B16
Public Record
Excerpt from Public Speech transcription.

Developing the Personal Conditions Manual

This idea came about because of drugs, honestly. [laughter] More specifically, it started when I began taking particular drugs often. I don’t feel the need to name the drugs, I don’t want any, um, endorsements or anything like that. Also, I won’t name any drugs because I believe that the type of drug is not important to this phenomenon.

First though, a bit of backstory: When I was twenty-five years old, I went to the therapist because in a very short period of time I became earth-shatteringly depressed with no real reason why. Which was a bummer. [laughter] So this therapist, let’s call him Dr. Howard, listens to my symptoms and then asks me when they started. I told him, “about two months ago,” and he said, and I quote, “Hmm…” [laughter] Dr. Howard was a man of few words. Anyway, Dr. Howard matched up my symptoms with something he called ‘SAD.’ I told him, ‘Yep, that sounds about right.’ [laughter] So he prescribed me something to help with the symptoms, and then said he would check back in with me in a couple of weeks. I had this excited sort of feeling that I think people get whenever they hear they will be taking something daily, you know? [laughter] There’s a nice sense of validation that, hey, maybe I do have it worse off than other people. I ‘suffer’ from something, and maybe eventually, if I take this pill often enough, I won’t ‘suffer’ from that thing anymore and maybe everything will be all rainbows and ice cream. [laughter] It’s that silly hope that everyone has that maybe this little pill will somehow solve every single problem I never knew I had. Which is exactly what it did.

The first week that I took these pills, I repeatedly noticed a pain in my lower back. Physical pain was not a side-effect of the drug. But due to this pain, I started checking in with my lower back throughout the day, and realized how much tension I place on it in my daily routines. I began taking stretch breaks after periods of sitting for a long time. I started exercises that would improve my posture, but wasn’t sure if they were working. After two weeks, though, the pain began to disappear. As it did, though, I realized that one of my molars felt sore. I went to a dentist and found that that molar was developing into a cavity. I had had lots of cavities before, but never once had I noticed when they started forming. Usually I’d wait until I could see a hole straight into my brain before I realized anything was wrong. [laughter] Dental discomfort was not a side-effect of the drug.

Soon I changed my diet in order to avoid the things that caused cavities. I also started going to bed at consistent times, because I realized that I felt noticeably better after a good night’s rest. Go figure, right? [laughter] Really out-of-this-world stuff we’re talking about here. And quickly I realized that, after only a few weeks of taking this drug, my daily patterns had changed dramatically, but really the only noticeable difference was that I was more in-tune with my own physical discomforts. I noticed that, when taking these drugs, I was listening closely to what was comfortable and what was uncomfortable. Soon I realized that I had created very specific routines in order to accommodate for my comfort. These routines were so intricate, and so delicate that I started to wonder if some people are this in-tune with themselves all the time, without the help of drugs. If a person could recognize this kind of pain and discomfort, I decided, I imagine they might do whatever possible to avoid this pain and discomfort. And at that point, I began thinking about compulsive disorders. I wondered, “Is this, in some sense, what an obsessive-compulsive disorder feels like?”

The routines of compulsive disorders are intricate and delicate. These routines exist in order to keep the the [air quotes] “obsessive-compulsive” person away from stimuli that they determine could cause them pain and/or suffering. The present treatment for this condition was to prove to the victim that their worst fears would not come true if their [air quotes] “compulsion” were to stop. My thought, though, was that maybe the problem is that we are just interpreting their behavior from an outsider’s perspective. Maybe these patterns and routines seem insane because we aren’t the ones experiencing the symptoms or stimuli that result in those behaviors. Then I had the thought that, I wonder what a person who suffers from [air-quotes] obsessive-compulsive disorder might define their affliction as. Then I wondered if they would even call it an “affliction.”

So with these questions in mind, I asked a question on Public Opinion which said, “To those of you diagnosed with ‘Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder’: If you could forget everything you’ve been told about your condition, what name would you give it? And how would you define it?”

I received hundreds of responses, ranging From article-length pieces to just short snippets, but my favorite, and the Most Popular Opinion was from a young woman named Thereska Flamps who said, “I’d call it ‘I Know Exactly What I F––ing Need and I Don’t Care How Stupid I’ll Look Doing It Disease.’” [laughter]

Constance Rhubarb