Achievement and OCD dogma

I felt low and listless yesterday after the buzziest of bank holiday Monday nights. A friend and I went to see John Vaillant and Colm Tóibín speak at the Cambridge Literary Festival, hosted at The Cambridge Union. 

I was really heading to the event to see Colm Tóibín, who is a great literary hero of mine. When I did my writing course after drafting out a novel in lockdown, I used Brooklyn as my hero book (you read it over and over to try and get into their head and write like (or at least something like) them.

John Vaillant was on the ticket at 6pm and was our wildcard, seeing him was an added bonus but I didn’t know anything about him. Vaillant blew me away with his take on fire, notably how this element is changing as the planet heats up. ‘We all have a busy schedule,’ he said (or something similar, I’ve yet to get a recording, so my apologies if it isn’t 100% accurate, ‘and climate change doesn’t really fit into that.’ 

Vaillant has written what appears to be a remarkable book called Fire Weather, a non fiction account of a fire that I had never heard of in a place called Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada in 2016. He is definitely worth looking up, as is his interviewer Robert Macfarlane who alarmingly I had never heard of but has written beautifully titled books such as The Lost Ways and Underland. He is only five years older than me but is already speaking at The Booker Prize (it’s on YouTube). He quoted some amazing author who sounded like Dante I had never heard of at the beginning, and I thought I’d memorise it to rattle off to people to seem cleverer than I was. I wonder if this is an OCD trait, trying appear to be something you are not, or it’s part of the human condition, or both. 

I actually said I wasn’t going to write yesterday when I drafted this blog (finishing it Wednesday), even though Mondays or Tuesdays are normally when I try to post. I’ll let it slide, who wants to hear from me anyway, I’ll never be like Colm, Robert or John. How on earth am I ever going to make a living from this – how the hell does Robert Macfarlane manage to go walking, one of my favourite things to do, and somehow make money from it – ditto Raynor Winn, the brilliant author of The Salt Path and other books. How do I start? He manages because he is brilliantly talented, which makes me nervous. I feel stupid looking back at how good the two sittings were on Monday night.

Thanks to loads of therapy I’m able to see this negative dialogue, and become a witness to some of my own thought patterns, one of which is to awfulise things. My OCD can do this, it starts out with something quite innocuous, and then ramps up when I don’t do my Exposure and Response Prevention work (ERP) – which is a tag I needed to get in here in case someone is search for the aforementioned, but in simple terms (which is much better – simple is better, Colm talked about this on Monday night, and art always mirrors life – which is why I love literature so much) DON’T GET INTO A DIALOGUE WITH YOUR OCD. Don’t ask for reassurance. I was advising someone else to NOT seek reassurance last night, and the person told me today that their anxiety has gone up. This is sadly what happens for a while, we ignore our OCD and it starts to metamorphose, ramp up, become more absurd, more real. 

I kept asking myself what has happened to my life as I looked Robert Macfarlane from my bed post lecture, adrenaline buzzing away. Well, he doesn’t have baby twins, I said to myself. But they’re not babies now, said another voice, they’re at school, and you have tonnes of time, all the time, to write, recover from OCD, see clients, run the house, etc. etc. etc. I was making jam sandwiches this morning splitting up a fight about a bunny in a Barbie bed and a note pad (I think) that had gone missing from one of the twins’ bags. What was Robert doing? Reading Ezra Pound? This is a new name of an author I’ve kind of heard of, but I read his brilliant essay The Gift of Reading which can be found on Amazon and the proceeds of which go to charity (it is a great little gift for someone who means a lot to you). 

Is reading Ezra better than what I was doing anyway? Achievement is a really weird thing, it’s something I’ve grappled with my whole life, unsuccessfully. My friend Michelle and I were talking about how excitement and high expectations of oneself are a bit of a lethal cocktail – especially for someone with a mental health disorder. As I am writing this, I am wondering if it is indeed OK to have ambition, expectation, something to strive towards. I’ve grappled with existential OCD and been terrified of dying – but I now wonder if the fear is not actually of dying but that I will leave this planet not having published a book, something that can remain permanent, in print and on this earth forever. As John Vaillant brilliantly said, ‘to write you need a massive ego and be consumed with yourself, but you also need to learn to get out of the way.’ 

This all feels quite navel-gaze-y so I will wrap up, save to say I went to pieces being at the front of the queue for Colm Tóibín’s Long Island book signing, telling him he was a hero of mine before I sort of ran away. My friend and I got to the very front of the debating chamber to see him, two metres or so away from the great man. I had no questions then, aside I now have one because some guy said to my friend while I was in the ladies that the author writes ‘great book club books.’ This made me so angry but I hadn’t yet processed it to ask CT if he felt angry about it too (he probably doesn’t care). Is literature something you have to slave over – like some kind of rite of passage? For another post, another time.