THE WOMAN WHO THOUGHT TOO MUCH
Joanne Limburg was born in London in 1970, and studied Philosophy at Cambridge. She is the author of two poetry collections. Femenismo (Bloodaxe, 2000) was shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection Prize; Paraphernalia (Bloodaxe, 2007) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She lives in Cambridge with her husband and son.
‘Judicious and elegant, lucid and spry, Joanne Limburg uses her uncommon gifts to anatomize an all-too-common disorder. She brings a sort of glee to the process: for all the unhappiness she describes, this remains a joyous read.’
Kate Clanchy
‘Joanne Limburg’s The Woman Who Thought Too Much is about that most intimate and destructive of civil wars – the fight against one’s own thoughts and obsessions. Brave, witty, intelligent, wise, and honest, it is the story of a lifelong battle with neurosis, but it transcends pathology, uncovering the extraordinary underside of all our “ordinary” consciousness. Her unremitting candour liberates us all.’
Raymond Tallis
‘Limburg’s clear, unsentimental poet’s eye... conveys with great skill... the identity issue of separating the disorder from the person. Moving and compelling, full of dark humour and insight.’
Sunday Business Post
‘Reading this will compel some readers – I’m one of them – to ponder their own hang-ups. There are no easy answers, but this book offers some hope... Limburg is a talented writer, and poet... Revealing, honest and thought-provoking.’
Time Out
‘Weighty in places, both intellectually and emotionally, but Limburg renders her autobiographical tale with charming gusto and boundless energy while referencing everything from medical journals, Freud and Dante, to Hollywood films and Prefab Sprout. A lovely read, expertly crafted and imbued with wry humour. These very personal and extraordinary accounts of a difficult life feel markedly different from the norm.’
The List
THE WOMAN WHO THOUGHT TOO MUCH
A Memoir of Obsession and Compulsion
Joanne Limburg
First published in Great Britain in 2010 in hardback and export and airside trade paperback by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.
This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2011 by Atlantic Books.
Copyright © Joanne Limburg, 2010
The moral right of Joanne Limburg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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The permissions on pages 323–325 constitute an extension of this copyright page.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 84354 703 7
eBook ISBN: 978 0 85789 299 7
Printed in Great Britain
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THE WOMAN WHO THOUGHT TOO MUCH
Contents
Author’s note
Shame
Nightmares
Body
Habits
Perfection
Confession
Sin
Grief
Avoidance
Dependence
Risk
Harm
Brain
Behaviour
Losses
A note on permissions
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note
As I am aware that few people would choose to be a character in someone else’s memoir, most names have been changed. In some cases, a few other details have changed along with them.
Shame
48. At certain moments I am tempted to tear off my clothes in public.
The Padua Inventory
———
It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
Shame is an inescapable part of being human: without it, there would be little to stop us assaulting attractive strangers and defecating on tube trains. In other words, it acts as an internal social regulator, and most of the time, for most people, it does an unobtrusively good job.
But shame can also be a bully. Nastier by far than guilt, which is merely the feeling that one has done something wrong, shame is the feeling that one is being someone wrong. When we feel guilty, we want to make right the wrong action; when we feel ashamed, we want to hide the wrong self away – or obliterate it.
There are quite a few of my own selves I would obliterate, if I could: the unsuccessful, soiled selves that could never quite act or speak or look as they should; that drag shaming memories around with them. The youngest of these is myself in middle school. She is being told off in front of everybody, and her peers are enjoying it.
The ironic thing about this particular public shaming is that it never would have happened had I not been trying to avoid that very thing. By that time, I had already spent several years as one of the class weirdos, what with my precociously serious manner, my penchant for long words, and my awkwardness at games. Sometimes I did manage to join in with the other girls for a while, playing skipping, or elastic, or ball and stocking, but more often I was turned away. I can remember spending countless break-times walking round and round the perimeter of the playground all alone, head down, doing my best to look self-contained.
I didn’t feel the way I was trying to look: I felt lonely, and vulnerable with it. My school wasn’t a rough place by any means, but children are pack animals by instinct, and can’t seem to help attacking the solitary beasts. One day, for example, I was sitting on a bench, staring thoughtfully into the sky, when a couple of girls came up to me and shouted angrily in my face, ‘You’re mad!’ I didn’t know who they were, and I certainly hadn’t done anything to them, but all the same my solemn, introverted presence was an offence to them. It bothered the teachers too: every parents’ evening, my mother and father would come back to tell me the stale news that I was doing very well at my schoolwork, ‘but was a bit of a loner’.
At lunchtimes, the rule was that all children had to queue for the dining hall in twos. The dinner ladies would count off so many pairs at a time and then bring their arms down like car park barriers to hold the rest of the queue back for a few minutes, before letting another few pairs in. Looking back, I suppose this must have been the easiest way for them to manage the flow of child traffic through the dining hall, but at the time the main purpose of the whole ritual seemed to be to humiliate the friendless. More often than not, I had no partner, and the penalty for this was to be sent to the back of the queue. Again and again and again. So it was hardly surprising that, after a while, I gave up trying to get into the dining hall altogether.
