For a while, OCD was not just any disease. It was my disease. No one else was allowed to claim it, because if other people suffered like I did, it felt like I never suffered in the first place. Quite a selfish thought, really, but OCD is a very self-absorbed disease. It seeks all available attention until there is none left to give.

In 4th grade, I had to whisper the names of every student in my class in alphabetical order. My only audience was my humidifier and the radiator (which stopped and started in reluctant applause at my incredible memory). If I failed to recall a classmate, I couldn’t fall asleep. It simply wasn’t feasible. I would shut my eyes and listen to the radiator, but my fists would clench and the 4:00 a.m. light creeping through the cracks between my curtains would settle over my eyelids. Sleep would not come.

In 6th grade, I chewed each bite 30 times in each cheek. I believed that even one bite short of my perfect number would cause me to fail to digest the meal entirely; it would settle in my stomach like a rock, destined to be an eternal resident of my digestive system. I knew it was a foolish thought, and therefore kept it to myself; but I  believed it nonetheless.

In 8th grade, I cried because I knew something wasn’t right. Nothing was ever right, but I was never sure why. My breath was taut, like shrinking elastic. Four in, seven out. Harsh beams of light filtered through my sterile shades; the four strips of white that shone on the floor between the bed and the wall were the same every day. Four was a bad number, so I avoided them. One foot on the cold hardwood, and then another, until they were side by side, toe-to-toe. Three sips of water. Gulp, gulp, gulp. Cup back down. Center it, good. Every morning was the same routine, and I liked it this way.

It was also in 8th grade that I developed my X-ray vision. Max Jacobs threw up in the middle of our first period class. Mrs. Peterson was explaining the importance of special right triangles when he started coughing. He didn’t even bother aiming for the sink or a trash can. It blanketed his desk like a cocoon, spilling over into his backpack.

“Oh dear,” began Mrs. Peterson, but I didn’t stay to listen to the remainder of her sentence. I pulled on my sweatshirt and hurdled over an empty chair to reach the door before any germs could spread to my open lips. I saw the bacteria floating through the air, crawling along the carpet, clinging to the soles of my shoes, sinking into the raw skin on my palms.

I despised the nurse’s office. It was the most germ-ridden place in the entire school. Germs were everywhere: in the bathroom and on the arm rests of the benches. I usually avoided this hell hole at all costs, but at that moment I didn’t know where else to go.

I perched myself on the table while I hyperventilated. I had never breathed so fast before, but I didn’t have time to be impressed with this new skill because the nurse was rubbing my back with her hand – the same hand that had rubbed hundreds of other backs that very week. I tore myself away from her and shoved my hands into my pockets where they couldn’t touch anything else. I held my breath so I wouldn’t have to breathe infested air. By the time I could no longer hold it, she was dialing the number on my emergency contact sheet. I breathed into the hood of my sweatshirt and waited.

When I got home, I stood under the bathroom’s judging light. I scrubbed antibacterial soap into the bleeding canyons on the backs of my hands, cracked from a combination of over-washing

and exposure to the biting winter air. I used hot water until the skin beneath my fingernails turned purple. I clenched the skin of my cheeks in my molars until my eyes watered and counted to 100. A solid number. A safe number.

“What are you doing?” My dad flicked off the faucet. I was just relieved that I didn’t have to touch it.

Hands suspended in the air, water dripping onto my socks, I whispered, “Washing my hands.”

Next, I found myself in a cold office. All the laminated degrees meant nothing to me, but they must have meant something to my parents. They trusted this man enough to leave me in his care for hours at a time, even though they hardly knew him. His name was Dr. Clump, and that was all I really knew about him aside from the fact that he graduated with a PhD from Brown.

It haunted me that he knew so much about me, yet I knew so little about him. I was determined to find out more. All I knew was what I could see, and I never liked that, because there were always things lurking beneath the surface. I knew he leaned back in his chair as he talked, and his stomach would protrude over his thick black belt, landing on top of his desk. I knew a Diet Coke left a wet ring on a book called, A Comprehensive Guide to Adolescent OCD. Perhaps he was going on a diet, a rather unsuccessful one. I knew he closed his eyes while he talked, inspiring me to coin the nickname later when I described the session to my parents: Closed-eyed Clump.

