Jennifer Traig - Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood

Copyright 2004 by Jennifer Traig

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Little, Brown and Company

Hachette Book Group USA

237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

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First eBook Edition: September 2007

ISBN:978-0-316-02856-1

Illustrations by Peter Bernard

For my family, Alain, Judith, and Vicky,
who have the patience of saints

M Y FATHER AND I were in the laundry room and we were having a crisis. It was the strangest thing, but I couldnt stop crying. And there were a few other weird things: I was wearing a yarmulke and a nightgown, for one, and then there were my hands, red and raw and wrapped in plastic baggies. My lip was split. There were paper towels under my feet. And weirdest of all, everything I owned seemed to be in the washing machine, whites and colors, clothes and shoes, barrettes and backpacks, all jumbled together. Huh.

Huh, my father said, examining the Reebok Esprit Hello Kitty stew churning through permanent press. You want to tell me what happened here?

Wasnt it obvious? The fumes from the bacon my sister had microwaved for dessert had tainted everything I owned, so now it all had to be washed. But this sort of rational explanation hadnt been going over well with my father lately. I scrambled to think of another, turning lies over in my mouth: it was homework, an experiment; it was performance art, a high-concept piece protesting the consumerization of tweens. I glanced up at my father and down at the machine, then dragged my baggied wrist under my nose and exhaled. I dont know.

We didnt know. Many years later we would learn that what happened was a strange condition called scrupulosity, a hyperreligious form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It hit me when I was twelve and plagued me, off and on, throughout my teens, making every day a surprising and mortifying adventure. The disease manifested itself in different ways, but they were always, always embarrassing. Sometimes I had to drop to my knees and pray in the middle of student council meetings, and sometimes I had to hide under the bleachers and chant psalms. Sometimes I couldnt touch anything and sometimes I had to pat something repeatedly. Sometimes I had to wash my hands and sometimes I had to wash someone elses. Sometimes I had to purify my binders. Sometimes I had to put all my things in the washing machine.

Scrupulosity is also known as scruples, a name I much prefer. Scruples sounds like it could be a pesky, harmless condition: I ate some bad clams last night, and today Ive got the scruples. Scruples is cute and saucy. Oh, you and your scruples, I imagined my date saying, laughing at the coy way I examined my lunch for spiritual contaminants. Scruples also evokes the fabulous Judith Krantz novel that would lead me to expect a far different disorder, one in which my mental illness compelled me to fulfill the fantasies of Beverly Hills debaucheesfor a price.

But its none of that. In fact, scruple is the Latin word for a small sharp stone. Originally this denoted a measure; the idea was that the sufferer was constantly weighing the scales of her conscience. I imagine a pebble in a shoe, perhaps because I was hobbled by constant nagging worries and by the undersized pointed flats I wore to punish myself. They pinched and chafed and matched nothing I owned, but werent nearly as uncomfortable as the doubts that plagued me every second of every day.

Scrupulosity is sometimes called the doubting disease, because it forces you to question everything. Anything you do or say or wear or hear or eat or think, you examine in excruciatingly minute detail. Will I go to hell if I watch HBO? Is it sacrilegious to shop wholesale? What is the biblical position on organic produce? One question leads directly to the next, like beads on a rosary, each doubt a pearl to rub and worry. Foundation garments, beverages, reading material: for the scrupulous, no matter is too mundane for a dissertation-length theological interrogation. Oh, we have fun.

But it was 1982, and we didnt know any of this then. We didnt know what this was or where it had come from. It had come out of nowhere. Well, there were things. There was the fact that Id been having obsessive-compulsive impulses since preschool. These had been stray and occasional, and while my parents may have thought it was strange that I couldnt stop rearranging the coasters, they didnt think it was anything worth treating. The compulsions had grown with me, however, and now they loomed like hulking, moody preteens. There was also the fact that Id been systematically starving myself for a year and was no longer capable of making any kind of rational decision. I sometimes wore knickers and pumps, wore fedoras and a vinyl bomber jacket to seventh grade, setting myself up for the kind of ridicule that takes years of therapy and precisely calibrated medications to undo. No, I was in no condition to make rational decisions, no condition at all.

And into this mire had come halachah, Jewish law. I had begun studying for my bat mitzvah, twelve years old and a little bit scattered and crazy, and suddenly here were all these wonderful rules. They were fantastic, prescribing ones every movement, giving structure to the erratic compulsions that had begun to beat a baffling but irresistible tattoo on my nervous system. Halachah and latent OCD make a wonderful cocktail, and I was intoxicated. Suddenly I wasnt just washing; I was purifying myself of sin. I wasnt just patting things; I was laying on hands. Now my rituals were exactly that: rituals.

And my gosh, it was fun. The endless chanting, the incessant immersing of vesselsI couldnt get enough. The obsessive behavior quickly evolved from a casual hobby to an all-consuming addiction, a full-time occupation. It happened so fast. One day I was riding bikes to McDonalds like a normal kid; the next, I was painting the lintels with marinade to ward off the Angel of Death.

I dont remember what came first, but I think it was the food. At this point Id been having problems with food in an obsessive but secular way for about a year. I had begun eliminating foods from my diet, first sugar and shortening, and then cooked foods, then food that had been touched by human hands, then processed foods, and then unprocessed. By January we were down to little more than dried fruit, and my nails were the texture of string cheese.

But then came these lovely laws to give shape to my dietary idiosyncrasies. It was so sudden and unexpected, this revulsion to pork and shellfish, to meat with dairy. I hadnt asked for it, but here it was. Suddenly I was keeping kosher. I was sort of keeping kosher. I was afraid to tell my parents, so I was hiding it, spitting ham into napkins, carefully dissecting cheese from burger, pepperoni from pizza.

Is there a reason youre hiding that pork chop under your plate? my mother wanted to know.

Oh, Im just tenderizing it, I lied, thwacking it with the Fiestaware.

Is there something wrong with the shrimp? my father inquired.

Seafood recall, they said on the news. You all can play food poisoning roulette if you like, but Im giving mine to the cat.

The food could have kept me busy forever, but I was ambitious. One by one, things fell away. I would wake up and know: today, no television, its blasphemous. Then: no more reading Seventeen, its immodest, its forbidden. A partial list of things I considered off-limits: exfoliation, hair color, mix tapes, lip gloss. Oh, I had so much energy, and there were so many laws I could take on, and when I ran out I would just make up my own.