friend. The paradox of the story, in which the reader is made to feel the grief of dead hope, of a God known on the cross, is the unresolved shock of the divine voice that quietly finds itself in the scene. Mary discovers, lurking in the honesty of her own grief over the realization of her journey toward nonbeing, toward death, that death does not have the last word as such, even if the Christian gives space for it to have a word.
OCD attunes me to my limit, to my weakness, to my need for others. In a sense, it has prepared the way for grace, the grace that accepts what is in order to get a fuller sense of reality, in order to invite God into the transformation of the world that is.
I am making all things new, says God through the voice of the writer of Revelation. I will be who I will be, says the divine voice within the burning bush. So God sends rivers of life out of the city for the healing of the world. So God delivers the Israelites from Egypt.
I may acknowledge the compromised termination of the beginning of Asian migration. I may acknowledge the truth that to be an American is to be part of a history built on death. I may acknowledge that age ails the body, that states maim the citizen, and that universities will abandon their students.
But these are unfinished truths.
If OCD keeps my fears close, friends keep God closer. This is what helps me to accept my diagnosis. This is what helps me to accept my bodiliness. And this is what also helps me to keep protesting, even in my fears.
Here is another conviction of Saint Paul’s: “And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, nor angels nor demons, neither our fears for tomorrow nor our worries about tomorrow — not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love.”
Not my fears. Not even nothing.
Colton Bernasol (he/him) is a PhD student in theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.
My initial reaction is that yes politics affects us, even deeply. Spirituality keeps the world from shaping us into resentment and fear. Then faith doesn’t fight against politics. Faith itself is the solution to politics. I believe Scripture teaches a passive resistance like Martin Luther King, Jr. employed. Sometimes saying everyone went to his own home, ignoring current leadership. Be light in the world by being who God is making of you. He has a purpose and plan for you and me.
Powerful words. I do not have OCD. I have bipolar, though, and I opened this piece curious to hear an experience of mental illness from a different angle. I am struck by the sameness in our experiences of dealing with the unreliable narrator of our minds. I am sorry this is a heavy, difficult time of rational fears taken to irrational ends for you. You are in my prayers.