Running parallel to the school’s main building was a row of single-storey, post-war prefabs. There was a long strip of uncut grass and weeds between the two which was safe and quiet. Nobody played there, because nobody was allowed to, so that was where I wen
t every day to eat my packed lunch. I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing, and the nettles had nothing to say about it.
But I had been spotted. Donna had stolen my friend Nathalie from me and turned her against me. Lately they had spent a lot of time together on the long path between the prefabs and the playing fields, playing catch with a big, heavy football; I remember that it was heavy because every time I walked past them it hit me on the head. When we played net-ball, it always seemed to be Donna who marked me; who stuck her hands up my T-shirt because, she said, they needed warming up; who followed me about the court asking endless questions about myself to which there were only wrong answers. She couldn’t get enough of my blood, and when I came out of my private dining place one day and bumped into her, ready and waiting with a whole gang of girls, I knew I had handed her a victory on a lunch plate. ‘What are you doing, Joanne?’ she asked in that syrupy tone I had come to dread. ‘Were you eating your lunch there?’ I must have said something back, but I don’t remember what: I spoke into my chest in those days, and I had a stammer to boot.
So, she told on me. Our usual form teacher, Mrs Hall, was a kind woman and probably would have dealt with the matter quietly, but unfortunately for me she was away on holiday, so I had to face Mrs Greenbaum instead. She was one of those teachers who, as far as I could tell, had entered the profession solely for the opportunities it gave her to snap children’s heads off, the more publicly the better. By the time I came back into the classroom after break-time, Donna had already spent a good ten minutes telling on me, embroidering wherever possible, and working Mrs Greenbaum up beautifully. Donna had told her that she had found me eating in the toilets – how dirty! How disgusting! She had even looked into the toilet after I had gone, she said, and seen a Marmite sandwich floating in the water, with the initials ‘JL’ scratched into it.
Perhaps Mrs Greenbaum wasn’t listening to the details, or perhaps she was just an extraordinarily credulous woman, but whatever the reason, she took Donna at her word and laid into me: I was naughty; what I’d done was filthy; the headmaster was going to be furious. She finished by using me as a teaching aid to help the class rehearse their proverbs.
‘What do they say?’ she asked. ‘When in Rome . . .’
‘. . . DO AS THE ROMANS DO!’ chorused the good children.
What could I do? My efforts to hide my soiled self had ended up with it being waved around in front of everybody, as if it were – I don’t know – a urine-soaked monogrammed sandwich. However I played it, I was different and that difference was felt as a stigma.
According to Erving Goffman, who wrote the book on stigmas and their management,1 an individual can be said to carry a stigma when there is a discrepancy between his or her ‘virtual identity’ – his term for what one is expected to be – and that person’s actual identity. A stigma is something which marks that person as outside the norm, and not in a good way. When it is revealed, its appearance might be said to interrupt the flow of easy social intercourse; it makes everyone, stigmatized and ‘normal’ alike, feel uncomfortable.
Some stigmas, such as obvious physical disability, or severe facial disfigurement, or a skin colour which differs from the norm, are impossible to hide, and any individual thus stigmatized faces a stark choice when it comes to the management of that stigma: either they shun society altogether, or they go out into it with their ‘spoiled identity’ on show and take the awkward consequences. If your stigma is not immediately obvious, you have a third option: to ‘pass’ as normal, to fail to mention it, whatever it is, and hope that you don’t get ‘outed’. Since Goffman was writing, in the 1960s, a fourth option has become increasingly popular: you out yourself. You give a newspaper interview; you go on a chat show; you write a book. But if you have any sense, you’ll think hard beforehand about how much you have to lose.
The Mental Health Foundation addressed this dilemma in 2000, in a report it called ‘Pull Yourself Together! A survey of the stigma and discrimination faced by people who experience mental distress’. One respondent wrote: ‘when I tried to kill myself 2 years ago I walked out of A&E on Saturday morning and went to work on Monday as if nothing had happened because I was scared to let anyone know.’
The report goes on to say: ‘There were many more reasons why people could not tell work colleagues than why they could . . . the most frequently reported reason for not telling work colleagues was fear of discrimination, stigma and prejudice.’ They have good reason for their fear: there are psychiatrists who advise their patients against disclosing their histories on application forms.
When it comes to covering up one’s mental health problems, sufferers from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and its ‘spectrum disorders’2 lead the field. This is a characteristic that Freud noted about a hundred years ago, when he commented that ‘many more people suffer from these forms of obsessional neurosis than doctors hear of’.3 He guessed that the prevalence of these kinds of disorders must be vastly underestimated, and current received wisdom suggests that he was right. Thanks to some rapid developments in research and treatment which have taken place over the last thirty years or so, the perception of OCD has shifted from that of a rare condition with a poor prognosis to its current status as a very common condition which can respond extremely well to the right treatment.
