“Don’t step on the crack or you’ll break your mother’s back”.
I’m sure you’ve heard this phrase at some point in your life. A remnant of early 19th-century superstition, it somehow found its way into our modern cultural subconscious. For most of us, it’s a silly thing we once heard and never paid much attention to. For others like myself, it represents something so much bigger. What happens when the line between superstition and fear blurs so dramatically that fantasy overtakes reality?
Welcome, my friends, to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
I knew from an early age that something was wrong with me. While I never believed my mother’s back was actually in jeopardy, I did notice myself engaging in some strange behavior. If I stepped on a sidewalk crack with my left foot, I had to step on the next one with my right. Not only that, it had to be in the exact same place and position on the foot. If I failed at this, I had to do it over and over until I got it just right. I didn’t know why I had this strange compulsion - all I knew is that if I didn’t address it immediately, it would start to eat me alive. My mind would be completely overcome by the desire to “rectify” this seeming imperfection that I had created. Only through this rectification was I able to find relief.
Throughout my childhood, I saw evidence of this “thing” everywhere. If I touched something with my right index finger, I had to follow up with the same on the left. If I scratched an itch on my right ribcage, I had to scratch the left in the exact same spot, even if it wasn’t itchy. As I got older, the obsession grew in both size and intensity, manifesting as a peculiar strain of body dysmorphia. I started noticing that certain parts of my body were uneven (chest, arms, abdominals), and this became a constant trigger for the compulsion. I knew there was nothing I could do about it (we are all asymmetrical in some shape or form), yet I needed to find relief. I found myself poking and prodding different parts of my body day and night, to the point where it became an obsessive tic. It wasn’t the sort of thing that’s all that noticeable in public so I was never questioned about it, but I certainly knew it was happening.
Enter drugs and alcohol.
For the first time in my life, I felt relief from my compulsions without having to give into them. When I got drunk or high, I didn’t give two shits about my asymmetry or anything else, really. I finally felt good. I finally felt normal. For the first time in my life, I could leave the cracks alone. That was of course until the morning after, when I was stuck with myself again. The compulsions returned, spiraling until the next time I returned to sweet oblivion. When I first started using, I was able to go a few weeks without drinking or taking drugs. Ten years later, I was barely able to go a few minutes without putting a toxic substance in my body.
When I look back now, it makes all the sense in the world why I became an alcoholic and a drug addict. I was so uncomfortable in my own skin, so controlled by my obsessions and compulsions that I needed something to feel okay. Without drugs and alcohol, who knows what would have happened - I may have resorted to hurting myself, or worse. The problem is, an obsessive personality goes hand-in-hand with an addictive one, and I found myself completely beholden to substances by the time I was halfway through my twenties. Drugs and alcohol stopped working, my mental and physical health were deteriorating, and I was at the end of my rope. By the grace of God I got sober, but ay, there’s the rub - what was I going to do about my OCD?
Going back to substances wasn’t an option, so I explored other avenues. I changed my diet, started working out everyday, and went to (several years of) therapy. While these things helped, they never truly quelled the machinations of my mind. Throughout the five years of my sobriety, I’ve endured several bouts of extreme anxiety and OCD episodes. Time and time again things would get good, then some external force would trigger an episode and I’d be left in despair. I couldn’t help but wonder if I was destined to live the rest of my life with a broken mind.
Enter the bent press (yes, bent not bench).
In the summer of 2022, I came across a photo of an old time strongman from the early 1900’s. I was completely blown away by his physique, and I started to do more research into the physical culture of that era. I quickly fell in love with it all - the style, the writing, the aesthetic - and I realized that the men (and women) from that era were consistently performing movements I had never seen before. I started to teach myself these movements and learn as much as I could from the niche (but growing) subculture I found online. Then, in September of that year, I tried the bent press for the first time. The rest is history.
Back in the early 1900s, the bent press was known as the “King of Lifts.” It requires an extraordinary amount of strength, flexibility and technique - to a degree not seen in any modern bodybuilding or weightlifting movements. For context, below is a video of me performing my heaviest bent press to date:
The thing about the bent press is, it completely overloads one side of the body, and in order to get good at it, you have to commit to one side. As you’d imagine, that’s not the best news for someone with intense asymmetry OCD. I thought about giving up on it, but there were two problems: I loved the movement, and I don’t give up easily. Instead, I decided to lean in - my broken mind be damned. The shift that happened over the next few months was nothing short of mind-blowing.
In what has only been a relatively short time, my OCD has diminished to a point where it’s difficult to even register. Sure, it’s still here and in some way will always be here (I find myself trying to even out my finger presses whenever I type on a keyboard), but it doesn’t have a hold on me anywhere near what it used to. I train the bent press and other one hand movements, and the difference in strength between both sides of my body is only getting larger. Not only that, but I’ve noticed that my musculature is also growing more and more differentiated on each side of my body. I don’t think that anyone would notice these things, but me and my OCD brain certainly do. What would have completely freaked out the adolescent version of myself now stands as a badge of honor - I can do some pretty extraordinary things with one hand, and I can only hope for more asymmetry as I get stronger. As the kid who used to avoid cracks, the very fact that I could write that last sentence is nothing short of a miracle.
So, what’s the moral of this story?
None of us (including myself) are perfect, nor will we ever be. We all deal with mental illness to some degree, and we all have our own imperfections and idiosyncrasies. The only thing we can do is follow our unique paths of truth and find the things in this world that bring us purpose, joy and fulfillment. If we do that, life has a way of giving us what we need and removing the things we don’t. I’ll leave you with a quote from Marcus Aurelius:
Every living organism is fulfilled when it follows the right path for its own nature.
-D
P.S. I also write poetry. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, you can check it out here: Poetry in the Dark.