Sharon Begley - Can’t Just Stop: An Investigation of Compulsions

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ALSO BY SHARON BEGLEY

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with Jeffrey M. Schwartz

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Copyright 2017 by Sharon Begley

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition February 2017

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Jacket Illustrations by Alex Merto

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Begley, Sharon, 1956- author.

Title: Cant just stop : an investigation of compulsions / Sharon Begley.

Description: New York : Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016016745 (print) | LCCN 2016029889 (ebook) | ISBN 9781476725826 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781476725840 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Obsessive-compulsive disorderPopular works.

Classification: LCC RC533 .B446 2017 (print) | LCC RC533 (ebook) | DDC 616.85/227dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016016745

ISBN 978-1-4767-2582-6

ISBN 978-1-4767-2584-0 (ebook)

J OHN M ILTON, HAVING SET HIMSELF the modest task in Paradise Lost of justifying the ways of God to man, was blind for most of the time he was creating his epic poem, from 1658 to 1667. So every morning, once that days scribeone of his three daughters or, sometimes, his nephewarrived, he began dictating another batch of what would be the ten thousand-plus lines of verse describing the fall of humankind, lines that he crafted every night and memorized until daylight broke. (A painting hanging in the main branch of the New York Public Library, Mihly Munkcsys 1877 oil, The Blind Milton Dictating Paradise Lost to His Daughters, depicts Mary, Deborah, and Anne facing their father around an ornate table, ready to midwife the birth of one of western literatures seminal works.) If that days designated amanuensis was late, according to an anonymous biographer, hee would complain, Saying hee wanted to bee milkd. The bovine metaphor could not be clearer: like a cow aching to release her store, Milton had a palpable need to be unburdened of the memorized lines of verse that filled him with anxiety until he could get them out.

Hemingways drive to write apparently had similar roots. In the characteristic monosyllabicity that inspired countless Papa-imitation contests, he put it this way: When I dont write, I feel like shit.

Both writers work sprang not, or not only, from a deep creative impulse and genius that could find expression nowhere except the page, but from something deeper, darker, more tortured. They were driven to write, compelled to get words down on paper in order to keep the psychic pain they felt at bay. Yet far from being unremittingly debilitating, even destructive, their compulsion to create brought them literary immortality. The rest of us made out pretty well, too: generations of readers have found comfort in the Fall and promised redemption of humankind, or inspiration in the self-sacrifice of Robert Jordan as the forces of the Spanish fascists approached.

There are endless motivations for human behavior, from the basic drives for food and sex to more complicated ones such as ego gratification, reputation building, altruism, compassion, envy, anger, a sense of duty, and simple pleasure, among so many others. But none of these explain behaviors that we feel irresistibly, often inexplicably, driven to engage in: compulsions. Compulsions come from a need so desperate, burning, and tortured it makes us feel like a vessel filling with steam, saturating us with a hot urgency that demands relief. They are an outlet valve, a consequence of anxiety as inevitable as burst pipes are a consequence of water freezing within a buildings plumbing. But while compulsions bring relief, they bring little enjoyment, and while with one part of our brain we desperately wish to stop them, with another we are desperately afraid of stopping.

Compulsively checking your smartphone for text messages, stabbing the thing the moment you step out of a dead zone and get a signal; frantically trying to beat a level in a video game; acquiring more and more stuff, no matter how much you already have and how unfulfilled each previous hoard has left youwe feel compelled to engage in these behaviors and more because, if we dont, we feel the anxiety that drove Milton to regurgitate his memorized lines or that caused Hemingway to feel like shit.

In that sense a compulsive behavior is true to the words etymology. We describe as compulsive someone who reads, tweets, steals, cleans, watches birds, lies, blogs, shops, checks Facebook, posts to Instagram, eats, or Snapchats not only frequently but with the urgency of one who is not fully in control of his behavior. Similarly, we describe as compelling motives, novels, reasons, evidence, television shows, arguments, scenarios, advertisements, melodramas, speeches, and candidates that create a sort of behavioral black hole: their attraction is so powerful, if we try to keep ourselves from being drawn in, if we try to look away or pull away, we feel a shiver (or more) of anxiety that can be assuaged only if we give in. Action that is compelled is brought about by pressure or even force, often against the will of the person executing the action; behavior that is compulsive arises from an irresistible, urgent drive or urge, one that loses none of its potency from the fact that it often clashes with ones conscious inclinations, wishes, and even deep desires. Our compulsions arise from a mortal ache that we will go to what seem the craziest extremes to soothe.

British historian Roy Porter (19462002) observed in a 1991 essay titled Reason, Madness, and the French Revolution that every age gets the lunatics it deserves. And ever since the 1947 publication of W. H. Audens poem The Age of Anxiety , ours has been an era defined by dreads both existential and trivial, societal and personal. Although Auden wrote in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the sources of anxiety in the twenty-first century go well beyond the specter of nuclear holocaust.

They include global warming and other forms of environmental destruction so powerful that humans have become like gods, replacing the nature in natural disaster to become the agents of floods, wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, and even the inexorable rise of the seas. They include the possibility that terrorism could again descend from an azure September sky or turn places as quotidian as an airport check-in, a subway, a concert hall, and a marathons finish line into carmine killing fields. The sources of anxiety include, too, relentless technological advances that seem to outpace the ability of the human brain to keep up, from the banal ( Should I be on Snapchat or WhatsApp, or both, or... ? ) to the consequential ( What cancer treatment from which doctor at which hospital should my mother get? ). The minute-by-minute monitoring of whether one is Hot or Not and how many likes that clever post on Facebook got can ignite a smoldering anxiety that feels as if our blood has turned to lava and is seeking the weakest escape portal. Parents a couple of generations ago did not stress out over getting their children into the right preschool, nor did yesterdays teenagers and new graduates agonize over once-trivial choices such as what summer job to get or extracurricular activities to sign up for. And before the likes of Google Shopping and FareCompare, buying decisions did not bring the stress of wondering, If I had just clicked through to the next page, or tried a different site, would I have found a better, less expensive version of what I wanted? No wonder some of us must compulsively check Zappos.coms 517th pair of pumps before we can enter our credit card number.