Despite the better prognosis and treatment, the average sufferer copes alone with the condition for an average of eleven years before seeking appropriate help. They know they’ve got a problem; in many cases, they don’t realize that their problem has been classified as a treatable illness, but, illness or not, they know they feel ashamed of it, and that they’d better keep it hidden.
The very nature of their symptoms contributes to their sense of shame. There are two components to obsessive-compulsive disorder: obsessions, which are intrusive and distressing thoughts or mental images; compulsions, which are the actions the sufferer performs in order to lessen the anxiety which these thoughts bring. While it is the intrusive and persistent quality of the thoughts, rather than their particular content, which marks them out as obsessions, their content is often of a kind that would distress or embarrass most people, were it to be revealed.
Ian Osborn sums up the usual themes very neatly by calling the relevant chapter of his book Tormenting Thoughts and Secret Rituals (1998), ‘Filth, Harm, Lust, and Blasphemy’. Common obsessions include fears of contamination and contagious disease; thoughts of the sufferer causing harm to herself or her loved ones, through accident or oversight, or out of some uncontrollable impulse; images of the sufferer engaging in some kind of forbidden sexual activity. Blasphemy may be a less common issue here than it is in the more religious USA, where Osborn has his psychiatric practice, but obsessions relating to religious doubts or fears of damnation have been familiar to clerics for centuries. As this suggests, the content of these obsessions – like stigmatization – is often determined by the sufferer’s social and cultural context.
The obsessions are most often shaming because of their content. Sometimes the compulsions are shaming too, because the sufferer can see perfectly well – but without being able to do anything about it – that her behaviour is ridiculous. Some compulsions, like hand washing, list making, or the repeated checking of locks and switches, are widely known about, often written on, and generally laughed at. Others are not so easy to identify. It took a long time for me to recognize it, but my favourite compulsion when hit by an obsessive thought was to seek reassurance – from my husband, from my GP, from my mother – that what I feared couldn’t happen. For eighteen months I had to push my small son, in his buggy, across a main road which had no pedestrian crossing, and for most of those eighteen months, at about 4.30 or so, my husband would find himself fielding phone calls about how I had pushed the boy across safely but a car was coming towards us as I did so and it was not that far away, but if I had fallen over it would have had time to break safely, wouldn’t it? Or turn aside, do you think? And all the time I knew how wearing
it was for my husband to be my human safety blanket, and how ridiculous I was being, but it was still a long while before I managed to prevent myself from picking up the phone and bleating on like an idiot.
I didn’t realize that this reassurance seeking could be seen as a compulsion. Neither did I understand how many compulsive activities I was managing to perform inside the privacy of my own mind: I was ‘neutralizing’ my obsessions with counter-thoughts; I was ‘ruminating’. I am one of a large group of OCD sufferers – some think the largest – whose symptoms are mostly in their heads. When I tell people that I’ve been diagnosed with OCD, their first question, more often than not, is: ‘So what do you do then?’ My usual answer is: ‘Nothing that you can see.’ When your stigma is of this kind, the easiest thing is to take option 3, and keep it zipped.
While we’re on the subject of how to manage one’s stigma, it’s also worth pointing out that OCD sufferers, as a general rule, care more than most about what others think of them. We are known to be ‘reward-dependent’ (where the reward is someone else’s approval) and to have ‘tender consciences’. As a group, we are law-abiding, conscientious, exquisitely self-conscious and excruciatingly eager to please. We set ourselves the highest standards, and are disgusted with ourselves when we don’t live up to them. We are forever scanning our own faces for flaws and other people’s faces for signs of disapproval. We cannot forgive ourselves for ever having acted stupidly; we cannot bear to make a mistake. We can be destroyed by the merest hint of criticism but we criticize ourselves all the time. No wonder that most of us choose to ‘pass’, if we possibly can.
Neither is it at all surprising that many sufferers don’t even know that there’s a name for what they’re hiding. They would be unlikely to recognize themselves in popular images of the illness. Think of Leonardo di Caprio in The Aviator, for example, playing Howard Hughes as a naked, bearded recluse, peeing into empty milk bottles in a darkened room. Or Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets, playing it for laughs as a tactless, misanthropic neat freak who brings his own plastic cutlery to restaurants. Dirty Filthy Love, a play broadcast on ITV in 2004, was written by a sufferer, and managed to convey more of what the condition feels like from the inside, but it was a television play, so it still had to show the afflicted characters doing things: walking strangely up the stairs, wiping seats before they sat on them, that kind of thing. As I remember, every single one of them was bothered by dirt – I’m not. I tend not to notice the dust building up in my house until I can shuffle through it. But I have been diagnosed with OCD.
Woman Who Thought too Much, The Page 1