Teneo Aribus Lupum, or The Beginning
Trap her in the woods, see her hood flashing red through the pines
Briars in her hair, bloody lip, where I’ll sip, lapping red just like wine
Granny’s got a plan, take my hand, little girl, darling child
Let me keep you warm, wrap you up from the wet and the wil
- Red Hiding Hood, Elysian Fields
I used to dream of a wolf.
Snakelike, it would enter my room and slip along the bottom bunk where my youngest sister slept and ascend with improbable skill to the top where I lay, rigid with terror and waiting for the worst. Its form, black beyond pitch, absorbed light like the nightmare that it was. Its features were all the more terrifying for being vague, but its teeth were there, ready to devour me one agonizing bite at a time.
I have always been visited by a wolf, you might say, and the wolf has never left me.
The title of this blog takes its name from a Roman proverb, attributed to the Roman Emperor Tiberius, teneo aribus lupum. Or, “I have a wolf by the ears.” Tiberius said this of ruling an empire. I do not have empire to contend with, as Tiberius did, but instead the ruling of my own mind.
The wolf I refer to here in this blog, no longer a shadow of a child’s nightmare, is instead an insidious demon that can neither extinguished or banished for long. The product of a misfiring, incorrectly wired brain, the wolf can only be persuaded to quiet for a time.
This story, the story of the wolf, begins with the caudate nucleus. My caudate nuclei, to be more specific. There are two caudate nuclei in the brain, one each side, deep in the center, almost at the midbrain. A little comma shape in the center of what it is to be you. The caudate nucleus’s little job is to filter thoughts as they run through the mind. A repugnant thought, a disturbing thought, or an irrational thought in the brain of a person with properly functioning caudate nuclei might be analyzed and dismissed and the thought dissolves into the ever flowing river that is the conscious mind. In the brain of a person with dysfunctional caudate nuclei, an unwanted thought occurs and while it may be dismissed, it occurs again. And again. And again. And again. This tiny error in the wiring in this area of the brain results in a neuropsychiatric disorder known as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This, of course, is a simplification of an error in the relationship between other parts of the brain in the immediate area, but in terms of which part carries the weight of responsibility, the caudate nucleus is the guy who “left the gate open.”
To return to Tiberius for a moment, he was the third Roman emperor, after Augustus. The adopted son of Augustus, he was named emperor in 27 CE, well into his middle age. While Rome prospered under his rule because he cut spending and didn’t start wars for amusement or glory, he eventually gained a reputation for cruelty, especially in his later years. Early in his reign, he began to encourage the practice of delation. In the time of Ancient Rome, there was no such thing as an official prosecution system. The government, instead, relied on citizens to accuse a person of a crime and bring them before a governing body, where they would be obliged to argue their case against the accused. If the “prosecutor” won the case, they would be rewarded a sum of money for successfully bringing a criminal to justice.
This system was, as one can imagine, outrageously abused.
OCD is, in a way, quite like a falsifying delator, pacing before the Senate of the mind and tirelessly laying down evidence for case, after case of irrational and improbable convictions.
I have had OCD for almost as long as I can remember. While many manifestations of OCD involve physical compulsions, such as cleaning, or checking, my version of this demon is what is known as Pure OCD, or OCD that is composed purely of obsessions, wherein the compulsions are checking thoughts rather than checking doors, windows, or stoves. The key distinction of an obsessive thought is that one maintains one’s awareness of how horrible or bizarre the thought is while having the thought, as opposed to a delusion, in which one is unaware of the insane nature of the thought and acts accordingly because the thought is a product of one’s mind based on specific beliefs or rationalities as a result of the unwell state of the mind. This goes along with the old adage that an insane person doesn’t know they’re insane. People with OCD, on the other hand, are all too aware of how insane their thinking is and suffer for it.
It is impossible to express what is to know how absurd these thoughts are, but to doubt the validity of that fact. OCD is sometimes called The Doubting Disease, and with good reason. While you may reassure yourself of certain facts--”I’m not a homicidal maniac, I’ve never hurt anyone in my life and I don’t want to.”--OCD’s job is to make sure that you cannot accept them-- “Are you sure? Or are you just in denial about your inner urges?” And the thoughts, thanks to that those little commas in the brain, will not stop. How appropriate that they are the shape of a symbol that implies there is more to come, always more to come.
