Back when I watched a lot of TV, one of my favorite shows was Monk. Starring Tony Shaloub as Adrian Monk, a brilliant former San Francisco police detective who was medically retired from the force after his wife was killed in a car bombing, but who now works with his former department as a private consultant and is trying to solve his wife’s murder. Monk’s problem, though, is that he has severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), so bad, in fact, that he needs a ‘nanny,’ an assistant to help him manage his private affairs. This was a groundbreaking police procedural that combined elements of drama and comedy in equal measure, following Monk as he solved cases that baffled the police while at the same time battling inner demons and frustrating the heck out of his friends with his OCD, which was the key to both issues.
Even as a child, Monk was obsessed with details and was able to spot the tiniest of discrepancies or details that others missed. Tough on criminals and friends alike because he didn’t discriminate.
I liked the show, even if it did take Monk seven seasons (2002 to 2009) to solve his wife’s murder, not because of the acting or even the story line, but because as someone who in 1982 recognized that he had a mild case of OCD, I totally identified with Monk. The first episode I watched, which was, I believe, in the third season (I’ve since been able to watch the first three seasons on an old nostalgia channel), Monk was touching parking meters as he passed them on the street, counting them, and when something distracted him, causing him to miss one, he went back to the beginning of the block and started over. That’s the kind of thing a person with severe OCD will do.
My own case, which I think I probably had from childhood but didn’t recognize until 1982 when I worked at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, is mild in comparison, and I’ve never been formally diagnosed by a doctor, but I’ve read enough about the condition to recognize it. For example, whenever I walk up or down a flight of stairs, I count the steps, and when I’m in a house with multiple stairways, I count and compare them all, and make a mental note of discrepancies. For instance, in one house we lived in, from the second floor to the ground floor there were fourteen steps, but from ground floor to basement, there were thirteen. Going into my basement always felt a little strange because of that one step difference. I also have a habit of putting on and taking off socks and shoes in a specific order, left one first. My wife was handing me my shoes once as we were preparing to go shopping and she handed me my right shoe first. I started to put it on, and it didn’t feel right, so I put it down and reached for the left shoe. She gave me a funny look but said nothing. Those around people with OCD tend to either act like that—studiously ignoring it with rolled eyes—or getting angry and frustrated.
I say all this to make a point, though. OCD in its mild form does not have to be debilitating. The ability to see the fine details in things, like how many tiles from door to door across a room, or that one tile is slightly off kilter from the others, can be the key to solving problems that other people can’t because they can’t see the trees for the forest.
My own little OCD habits just happen to serve me well. My attention to seemingly obscure details enable me to solve problems that other people have given up on, or to see the connections between and among apparently disparate elements that explain why things work in a particular way or fail to work. My habits, such as always getting dressed in a particular way, or hanging my clothes or putting my toothbrush in specific places might seem petty to you but having this comfortable pattern for the everyday things that enable me to get up and get going without having to put too much thought into it leaves my mind free to explore creative things or to deal with emergencies when they arise.
When I was about nine of ten, the grease in a skillet caught fire in our kitchen. My mother, normally a solid person, momentarily panicked. Had she been alone in the kitchen our old wood frame house might’ve caught fire and burned down (it did years later when she was alone with two of her grandchildren, but she at least had the presence of mind to get them out without injury). It just so happened, though, that I was standing near her at the time and was mesmerized by the way the gas burner on the stove worked. When the skillet burst into flame, I actually saw how it happened. The grease in the skillet was popping from the heat. A globule burst into flame from the fire that was licking up the side of the skillet and there was a kind of cascade effect which resulted in the whole surface of the skillet erupting in flame. Without thinking about it much, I realized that the popping, flaming grease could easily jump to the wood of our walls, so I picked up the hot skillet in my left hand, walked to the door, opened it, and tossed the skillet into the backyard where the flames soon burned out. I then went back into the kitchen where my mother, now recovered from her panic, put salve and a bandage on the blisters on the palm and fingers of my left hand.
Years later, when I was American ambassador in Cambodia and tensions flared up between the Cambodians and the Thai resulting in students rioting in Phnom Penh and burning Thai facilities, including their embassy, I called a meeting of my embassy emergency action committee, turned it over to my deputy, and went to my residence which overlooked the main street that the demonstrators were using, and which the army used to finally quell the riots. I worked two phones, getting reports from the wife of my Japanese colleague, whose residence was next door to the Thai embassy, and keeping my deputy briefed on what I was seeing so he could keep Washington informed. After things settled down, someone on my staff remarked at how calm I remained throughout what was for them a very traumatic incident. I didn’t get into a discussion of why; just said remaining calm is essential to solving problems. Truth be told, I was so preoccupied with cataloging the details of what was going on I had no time to panic.
That’s how you live with OCD. You put it to work for you. – NWI