His desk lacked any photographs of a wife, kids, or even a dog. There were only generic framed pictures that he clearly didn’t take himself. A fall leaf, a water droplet on a brick. They seemed

meaningless, and hung crooked on his wall. I wondered if he had done that on purpose, because surely, no grown man could manage to center a photo that poorly.

I found solace in the small octagonal window behind him. It was blue, gray, black, or orange depending on the time of day. I loved the drive home from his office through the city, with its buildings stacked neatly side-by-side and its precisely planted shrubbery. It meant I would not have to stare past his ugly glasses into curious, prying eyes for at least another week. However, I loathed the ride there, with the car-seat fabric stretching between my white knuckles and me constantly rolling the window up and down because I could never get it just right.

During one of our earlier sessions, I noticed his computer had adopted a new screensaver: polar bears. It changed about every 30 seconds or so, and each depiction of the animal featured a new pose – one leaning against a rock, one sitting cross-legged, one standing on its heels begging for fish, one resting on its back with its stomach stretching out over its legs. Then and there, I decided my shrink quite resembled this arctic species, but his most accurate likeness was certainly the last image on the slideshow.

“Do you know why I chose the polar bears?”

I shook my head.

“Now that I brought it up, and you’re staring at them, you can’t stop thinking about them, can you?”

I shook my head again. This was our usual routine. He would say something he thought to be profound or groundbreaking and smile to himself at his own genius while I either nodded or shook my head, depending on what I deemed appropriate.

“It’s like OCD. As much as you try to stop yourself from thinking about your compulsions, they will never go away. You have to stop trying to make them go away, and they will.” This seemed extremely counterproductive. Wasn’t his entire job to cure me? Not to make up reasons why I wasn’t yet cured. I realized how unfair this entire thing was. Why me? Dr. Clump told me I had the perfect case of OCD, but he also said nothing was perfect. He was full of contradictions. It comforted me, knowing that something about me was perfect, just right: my OCD. As I watched the sinking orange beyond the car windshield, while my dad whistled his usual backing-out-of-a-

therapist’s-driveway tune, I thought about this idea. I thought about it quite often.

Nothing is perfect. What exactly did that mean? I had heard things described as perfect before, so how was it possible that perfection didn’t exist? It was August when I realized he was right. During one of our dimmer, lamp-lit sessions over the winter, he told me to go kayaking. I was watching sleet blanket a telephone wire through the octagon as he described the ripples in the water that stem from the rivulets dripping off the paddle. How they appear unflawed at first glance, the rings all equal lengths from each other, separating slowly, continuing far into the distance.

“But,” he had said, “even one of the most seemingly perfect sights in nature is still not entirely perfect. A boat could drive by, disrupting the pattern; this is essentially what OCD is. Something disrupts the pattern and it upsets us.” This sounded like something a bearded man with horn-rimmed glasses framed by Brown degrees would say, but it was also one of the moments when I was most fond of my therapist. It was a very therapist thing to say, and I liked that. I liked

that it was expected, but I still wasn’t sure how that piece of advice could fix me.

Come summer, though, I did as he told me. As soon as I stepped into the boat, I immediately became ill-at-ease. It tilted with the shifting wake, and I never liked being off balance. Water soaked through my shorts, prickling the skin on my thighs. My breathing tightened again. Seven, four, seven, four. I watched the sky warm to a pale red reflecting in the water on the ripples. It’s true. They aren’t perfect, but they’re still beautiful. Exposure therapy: a term Clump liked to

throw around a lot. I knew it was important for me to get better, but I kept putting it off. Getting better seems hard, far away, the future you imagine on the hopeful edge of sleep, but in the back of your mind know it will never find its way into reality. I dipped my fingers into the cool pink water, sweet on my chipped fingernails. I let them stay there for a solid amount of time. I didn’t count, just waited for my fingers to grow numb as I stared at my rosy reflection in the lake water. I tried to remember the second part of what Clump had said. As he was finishing his sentiment, I remembered, I was watching a cardinal flick ice from the telephone wire,

“Even if something disrupts the pattern, don’t let it upset you. Nothing’s perfect, and that’s okay.”