The main theme of the diary was disappointment, with Cambridge, with other people, and with life in general, but mostly with myself. I was disappointed with my lack of a love life, my stalled career as an undergraduate comedy writer – which I’ll come back to later – and disappointed, so bitterly disappointed, with my academic performance. At school, I had, with a bit of luck, a certain amount of forbearance from the teachers and a following wind, managed to get all my essays in, just about. But at Cambridge, with so little structure, so many new ideas to take in, so many choices to make for myself, and with the myth of the place to live up to, I was quite overwhelmed.
It started well. The first essay I wrote was for my sociology supervisor,13 on Max Weber and bureaucracy. It was handed in on time and was, he said, of First quality. It was the worst thing that could have happened at that stage, because in pouring so much into an early effort I had set myself a ridiculous standard. I found it harder and harder to hand essays in. My supervisors tried to help, but by the end of the second term they were all clearly utterly exasperated. For some reason, I found it especially hard to produce any essays for social anthropology, and became too embarrassed to show up at supervisions; it got to the point where I was looking over my shoulder every time I left my room, in case my supervisor came up and collared me. In the end, I shut myself in my room and worked all out on an essay comparing status symbols in the West and in the Trobriand Islands, where the traditional people used piles of rotting yams much as we use huge muscle cars. I handed it in at the porters’ lodge, so I didn’t have to meet the head man. It was a good essay – as it should have been, given the time invested. I got it back with the comment, ‘It’s a shame you don’t hand essays in more often – they are very good when you do!’ It should have helped but it didn’t; I always talked up a good supervision – sometimes hardly allowing my supervision partners a word in edgeways – but when it came to written work there were too many barriers. My social psychology supervisor tried to help: ‘You can have all these wonderful ideas in your head, but if you don’t write them down you might as well not have them – it’s like masturbation.’ That didn’t help, but one can hardly blame him for trying.
As part of my research for this book, I spoke to Dr David Veale, a leading psychiatrist in the OCD/BDD field, at his office in the Maudsley Hospital. He suggested that what underlies such crippling perfectionism is the need for that ‘just right’ feeling that drives all kinds of compulsions from hand washing and oven checking through to counting and word repetition, in which sufferers ‘may use emotional criteria that you don’t finish something until it feels right, rather than taking the objective view’. A healthy student, or writer, can accept that she is unable to judge the quality of her own work for herself, and must hand it over to a supervisor, or editor, to make that final decision as to whether it is, if not ‘just right’, then at least ‘right enough’. For the obsessive student/writer, on the other hand, there is no such thing as ‘right enough’, ‘good enough’, ‘sound enough’ or even just ‘enough’.
While reading, the person may reread the same line or paragraph over and over to make sure it has been perfectly understood and that nothing has been overlooked by mistake. A behaviour that sometimes accompanies rereading is compulsive underlining or highlighting. The sufferer wants to perfectly remember everything that might be important in a book, but due to their inability to discriminate the important from the unimportant, they often end up marking most of or even the entire book.
Fred Penzel, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders: A Complete
Guide to Getting Well and Staying Well, pp. 266–7
And so it would be that after forty minutes’ study, I would have nothing to show for my labours but a handwritten copy of the first two pages of the introduction, a swollen, aching hand, a splitting headache and stomach cramps so painful that I would have to stop altogether.
So, I found other ways to fill my time. I would spend hours, day or night, shut in my room, picking my skin, listening to the Sugarcubes or Prefab Sprout, and pacing up and down. I was miserable in there, and not only because I had to share it with a growing pile of unread set texts. It had a huge curtainless window which looked across a courtyard into another huge window from which I risked being seen in all my private disgustingness. It had thin-as-my-own-skin walls, through which, my less inhibited neighbour had told me, she could hear me pee, and which allowed continual waves and gusts and peals of sociable noise to pass through from her side to mine. Its bile-green door gave out onto strip-lit corridors, which were populated almost entirely by people I sincerely wished to avoid. And I lived in fear of the building’s Banshee fire alarm, which could go off at any time and give me a panic attack.
When I couldn’t stand my room any more, which was often, I would go and wander about town disconsolately like a virginal nineteenth-century novelist looking for heights to wuther upon. I would knock on doors until I found a friend who was both in and distractable, hoping that we could spend an hour or five drinking coffee and moaning at each other about not getting on with our work. If nobody was in, and it was daytime, I might wander into the shops and spend some of the money I’d saved by failing to drink like a normal student.
Sometimes I went out to eat, to see a film or a student drama production. I wrote comedy sketches and one or two of them were performed in student revues. I even managed to act a little. I made the first of my three appearances in a Dario Fo play. My character was a scared little mouse who spent the play being pushed around by the rest of the cast. It wasn’t a stretch. A couple of male cast members clocked how inexperienced and shy I was and teased me mercilessly: ‘What pure white skin!’ they would cry as I cringed in the unisex dressing room. ‘What a Madonna-like midriff!’ At the cast party, I sat pinned between them on a bench while they told me that I was grown up now, I was pretty and clever and could do whatever I liked, not just what my mother told me to do.
