MY OCD MASTERS
How did my mild compulsive disorder spiral me out of control?
Our Journalism course leaders at Cardiff University organised a short getaway at Gregynogg, Wales, an old mansion elongated with dusty corridors. The innumerable rooms, often identical, would give the impression of a maze.
I stayed in a room alone. It smelled like dust for sure stemming potentially from he worn-out blue carpet. A desk sat in the right hand corner by the window. There was a sink next to that with a wide mirror. We had several communal showers at various snugs of the mansion.
During the cold nights I heard mechanical drilling — or something akin to a metal container being dragged across the wet concrete floor. Flustered and pissed off, I jumped out of my bed and to the window, to see who the inconsiderate culprit was.
No one there. Just rain swooshing down from the clouds.
I asked my friends the next morning, over a bland breakfast of toast or cereal, if they heard something like that. A negative response.
On the last day of our trip a colleague, in conspiratorial tones, told us that she suffered a traumatic haunt in her room.
Her own name had been written on her misty, condensated window panes — from the outside.
The most terrifying fact was that she was alone. It couldn’t have been a prank, she said; she always locked her room when leaving. Nobody knew what room she was in other than the lecturers. I am sure they wouldn’t pull a stunt of this emotional distress. And, to make hairs stand on ends, she stayed in the mansion’s second floor…
A camp fire story to tell the grandkids, certainly…
The trip was ostensibly organised so that as journalism colleagues we could bond while secluded in this country side — like a spin off of Love Island but instead of finding a partner we were trying to partner up with our dissertation topics (Journo Island?)
As we arrived by coach on the day with our luggages (I left my laptop on my seat…) it looked like it was going to patter down with rain. This ended up being true. The sun-filled vistas we had conjured up in our hopes did not come. All we got, instead, was torrential downpour and disconnection from the Wi-Fi. Phone signals were choked out, too.
No contact with the outside world for two days out of these private Welsh grounds. And they expected us to do research for our upcoming story pitch a day later?
Imagine this, reader, if you will: 20 international journalism students in the mansion’s meeting room. Laptops glowing up in our taut concentrating faces. The air filled with determined keyboard taps and hushed debates as we reasoned out our motivations for our topic choice.
The absence of the internet that day instilled in me one thing: the mental muscle responsible for pulling the intellectual trains of thought was embarrassingly weak. I had a heavy reliance on the internet to get me going, rather than relying on my brain, my present storage of information.
In these dark rooms at Gregynogg, I would suspend a thought in my head about a potential dissertation topic, a ghostly image of an idea. I can’t see it clearly with my eyes open. So, to add some meat onto the ghost, I closed my eyes and envisaged again the topic.
This is where, normally, I would itch to open Safari or Chrome to locate the answer. But now the wires were cut off.
I can now see branches sprouting from this idea kernal in my mind into areas of potential exploration. No sooner than when they burst into the mental landscape than I immediately wrote it down.
Brainstorming — the act of throwing ideas, however disparate, onto paper and to find inspiring correlations between them — was something I found strenuous. So it was this difficulty, and this difficulty alone, that spurred me to train myself more in the act of thinking.
I needed to do this for my own sake. I needed to be prepared for the intellectual endeavour that was my final journalism dissertation.
I finally settled on a topic, one which we were going to spend nine months of our lives on, that would both serve me a therapeutic as well as an academic function.
Academic because, obviously, I had to pick something to work on to get my degree; therapeutic because, at this moment of my life, I was given an opportunity to alleviate something deep down that had been causing emotional friction. To find an answer to my cultural identity crisis became my do-or-die. I just had to investigate.
I set myself a mission to not only understand my current self — the predicaments of living on a cultural knife edge all my adult life, manoeuvring around racism, the constant urge to “go home” even though I am home — but to understand the context of it all.
After Gregynogg and being once again connected again at home to the internet router like a hospital drip bag, I scoured online for articles and journals, typing the keywords British Chinese and cultural identity.
I non-stop followed these searches through, like variations on a theme, in the hopes I would discover some insightful gems to my problem I was trying to solve: to settle my anxiety about who I really am.
I found a few articles on the Identity question but the search stopped after a handful. Is this it? I uttered to myself. Or am I being a potato and not doing my searches correctly? Could there have been a more omnipotent way to burrow into the mines of the internet?
It didn’t help that my topic, the cultural identity of the British Chinese in the UK, was such an understudied subject.
My novice ability at finding things out became painfully apparent. The thought of my internet-less moment at Gregynogg came to surface. Instead of trying to constantly plow through the pages in the hopes of finding direct relevancy to what I was answering, I, at the time, branched out to the peripherals.
I sent myself of a low-stress cruise around the outskirts of the academic compound, hoping to come across a tidbit from an informant of sorts — anything useful from this that would guide me closer to finding what I was looking for would have been gold to me.
These low profile stakeouts didn’t prove that useful in the end. My obsession with how physical touch impacted mental stimulation came into force.
I printed out the academic papers I was looking at, convinced that the contact between my fingers and printed text would help in the brainstorming process, to bridge ideas together. The mere probing of my finger tips across the sentences gave me some illusion of productivity.
I just didn’t feel like I was coming closer to any revealing material about British Chinese cultural identity. So, I found a way to remedy this.
I printed more papers. And more. More and more.
In just a span of a few weeks, I stacked them up on my desk. I even red-inked and circled their publication date on the front page so that my navigation among them was made easier. To cement my obsession for order I serialised them by the date I found and started reading them. Pretty much anything associate with culture and identity, I probably read it.
From these peripheral journals I realised after having read them they had scant relation to my topic. Trying to re-route my path but still obsessed with arriving at intriguing intellectual lands I took the keywords and searched through their associations, again.
This suddenly became very dangerous. Before I knew it the rabbit hole opening disappeared into the distance and darkness swallowed me up. My obsession with finding the answer led me astray and into weird unknown waters. My focus, at this point of the journey, now dissolved in the puddle of illusory diligence.
I had to reassure myself, incessantly, that my reading was going in the right direction. But, at the same time, I justified my broad sweep of data collection as a means to build solid intellectual foundations.
It turns out that my reading broadly laser focused my attention on what was not important, and, then, what was.
This compulsion to read deep and broad still bears relevance today in my writing, interviewing and podcasting work. It is this obsession with information and my fluency with it; my standard of understanding a subject was measured with how I could manipulate the content in context and still be comprehensible.
By this measure, I want to talk in a meaningful and impactful , rather than run of the mill questions. I want to push the boundaries of knowledge further, however small this shift may be.
I can hear you asking the corollary: In which direction are you pushing the boundaries of knowledge?
I can assure you that I don’t have a definite answer to that question. Like most things in life I answer with a modicum of skepticism. This way you are always pleasantly surprised.
This mild OCD — my mental hijacker — has shown me places where I would otherwise have never visited.
It was my Master during my Masters. Now it is my intellectual travelling companion. I have control over it.
