Inching Back Towards Obsession

Cautiously returning from a post 2020 hibernation

There is something so soothing about obsession. A single focus point clarifies, makes the chaos of normal life feel simple and clear. It can also, of course, destroy.

I’m an obsessive person by nature. Sometimes this manifests itself in good ways, like writing a few novels in the span of a few years (despite the fact that they may never see the light of day). But often in bad ways, like monitoring my eating and exercise to the point of self-erasure in my twenties. My journey, has generally been one of learning to shift my habits from relatively destructive to somewhat productive, and, as much as is possible, imbue some sense of so-called balance in between.

Before the pandemic, it was going okay!

But in 2020, things went haywire. Everyone has their own version of how 2020 upended their lives. For me, it was largely wrapped up with my startup, Chorus, which I had just launched two months earlier. I was also living alone in NYC without so much as a houseplant for company after spending most of the previous year couch-ridden. So, as the world began to crumble, I sunk into old patterns. Specifically, grasping for control by obsessing over a man I felt hurt by.

In 2020, I spent close to one-thousand hours trying to explain myself to a man. It was the most addicting of writing prompts. To try and get this man to understand what he did wrong, and, if not apologize, at least acknowledge it. I stayed up past midnight many nights working on emails, waking up at three in the morning with a turn of phrase that captured a sentiment just right. When I wasn’t working on Chorus—in the shower, at the grocery store—my thoughts spun on how I could make him understand. He and I had been in what could only be described as a “situationship,” and his responses were infused with the illusion of care, but sporadic and missing the point. This only made me work harder, as if I wasn’t explaining myself clearly.

Like any somewhat stable grown woman, I had really, earnestly thought I’d grown out of this particular strain of obsession. Why would a generally smart and sane adult waste so much energy on someone who clearly didn’t care, was something I asked myself constantly. Sure, his silences validated the hidden belief that I’ll never be loved, and mapped to my own history of abandonment, but I thought I’d outgrown that impulse! Turns out, old patterns have a way of rearing their damaging little heads. My obsession with this man was a distraction — from a global pandemic, from my sinking company, from confronting the parts of me I naively thought I’d grown out of but will always need work. And it was a break from that work, which, amidst everything, was far less comfortable than the familiar pattern of trying to prove myself. 

Running a company is hard, practically, but also emotionally. It’s lonely. And the pandemic made this harder—traditional structures of support and validation not just professionally obliterated, which I’d opted into, but then personally, too—not to mention it toppled our whole business model. Meanwhile writing, which had become my stabling force, felt impossible. Everything felt more urgent than anything I had to say, because it objectively was. Not to say this was any worse than anyone else’s 2020. Just to say I was craving control, desperate for a clear goal, a concrete rewards system, and a man’s approval was an old and familiar standby.

To be clear, this didn’t get in the way of my working on Chorus. By day, I channeled my obsessive tendencies towards the app, trying as hard as I could to make my company work. Nor is it why I eventually dissolved it (I continued working on it for years). Like a high-functioning alcoholic, it was just happening in the background.

It’s so hard to manage how we deploy our tendencies. Obsession was arguably what brought me the things I’m most proud of professionally. It’s also the trait that continues to get in my way personally. In our hyper-individualized, maximalist culture, what’s rewarded externally is so often at odds with what’s good for us internally. 

It got worse before it got better. But after the hard-won realization that this man was full of shit, I was completely losing myself, and understanding one another would never actually happen nor did it matter, not to mention a small but life-saving prescription of Prozac, I stopped contact. And then I took a good long break from caring about, well, almost anything.

Coming out of the haze of 2020, it felt as if I had to turn my brain off—my entire nervous system off. I was terrified of my capacity for obsession, how far it could take me from myself. This wasn’t a new realization, I’d spent a decade detached from my body, viewing nearly everything through the lens of food and exercise, but I thought I was over that; to see similar behavior emerge in a new form was unnerving. 

In 2021, I took a small step back from my company and started part-time consulting a few days a week. It’s bizarre how good this felt—not needing to be in control of every last detail, collecting a regular paycheck. I started dating a kind man who I liked very much but who I was not obsessed with, who didn’t play games, and who (unlike me and that other guy) had always been in stable, committed relationships. I started running and writing again, but only when I felt like it—which was almost never—but that was okay! I was tired of stress and pressure and self-hatred. My goal was pleasure and ease. I needed to get my thoughts back, I needed to get my self back.

These last two years felt like a kind of hibernation. I imagine many people went (or are going through) a similar resetting. But by the middle of last year, I had evened out my life to such an extent that the lack discomfort started to feel like an emptiness. I wasn’t writing, I wasn’t exercising. My job was part-time and temporary so I wasn’t invested in it for the long run. All of this was intentional and necessary…until it wasn’t. At some point this focus on calm morphed into feeling like nothing mattered; I couldn’t get excited about anything I used to care about. 

What’s funny is that my personal life somehow became bizarrely (or maybe not so bizarrely) more stable than ever. I fell in love and moved in with the relationship-guy, the first time I’d ever lived with a partner. And I have a lovely five-year-old step-ish (we need a better word for this when you’re not married) son. Those two years, though a kind of stasis externally, offered the calm I needed to stabilize internally. It was steady, void of drama (more or less), and I did make space for pleasure and ease.

And yet. 

I miss obsession.

“Balance sucks,” is something my idol, Jacqueline Novak (I have about 487 idols, but she’s up top), said in the recent re-play of Poog’s canonical (to me) New Years episode. There’s more nuance to it, but I appreciate someone boldly stating that balance isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The only way I can ever finish an essay is if I’m wholly and fully consumed with figuring it out. You need a certain kind of mania to stare eye-to-eye with your deficiencies long enough to crank out a first draft.

When I think back to my obsession with that guy, I’m mortified. But it was a grasping for control in the form of writing, which, to be honest, is not that far off from my “healthier” fixations. There’s a certain kind of all-consuming energy that enables us to really and fully access ourselves, be present, I guess it’s what’s called “flow”, though that sounds far too orderly for how it feels to me. It’s how I feel when I’m writing or building an idea I can’t let go of. But there’s a weaponized version of this, too, when this hyper-focus is leveraged to gain another person’s approval. The tendency in that form doesn’t build the self, it erases it. Unfortunately, it can be a disturbingly fine line between the productive and the destructive.

I have a feeling many of us are still figuring out, years after lockdown, how to re-enter the world as familiar versions of ourselves. I do not want to dive back into my 2020 self; it was chaos, more than chaos, it was self-destructive.  But I miss who I was becoming before that. And I appreciate what I learned after it.

These days, I’m trying to work up the—courage, stamina, habit?—of accessing that part of me again, this time with some lessons learned. I even hope to kind of obsess over this newsletter, which on its face probably reads as silly and casual, but is an internal commitment to taking writing seriously again. Even since sending my first post, I find myself waking up early with new ideas and phrases I have to get down. My body craves some level of unnatural intensity. And maybe that’s okay (even if it means I hibernate for a year or two every now and then), part of my “balance,” or at least something to work with.

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Reading Recs

I absolutely loved Laura Lippman’s piece for Oldster about finally, at sixty, starting the process of loving how she looks. I deeply related (though in a different field) to Kristina Kasparian’s piece for Catapult’s I Give Up series, about allowing yourself to take a different path after you reach so-called success in Academia. I was also thrilled to see a woman finally writing about the stigma of thin, low-density hair, and for the Times! And I enjoyed re-reading the old classic that inspired this week’s pic.