I was persuaded once to give advice on how to become a newspaper subeditor. I called it “How I Used My Psychosis and Paranoia to Make Money in My Spare Time — And You Can, Too.” I was going to add “OCD”, but I deliberately thought, let’s *not* go there. I was certainly not kidding about the other two afflictions. I remember laying out the photospreads and writing all the captions in the days following 9/11. Writing newspaper captions and headlines is a vast exercise in controlled psychosis. I’ve had outraged relatives arrive on the newsroom floor wanting to assault the person who wrote *that* headline. With more polite outraged people, over the phone, I would just ask: Did I spell your name right? Is there a single factual error or even exaggeration? No one ever found a single mistake in all my newspaper editing, I kept a 100% clean sheet in over a decade. That’s OCD at work for you.
The point is: you’ve got an affliction. Does it incapacitate you? Then it’s a problem. There are two options. (1) You cure yourself; or (2) You accept that this is a part of you, and you engage it and let it make money for you. I edit scientific manuscripts online for a living. I sometimes go days without stepping outside my cottage. I don’t care. I love my job. It requires me, functionally, to be truly obsessively and relentlessly and compulsively OCD. I edit statistical and econometric papers. I have to check every single comma, bracket, semicolon, apostrophe, symbol, superscript, subscript. I had a single symbol once that had (I counted) 12 different levels of super- and subscript. Then I realised, if you counted the lower caps as another level, it was actually 14 levels. The real beauty is that it doesn’t even count as a single word on my word count, although it takes me 10 minutes to make sure it’s all straight. But I cannot pass by without checking every detail.
If I make a mistake, it will come back like a bullet. I learned that on my first day at the desk — someone had printed the wrong answers to the crossword, and the letters and disgusted comments flowed for weeks. You learn not to make any mistakes, ever. I’ll tell you the single routine that has saved my life over and over, starting as a temp secretary, for any task of any scale: (1) Do it. (2). Check it. (3), and by far the most important step: *remember* that you’ve checked it. *Check off* that you’ve checked it. Check that all your check boxes are truly checked off. Learn that when you’ve checked off that you’ve checked it, you *really have* checked it. Then get on with the job, and get on with your life. In other words: engage your OCD, make it reflexive, integrate it into a functional system. Read Scott Adams of Dilbert: systems are more important than goals, any day.
I perform and teach clarinet also, OK? You can check out the Clarinet Bulletin Board, there is no more OCD demographic outside of an asylum. It’s just how we’re wired. They took a poll, and a majority of the orchestral pros freely admitted they were on beta blockers. This game involves being on a stage with everyone looking at you, while you undertake incredible acts of coordination, timing, and sensitivity that have been shown to produce all the biochemical and nervous reactions of a jet fighter pilot in battle. If you make *one mistake*, the entire symphony is ruined, and you will be blamed forever, probably fired and never to work in this town again. This is a very different scenario to sitting alone in your room late at night, patiently putting Korean symbols into various online translators, trying to make sense of a tricky passage of a bad translation. (One Korean translator described a “medical mall” as a “medical lacing braid”. That is a paid translator.) All I’m saying is: there are lots and lots of openings for talented OCDs, if you know how to engage and manage your issues.
It’s no joke, but also, this is why it is *so* important sometimes to laugh at it. I am a great fan of Nurse Jackie, with Dr Coop, with the obsessive sexual touches. Coop is just hilarious, one of the funniest roles I’ve seen on TV for years. And as a clarinet player, I watch always for the little funny clarinet solos they often put on the soundtrack for Coop, when he’s trying not to grab someone’s boobs. The bulletin board is always moaning that there is no work for clarinetists, and yet here’s a lovely gig, composing little interludes for an OCD doctor. What little tune would you compose for a medical professional who’s hobbling around on a crutch — literally using a crutch as a crutch? Comic genius. And what a relief for Coop when he is able to talk about it, and joke about it, with a patient who compulsively stabs himself in the leg with a knife.
So for years, I have divided everything into threes, always. You can go and look at my bank withdrawals for decades, it’s either 1200 bucks or 2100. Do you know Nicola Tesla was exactly the same? You know he would take 18 napkins at dinner, because it’s divisible by three? You know he invented the three-phase electrical current that has run every electrical motor in the world? You know that the term “chaos theory” came from a paper by James Yorke, titled “Period Three Implies Chaos” — i.e., any threefold pattern is infinitely generative? You know that Lao Tzu said, one created two, two created three, and three created the ten thousand things, predating Yorke by thousands of years? You know the principal of Pythagoras, all musical notes, the cosmic melody, arises from the third overtone, i.e. the musical fifth? There’s reason in your madness. Sheldon Cooper in Big Bang Theory has to knock three times. Everyone knows this, it’s comforting for him that they do. One day, your OCD will save lives, maybe even your own. Watch a video of a Russian systema bodyguard teaching how to shoot with a pistol, how you run, duck, hide, use your opponent’s dead body as a shield, roll, and all the time, without thinking, you are counting shots, he says, all the time you train, compulsively count shots, because when the bullets are flying, you want to be counting corpses and making sure you’ve missed nobody, you’re not counting shots any more. Be *that* killer. I looked into that little guy’s seriously OCD eyes, and thought, I would place my life in his hands, any day.