Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Harm O.C.D.

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Starting around the late spring, early summer of 2015, when my ex and I were talking seriously about and then actually searching for a house to buy in the Bay Area, I noticed something odd.

It happened first with writing. Or, to be more precise: It happened when I was editing a client’s book. I am both a writer and a developmental book editor. (A structural or “substantive” editor, focusing on novels and memoir, zooming in on structure, plot, characters, voice, dialogue, setting, ARC, etc.) One day—I think it was early afternoon—sitting in my little upstairs studio apartment on Rand Street in Lake Merritt, in Oakland, California, I found myself feeling compelled to reread a client’s sentence over a few times.

Now, as an editor, it did in fact sometimes happen that, yes, I’d reread sentences a few times, just to make sure I fully comprehended the intent, context, etc. But this felt different. I understood the sentence right away. It wasn’t a difficult line to understand. Yet there was a sincere compulsion, a basic need, to read the line again. And again. And again.

This started out slow: A line here, a line there. But as we got a real estate agent, and started looking at houses—quickly realizing the glaringly obvious truth that we couldn’t afford either San Francisco, Oakland or Berkeley—the obsessive feelings grew worse. It morphed from simply being sentences to all kinds of things. I worried that I left the oven on at home after I’d left. Or that I hadn’t locked the door. I felt a compulsion to wash my hands religiously. Sometimes I forced myself to go home and check: The door was always locked, the oven was always off.

I got distracted for a while in the search for a house. In July we found one in the little town ten minutes north of Berkely called El Cerrito. It was bordering the fairly violent, crime-ridden town of Richmond, but there was a police department and fire department down the road and it was between two BART train stops. We put a bid down, and we’d been lucky and had magically met the owner on accident; the old man and I’d connected immediately and had chatted for half an hour or so. In addition I’d written a very person letter about why we wanted the house. We expected to lose out: In 2015 bidding wars were common and often prices shot up hundreds of thousands of dollars above the asking price. But this one was a lucky find and a lucky catch. We got the place.