The Underachieving Overachiever: Version 2.0

On flipping overachieving/underachieving on its head

I’m going to do things a little differently from now on.

I recently posted my artist manifesto, a public declaration of my promises to myself and my writing practice. Today I wanted to introduce the new structure for this newsletter and give a little context around why I’ve decided to make these changes.

Me and OCD

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is an extreme form of anxiety, in which you experience intrusive thoughts and images that cause distress (the obsessions), and then engage in repetitive behaviors to try and rid yourself of the uncomfortable feelings these thoughts and images cause (the compulsions). It can range from mild to severe and tends to become worse over time if not treated. It operates in a similar way to addictions, in that the drug of choice (the compulsions) initially helps lessen the anxiety, yet as time goes on you need to perform them more and more to get the same results. Eventually, you become trapped in a cycle that makes it difficult for you to live your life in a healthy and meaningful way.

The most common example people know is someone who is afraid of germs and then obsessively washes their hands repeatedly. Leonardo DiCaprio did a brilliant job of portraying how debilitating this cycle can become in ‘The Aviator’, a biopic about aviation genius Howard Hughes. Despite all his phenomenal achievements, Hughes’ life was eventually derailed by severe OCD. What starts out as a bit of overzealous handwashing eventually spirals into severe contamination OCD, which sees Hughes locking himself in one room for weeks on end and being unable to touch anything without tissues in his hands. The film suggests that his contamination phobia stemmed from his mother’s obsession with germs, a fear she then projected onto her child¹. The tail end of Hughes’ story isn’t covered in the film (likely because it is just so sad), in which he became a complete recluse, dying at age 70 from a combination of drug abuse and severe malnutrition (the results of his contamination phobia).

DiCaprio himself suffers from a mild form of OCD, which became much worse during filming

I found this film incredibly difficult to watch, yet also comforting, because unlike Hughes, I know what is happening to me and how to treat it. Despite all his wealth and influence, Hughes wasn’t able to find the right treatment. And if we’re being realistic, he was rewarded for his compulsive behaviours. People indulged his out-of-control perfectionism, labeling him as simply an ‘eccentric’, because he made people a lot of money. His success ultimately became tied to his OCD, and Hughes couldn’t untangle himself from it, even when his relationships and health imploded. It’s a tragic story, and one that I relate to deeply.

In the OCD community, we talk about ‘themes’. What is important to understand about OCD is that it goes after what you love most. Why? Because the thought of losing that thing is so terrifying to you, your brain goes into overdrive trying to protect you from a reality it thinks you won’t ever possibly be able to handle.

One of the more common themes is what’s called relationship OCD (ROCD), which stems from an intense fear of rejection. If you suffer from ROCD (I do), the driving fear is having to live a life without love and acceptance. It can attach itself to different things, the most common being romantic partners. In this case, the intrusive thought might be that your partner is going to break up with you, and the compulsion might be constantly seeking reassurance that they still love you and aren’t going to break up with you. You might analyse every conversation, constantly do things to ‘test’ their love for you, and obsessively research signs that they might be cheating on you (I have done all of these things ✋🏻). Usually this theme comes along with a heavy does of social anxiety as well.

Other themes include harm OCD (the fear that you’re going to go crazy and hurt people), sexuality OCD (the fear you might be gay/trans and are living a lie), existential OCD (fear that this life is meaningless, that we’re in a simulation, or some variation on that) and pedophilia OCD (POCD- pretty obviously…the fear that you’re going to become a pedophile). If you love kids, then it is a sure bet that POCD is going to be one of your themes at some point, because the thought of harming a child in that way will be so terrifying to you. The more society deems something as completely unforgivable, the more OCD is going to latch to that idea.²

So what about me? Currently, I live with a lovely cocktail made up of ROCD, health OCD and something called sensorimotor OCD, which is the delightful experience of becoming completely fixated on certain body sensations and being unable to not notice them. At my worst, I was fixated on my breathing. I would count to five for every in breath and out breath pretty much all day, every day, afraid that if I didn’t I would stop breathing. This obviously doesn’t leave much time for anything else! I’ve also been fixated on other sensations in my body, such as gurgling and bloating in my stomach, and jaw clenching.

Without realising it, I spent the last 18 months trapped in an OCD cycle. The intrusive thoughts and fears centered around the decline of my health, a feeling that I was broken and my body slowly decaying, and the compulsions were seeking medical help and attempting to control my environment so I wasn’t being ‘poisoned’ anymore. I derailed my career, spent my life savings, and completely withdrew from life in an attempt to run away from the intense fear I felt. I didn’t understand how varied the symptoms of severe anxiety can be, and how intensely they can be felt, so I mistakenly assumed I was sick. I taught myself to fear these sensations, and inadvertently made them worse by creating more anxiety, the thing that was creating them in the first place.