‘Can I tell you to piss off?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ one of them said, ‘but we won’t.’ He suggested a three-some. Then one of the other girls came over and told them to leave me alone, so they dropped me, the (metaphorical) worry marks still fresh on my nape, and went off to find sport elsewhere.
I withdrew. I avoided the dining room – dining rooms were still bad places for me – and lived on takeaways. I cried a lot. I phoned my mother most days. I often went home for the weekend. I begged the senior tutor for a quieter room and got moved to the vacant half of an attic in a postgraduate hostel across the road, which meant that I could avoid college almost completely. At the end of the year I changed from social and political sciences to philosophy. Leaving Cambridge was not an option I could countenance, but I had run as far as was permissible from that disastrous year.
My main goal for the remaining two years was to stick them out and try to stay out of trouble. The switch to philosophy was part of this damage-limitation programme. I knew that there would be no hope of bluffing my way through supervisions as I had on the first-year courses in SPS, which had been so much New Statesman and Guardian stuff. Philosophy was new to me and if I didn’t do any work this time I would fail the course and be out on my ear. As an extra insurance policy, I planned to go to as many lectures as possible and use my notes as the basis of the revision: the notes from my own reading could on no account be trusted. My brains had broken down and would have to be towed for the time being. Maybe I could get them repaired once I had my degree.
Subject changes are not uncommon in Cambridge, whose system allows for these, and I took a two-week conversion course over the summer. My first essay was called ‘Is it Possible to Doubt Everything?’ I had to read Descartes’ Meditations and reflect on the idea that perhaps one’s whole experience – everything that one understood to be reality – was nothing more than a dream conjured up by a ‘malevolent demon’. The conceptual equivalent of a perfect vacuum, this is one of philosophy’s classic ‘thought experiments’. The subjects of such experimen
ts often coincide with those of obsessive ruminations. Take, for example, these questions from my ethics final paper:
No ethically significant distinction can be drawn between acts and omissions. Discuss.
Is deciding an action? If so, does that mean that it is something we decide to do? If not, can we be blamed for our decisions?
I took ethics two years running; it was my best subject.
My weakest point was symbolic logic. My first supervisor was a very serious woman who took none of my flaky little-girl nonsense and would send me away if I arrived at a supervision underprepared. She instructed me to take the introductory logic course alongside the first years and to concentrate on catching up. For a few weeks I did as I should, but faced with blackboards and sheets covered with subscripted Ps and Qs stuck inside brackets and on either side of incomprehensible symbols, I took the line of least resistance and gave up. (I still have my logic textbook and the underlinings run out very early on.) Then there were my other responsibilities. Someone was producing The Importance of Being Earnest that term and I could not resist auditioning. I went in to read for the part of Gwendolyn and was offered Lady Bracknell. It would probably not have happened had my attempt to mimic Joan Greenwood in the film version not resulted in a passable Edith Evans. It was a dreadful piece of casting: the shortest performer in the company, I had neither the presence to fill the role nor the breath to get to the end of her mile-long sentences. My priority became to do as close to an adequate job as I could, in order not to let the director and the rest of the cast down. Skimping on my work only meant that I was letting myself down, so, from a utilitarian point of view, that mattered less.
In the event, I probably did as well as a tiny, untrained, mis-cast and only slightly talented nineteen-year-old could, and if the student critics did not single me out for praise, they did not criticize me either, which was a huge relief. After the last performance I had a massive nosebleed and decided that my on-stage career was over.
At that point I should have started concentrating on my work. My performance that first term had been patchy, at best, and my new supervisor had read me several lectures about the commitment that the study of philosophy required. I should have concentrated on my work. Instead I joined the writing team for the Footlights women’s review and directed Nikolai Gogol’s The Marriage with Jane, my old schoolfriend. The sketch I contributed, a dialogue between an insecure fourteen-year-old and her bitchy friend, went down very well, and I had hopes of achieving my dearly held ambition of getting some material into the Footlights’ main show, which went to Edinburgh, but it didn’t happen. The performers had their own material, which understandably they preferred to use. Perhaps it would have helped if I had been better at what I’ve since learned to call ‘networking’, but by the time I realized how important it was to socialize with people with whom one hoped to work, it was too late, and I’d retired disappointed from comedy. This seemed like a shame at the time, because I could see that my writing was probably no worse than most of the others’.
My directing, on the other hand, was dreadful, and the play was a fiasco. It was supposed to be a comedy. For the first four nights, nobody laughed and Jane and I watched the poor actors struggle while we sat in the back row, eavesdropping on a contemptuous and impatient audience. On the last night, when my parents happened to be in attendance, the cast could stand it no more, and in a last, desperate bid for laughs, took over the play, mugging, swearing, stuffing cushions up their costumes, bumping into each other, falling over, and generally clowning as hard as they could. The audience lapped it up, and my humiliation was complete. I sat in silence at the cast party and left early. They presented Jane and me with a bottle of Baileys, which she was happy to take away.