The biggest weight to carry with OCD, at least in my experience, is shame. I’ve paused here to state that because even as I set out to explain my relationship with this monster, I feel myself cringe with shame. While OCD is an involuntary, physiological misfire of the brain that results in repeated, intrusive thoughts that force the the Host (so to speak) to carry out bizarre, stressful rituals whether they are physically or mentally manifested, Or Else, it is almost impossible to escape the shame that slips alongside it, the Bonnie to its Clyde. At times it feels almost impossible to divorce oneself from the shame and the embarrassment from carrying this, pause for dramatic effect, affliction.
The intrusive thoughts I have fielded my entire life revolve specifically around violence, interpersonal relationships, morality, and, more recently, death. It is impossible to express the hell that exists on the battlefield when confronting the Enemy. But I consider myself lucky. I went twenty five years of my life before I knew that what I was experiencing was Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and I am beyond grateful to have finally discovered the truth of it. Before that, I knew only that I experienced bizarre, horrific thoughts that were so exhausting and stressful to cope with that I considered killing myself on more than one occasion to make them stop. Because of the nature of this beast, particularly Pure OCD, wherein I do not have physical compulsions which would have made it easier to identify, I believed myself to be completely insane. OCD, as far as I had ever understood it, revolved around cleaning, checking, counting. People having to adhere to a schedule and organize their shoes just so. It never even occurred to me that what I was experiencing was a different manifestation of the same condition.
Because of the physical nature of this condition, intellectually knowing that one has OCD does not lessen the impact that it has. The thoughts still appear, the compulsions still exist. There is a specific technique pioneered by Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz of UCLA that involves a four-step mindfulness process. Through the miracle of neuroplasticity, the method introduced by Dr. Schwartz literally rewires the neuron network in the brains of patients suffering symptoms of OCD. Symptoms still occur, of course, because OCD is at the time I write this an incurable conditional, but dedicated work on the part of the one afflicted can make all the difference in the world.
The key phrase being, of course, dedicated work.
The thing about OCD is that it is an insidious enemy. It seems to me at times to have an intelligence of its own. It evolves. The need to stay apace with it, to practice mindful awareness and vigilance at all times is imperative. I think of it as a demon that has attached itself to me, a monster that I am stuck with, for better or worse. Why would any rational person want to think of themselves as possessed by a demon? Because, for the purpose of separating myself from it and depersonalizing it, it is helpful for me to think of it as a separate and personified entity. A shifting, shadowy wolf. It is, of course, not, but it also serves to remind me that it is not a friendly or forgiving aspect of my mental function.
It is difficult to describe how skillfully and intricately OCD loops itself through your mind. Even when you believe you may have beaten it back, gained some control over the situation, so you might lapse in your vigilance for a while. You’re tired, you’ve been battling for so long. But like a spider ever spinning, it cunningly searches out the tiniest, most delicate hideaways where it folds itself up and then crawls inside and secrets itself until it sees an opportunity. Then it grows into an incomprehensible size, shadowy and razor toothed, and lays siege against your very sanity.
It is interesting to speculate on how many people throughout history may have been thought of as possessed or insane because of obsessions and/or compulsions that were, in reality, the cause of a misfiring brain and not the result of a metaphysical or dreadfully gothic affliction. Recounting my own history with the disease and the suffering I went through not knowing what I was contending with, I cannot imagine the suffering others may have undergone through lifetimes of living in ignorance of the fact of their condition.