The more I’ve come to learn about OCD, the more I’ve realised how much it has impacted every facet of my life. My perfectionsist tendencies with my writing? OCD! The minute my 12-year-old self announced to the world she wanted to be a writer, OCD had an in, and because I didn’t understand what was happening, I allowed it to hijack all my attempts to make a real go of it. The idea of failing was too much, so I gave up over and over again.

I’m not alone in this experience either.

Mason Currey

recently wrote about Deadwood creator David Milch’s writing process, ‘which involves him lying on the floor in a roomful of people and dictating to a typist’. Why? Currey writes:

He suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and being alone in a room—and especially operating a computer by himself—simply offers too many opportunities for getting derailed by repetitive behaviors. “I’ve come to recognize that the more isolated I am, the more disposed I am to obsessive processes,” Milch has said. “I find that by writing out in the open, I am less likely to, for example, begin to write the same sentence a thousand times, or hang upside-down like a bat in the corner of the room, you know, or smoke crack.”

Luckily, I never ended up turning to hard drugs. But I have turned to food, obsessive researching, procrastination, and have fallen into the same trap of writing the same sentence over and over and over again. And although I never pursued writing as a career, I did the next best thing and became an English teacher. I’ve since realised this OCD cycle was a huge factor in my career burnout. The workload was high, no doubt, but I compounded this by wasting time repeating the same actions over and over and over again.

Why does any of this matter?

I’ve spent most of my life stuck in a cycle that a) I wasn’t aware I was in, and b) I didn’t have the tools to get out of. But now I do.

The first thing that needed to go was my obsessive search for answers about why I felt the way I did. In his book ‘At Last A Life: Anxiety and Panic Free’, Paul David explains:

‘My anxiety didn’t hang around because I had some lifetime curse or disorder; it hung around because I spent all my time stressing and worrying about it. I wasn’t mentally exhausted because of anxiety; I was mentally exhausted because I spent years trying to think my way out of it. I didn’t feel so self-aware because of anxiety; I felt so self-aware because I had spent months on end obsessing about myself and how I was feeling. I didn’t feel so detached because of my anxiety; I felt so detached because I had done so much inward thinking and stopped living my life. My anxiety had little to do with so many of my current symptoms. These were all created by my attempts to get rid of anxiety and so there was my answer, stop trying to get rid of it.’

Deciding to write about my health was one of the worst things I could have done for myself. I kept myself in a loop, consistently rewriting a story I’d been telling myself for almost 20 years about how broken I was. I created an identity for myself that relied on me being someone who needed fixing, which continued to fuel the fear that I was getting further away from what I wanted more than anything: not to be sick.

Also, it’s kind of boring. As

Jen Hitze

pointed out in her recent newsletter:

While diary and notebook essays can aid in surfacing personal dilemmas or solidifying new concepts, they generally lack resonance with readers. That’s because they aren’t written for others; they’re written for oneself. They make great practice material but are not great works to publish. Other people have their own inner problems to uncover and notes to take; they are unlikely to find interest in reading yours.

I was getting bored of my own stories, but I wasn’t really sure what else to write about either. Fear had a grip on me once again.

Four months ago I decided not seek any further medical treatments other than working with a dietician to help mend my relationship with food. I haven’t had much luck over the years with psychologists, who failed to pick up my OCD. Instead, I’ve decided to stick with what I’ve learned through DNRS and invest in some private coaching from people who have OCD and have been where I have been. I’ve made more progress in a few months than I ever did with years of therapy, so it seems to be working.

My recovery process is pretty simple:

• Cut compulsive behaviours

• Face fears through exposures

• Break down irrational beliefs that fuel the fear cycle

• Live the life I want to live despite chronic symptoms

This process is simple in the way that telling someone climbing Mount Everest is as simple as putting one foot in front of the other over and over again. There is clearly a lot more involved than that. The journey is going to be messy, and I want to share that mess. But I will no longer be writing about my health in the way that I have.

In considering how I could pivot this newsletter so that it was truly helping and not hindering my progress, it occurred to me that the answer lay in the title I gave it. Recovery from OCD is about bringing balance back into your life. It is removing some things and adding others. It is intentional underachieving and overachieving.