So that was that for me and show business. I wasn’t getting on much better with academe. Although I continued to attend lectures faithfully, and take down the thoughts of others, my own remained ungatherable. My essays were late, or superficial – often both – or else non-existent. I was postponing supervisions left, right and centre. Two of my supervisors for my second term were postgraduate students, only a few years older than I was, and they found it all but impossible to teach an undergraduate who never finished any of her essays early enough for them to read them before they saw her. An entry in my third-year diary shows how neatly one of them put her finger on my problem with work: ‘T—— always said that I never got round to essays because I worried too much about the doing of it, and forgot about the actual topic in question.’
My director of studies nailed it from a different angle. I had come to him panicking a couple of weeks before the exams, to warn him that I had been ‘having a hard time’ and that I thought I might fail. He asked, ‘Why do you find it so hard to write anything down? Is it because you’re afraid of being judged?’
‘You must have been very frustrated last year,’ he said when we met again after the summer. I had achieved an upper second in the exam – a class up from my disappointing first year in SPS – which had surprised us both. One of my teachers in the sixth form had told me that I was very good at thinking on my feet, and this had served me well in the philosophy exams, where I had found that by thinking the exam questions through from first principles, and performing my own on-the-spot thought experiments, I could to some extent make up for all the reading I’d failed to do. With nobody else’s ideas in front of me demanding to be perfectly absorbed before I could write a word, my own thoughts had been free to flow at last. The blessed thing about an exam setting, for me, was that it allowed me no access to my usual procrastination tools, so the only thing left to do was to get on with it.
Outside the exam hall, though, the usual problems remained. My unreliability as a student throughout the previous year had meant that none of my second-year supervisors was willing to take me on again, and my director of studies was reluctant to inflict me on anyone new, so he had decided that he would have to take all my supervisions for the final year himself. It was going to be the two of us, sitting in old chairs at either end of his long, Georgian study, once a week, every week, for the whole of that academic year.
My D of S always sat at his desk by the window, with his back to the light, so that if I left my glasses off, his face was a perfect blur. I had got my first pair of glasses – John Lennon ones of course – when I was fifteen, and had been using them only for blackboards, cinema screens and takeaway menus. Glasses, even John Lennon ones, were neither cute nor cool, so for most of the time I preferred to screw my eyes up and peer at the world, or else let it drift by in a haze. In so many ways the shared external world was less vivid to me than my private internal one, so it didn’t make much of a difference. I didn’t realize how bad my eyesight was, or the social consequences of this, until I was walking down King’s Parade one day and heard, just behind my right ear, ‘So what am I supposed to have done?’
I had just blanked one of my friends, and not for the first time that term. From that point on, I began to wear my glasses more often.
When I was shut up with my D of S in his long study, I left them off on purpose. I thought that perhaps this would keep my Inappropriate Thoughts out of the room. As I understood it, the two of us were sitting together in a working space, a philosopher’s study no less, and the only thoughts I should have in it were of secondary qualities, dialectical reasoning, categorical imperatives, substances, spirit and the like. I should certainly not be entertaining, however unwillingly, mental pictures of myself engaging in acts which I had never witnessed, let alone performed, especially not if these pictures included the man in front of me, who was a teacher, a figure of authority, a philosopher to boot. If I made eye contact with him, I thought, he would be sure to read these thoughts in my eyes, these proofs of my psychosexual aberrance, and be disgusted. So I chose not to wear my glasses and to spend three terms addressing a hazy outline. Inside it, I assumed, was a man who paid little attention to what I said because he thought I was stupid. He would be right to t
hink this: I had become stupid because my brain was polluted with sick thoughts. I must not let him see the sick thoughts. So I kept my glasses off. So it wasn’t until I forgot to take them off for our final meeting that I realized how much he had been listening, nodding, responding to my arguments, and making encouraging faces. Instead, I assumed he thought I was not worth listening to. Because I was stupid. On account of my thought pollution which I had to hide. By leaving my glasses off.
If only I had put them on, I might have seen a more accurate picture not only of the room, but of myself. So many problems, as Dr Veale explained, can arise from living more inside one’s head than out: ‘most people, if they are mentally healthy, tend to have about 70–80 per cent of their attention focused externally onto specific tasks or the environment or noise or so on, and only perhaps about 10–20 per cent on themselves, whereas it’s the opposite way round if you’re suffering from a mental disorder – [then] you get all your information, really, from what your mind is telling you.’ A result of this self-preoccupation – and something which is, perhaps, the defining feature of obsessive-compulsive disorder in particular – is the tendency to seize on certain passing thoughts and mental images, the kind that run through everyone’s minds, and to ascribe inordinate significance to them. There was nothing unusual, let alone pathological, about the sexual images popping up in my head: the problem lay only in the excessive attention I paid them.
Woman Who Thought too Much, The Page 9