John Bunyan was a 17th century preacher who suffered what we now understand to be OCD. He viewed his OCD as a test against his faith in god. He documented his struggle with his, pause for dramatic effect, affliction in his autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. He expresses well the horror of the battle in this passage:
For about the space of a month after, a very great storm came down upon me, which handled me twenty times worse than all I had met with before; it came stealing upon me, now by one piece, then by another; first, all my comfort was taken from me, then darkness seized upon me, after which whole floods of blasphemies, both against God, Christ, and the Scriptures, were poured upon my spirit, to my great confusion and astonishment. These blasphemous thoughts were such as also stirred up questions in me, against the very being of God, and of His only beloved Son; as whether there were, in truth, a God, or Christ, or no? And whether the holy Scriptures were not rather a fable, and cunning story, than the holy and pure Word of God?...
Mental illness, or “lunacy,” has a long and controversial history. The ancients, especially those of Christian and Jewish religious beliefs, tended to believe that mental illness was a punishment afflicted by God. The possession of demons. The Greeks and the Romans put more of a scientific emphasis on understanding what they were contending with. Hippocrates, often cited as the father of modern medicine, first suggested that mental illness was the result of an imbalance in the four humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm, and was treated and viewed accordingly.
This was more or less the view of it, until Middle Ages saw a regression in society’s view of mental illness and it is speculated that a number of people executed for witchcraft were, in fact, mentally ill. The term “lunacy” comes from the name of the Roman moon goddess, Luna. The relationship, of course, is the ages old idea that the moon holds sway on man’s mental wellness. This has an established relationship with lycanthropy, as well, or the notion that an infected person might be seized by the sway of the moon and transform into a wolf when the moon is full.
Even a man who is pure in heart
And says his prayers by night
May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
And the autumn moon is bright
- The Wolfman, 1941
The attempt to understand the origins of mental illness has been a singular quest for many physicians and psychiatrists alike. In recent years, after centuries of disagreement on cause for these conditions, there has been a professional agreement to settle into an understand of psychosocial factors that influence the likelihood of an individual to develop a condition. Often there are genetic factors that are at work, but environmental factors play an important role, as does physical wellness, and the individual’s success at developing emotional attachments based on their attachments to their primary caregivers, among other things.
A host of bizarre and inhumane “treatments” were developed for the mentally ill over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. These years saw a variety of trends in lunatic asylums, with an optimistic trend toward humane treatment, to more horrifying methods that were more consistent with the narrative of a horror film. It was thought for a considerable amount of time, even up until recent decades, that lunatics were more akin to animals and that their experience and perception were so vastly different from that of a normal person that it did not matter if they were kept in foul, isolated conditions and subject to bizarre and cruel “experiments.”
In combing the internet for information on OCD, I find little of interest. The Smithsonian has a small section on the history of OCD and the medical community’s attempt to understand the nature of the issue, but there is little of interest there. While OCD is not particularly prevalent among the general population, it is thought that roughly 3% of the population has the condition, two thirds of that number being adults. This estimation places OCD as the fourth most common mental health condition.
In searching for a valuable or interesting memoir on the topic, or any sort of natural history or social writing done about the condition, I find absolutely nothing of interest.
So, here then is this blog.
It would, however, be excessively boring to deal exclusively with OCD, as it is only one aspect of living. Instead, I intend to continue to investigate its history, the experiences of others with it, both in the present and in the past, as well as a number of other social, philosophical, scientific, literary, or artistic topics that strike my interest, in addition to illuminating the condition through my own experience with it. I intend to create very intersectional discourse here. There is no value in anything except in relationship and correlation with other things. Knowing the origin of something, whether it be a word, a motive, a law, or mating habits of a marsupial, breeds understanding of the thing itself, as well as the interconnectedness of everything.
In other terms, this blog is a collection of curiosities and contemplations, an autodidact delight. An autodidact with obsessive compulsive disorder. The wolf I hold by the ears is both a neuropsychiatric condition and the existential question mark of what it is to be human, in relationship to other humans, and to everything in the universe that surrounds us. Albert Einstein once said that consciousness is merely an illusion. We are one with everything. I’ve come to subscribe to that idea.
I do not claim to be an expert in any of these matters. I am only an artist and an armchair philosopher, researcher, and intellect. I am merely a curious person chasing down interests, as a dog chases rabbits. I welcome any corrections or insights into any of the points I bring up here in this post or any of the posts to follow.