What this newsletter will look like going forward

When I started this newsletter I had dreams of writing long-form essays that dove deep into topics that sparked my interest because this is the kind of writing that I admire the most. But I’ve had to be realistic with myself and realise that the people I was aspiring to be had many things going for them that I did not. Many of them were able to commit to a career that involved writing and therefore get paid for their thinking and work. Or, they are in a position where they are making enough to earn a living on Substack. And they probably don’t have OCD.

Even writing this newsletter took a significant amount of brain power. And OCD did its thing, of course, meaning I’ve written and deleted thousands of words, only to rewrite them again. I have to accept that I have very limited energy to work with right now because I’m still recovering from decades of chronic stress. I’m hopeful this will all change in time, but for now I have to delegate my energy sensibly, and unfortunately, that means giving most of my energy to the things that provide an income.

So I’m committed to this, but need to be realistic with myself about the energy I can give to it.

I still want to share my journey towards recovery, but I want to do so in a way that focuses on resilience, perseverance, love, excitement, and learning. I want to show people how I’m trying to rewrite my story. I might not succeed in doing so, but I’m damn well going to try.

When figuring out how to tackle my writing practice going forward, I considered what I would tell a student if they were in a similar predicament to me (i.e. finding the writing process overwhelming and energy-draining). My answer to that would be to give yourself scaffolds, little prompts that can redirect you and keep you on track, like little cheerleaders on the sidelines who hand you water when you’re running a marathon, and to build up your capacity to write more over time.

Going forward, I’ll be structuring this newsletter in a way that gives me direction, yet also gives me room to expand depending on my energy levels.

This is what it is going to look like:

⬇️ I’m underachieving at…

This is where I’ll discuss what I’m doing less of (i.e. cutting a compulsion). I’ll explain a little bit about the fear that was driving this compulsion and why it needs to go. I’m also going to be real with you about how challenging cutting it has been. I’ve been forewarned that cutting some compulsions is equivalent to coming off hard drugs-confirmed by people who have both cut OCD compulsions AND come off hard drugs (honestly, the admiration I have for these people is next level). I want to be as vulnerable as possible and share the messiness of this process as best I can.

⬆️ I’m overachieving at…

This will be what I am doing my exposures on. Again, I’ll give a little explainer on why I’m doing that particular exposure and what the experience is like.

💭 A belief I’m challenging…

A big part of the recovery process is bringing down the fear that is driving the cycle. I will be using practices taken from Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), created by Dr Albert Ellis, to do so. This approach has resonated with me in a way that traditional cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) never did because it gives structure to breaking down your fears. Ellis is also a big proponent of working on unconditional self, life, and other acceptance, and his therapy lends itself well to people who lean towards philosophical thinking and are curious about a stoic approach to life, which is where I’m currently at. This will be the place where I can explore some of the big thinking I am doing.

✨ Things I’ve enjoyed…

Finally, I will share some things that I have enjoyed throughout the week, for no reason other than that is what I want to do. For a while, I felt that this was ‘lazy practice’, because I read somewhere that curation was lazy artistry. I can’t remember the exact quote, nor who said it or where, which just highlights how ridiculous it is that I allowed some random comment from a random stranger on the internet to stick in my brain and stop me from doing something I wanted to do.

A big part of this process is about finding joy and creating connections. I can’t expect to find people to connect with if I never actually put the real me out there. I’m giving myself permission to share what I’m doing, reading, watching, and listening to, in the hope that it might inspire someone else.

What I’m hopeful will come of this

My hope is that people who read this will develop a greater understanding of OCD and how to live a good life alongside it, whether you have it yourself, or love someone who does.

I’m also hopeful that my relationship to my writing will be transformed through this practice.

Most of all, I’m excited about the chance to build a community.

We’ll see!

I want to end with these words from

Maya C. Popa

:

Labeling events and feelings gives us the illusion of control, and that is the mind’s directive, what it seeks above all else. The brain prizes familiarity and comfort, even if what’s familiar is uncomfortable. If it’s known, it’s good. The brain is not wired to nudge you towards executing your largest vision and finding your deepest fulfillment and contentment. It is wired to keep you safe. It wants you to stay inside the cave.

Here’s to stepping out of the cave!

Lou x

1. It also seems that OCD is, unfortunately, highly genetic. Severe OCD seems to be triggered by a combination of a genetic predisposition and highly stressful life events. This was the case for me.

2. Latching is a term used to describe what happens when the switch is flipped in your brain. One day, the fear might be background noise. Then all of a sudden, the fear latches out of nowhere, and you become trapped in a 24/7 cycle of fear.