I was diagnosed with severe OCD in my early adulthood but I had symptoms syndrome a lot sooner than that. It manifested a bunch of ways truly. I was a weird kid and if I hadn’t been a jock in the punching people sport I would have been bullied more but as it stands I was mostly just ostracized. Like, I couldn’t eat most foods or wear most fabric textures. I had strange rituals that I had to enact to keep the sky from falling. People would point out the inconsistencies in my logic, the way cause didn’t follow effect. It didn’t really shift me or stop me from doing tapping three times before picking up an object, or opening and shutting my window each time I heard thunder outside. It puzzled and enraged my parents, for sure. I get that it probably didn’t make a lot of sense from the outside.
The truth is, I was like that because nothing made a lot of sense from the inside. I did not understand the nature of cause and effect, or of entropy, or of time. I did not understand how my body was made or what my destined place in the universe might be. And so, like everyone reliant on superstition, I was only succeeding on accident. Because I didn't know how anything worked.
I couldn’t use a notebook until I was 17. I had notebooks, I liked the way the pages felt as they ruffled through my hands, and sometimes I would ask for one or steal one. I liked to read books and I liked the idea of writing books. But I couldn’t write in my notebooks. I would try, and the page would come out looking bad, and then I would rip the page out and not try again for a long time.
You see, I thought that notebooks were for reading later. And they can be. Like, you can see how a child, observing adults using notebooks, might come to that conclusion. But that is incidental to the function of a notebook. The actual function of a notebook is to be a working space for you to attempt to understand shit.
Nobody ever taught me how to use a notebook. I just thought I was doing it wrong, and didn’t understand how to really use it, and could not intuit the necessary steps, and nobody showed me because I am a homeschooled army brat with a B.A. in horseshit phrenology from Big Student Loan so when I tell you I didn’t have a proper upbringing and I didn’t have an education. Right.
So what happened to me was, I started writing poetry. And I started keeping drafts in a notebook. And that was really hard. It was so hard. I tore out a lot of pages and so I’m missing most of my earliest writing which is a bit sad to me now at 30. I wrestled with the OCDemons and won and slowly I got better at it. And then I would encounter some situation, and fail at it for a long time, and eventually it would occur to me “would it be easier if I wrote some of this down?” And I would write a grocery list. I would slowly improve at making grocery lists that were useful to me, readable at a glance, so on.
But I had to do that for like, every task. This process went on for literally the next two decades. I am only now this year really using notebooks in the way they are most useful. Like can you imagine. Instead of starting at the notebook because I understood what the tool was for, I would like. Be driven by circumstances to the notebook, eventually randomly try writing part of my task out, trial and error painfully get better. Like the absolute most painful way to learn to write shit down. And it was like that for every. Single. Task. I had to learn separately to use the notebook for groceries and budgeting and meeting notes and things to tell my friends later and all the normal human things people use their working notebooks for.
Because I did not understand how to systematize information in a generalized sense, I did not know how to go from an initial impression, to some kind of data set, to some kind of decision about the causal relationships in the world around me and how that might impact my own choice of action.
When you systematize information, you go from folklore to engineering.
