Every once in a while I come across a concept or a word or an idea that helps illuminate and make sense of something I already knew to be intuitively true about myself.
The term Orthorexia Nervosa was one of those. It is defined as an obsession with healhy eating that impacts ones life in negative ways. It is classified as an eating disorder, and it is, at least before I understood and knew what it was, something that nearly destoryed me in a myriad of ways. It grew out of my childhood. When my dad first got sick with cancer, my mom overhauled our house, purging it of “junk” food and replacing it with “healthy foods,” primarily defined as organic, all natural, whole grain, and every other catchphrase you can find represented within what has since become an incredibly lucrative field in the homeopathic industry.
When I finally moved out of home in my twenties, this formed a kind of existential crisis. I had adapted to this way of living in my parents home, but I had never actually asked the question why. Thus when I now found myself responsible for my own grocery shopping, perusing the aisles and needing to make my own decisions regarding whether to pay that extra $3 for organic lettuce or not, the only thing I knew to do was to research it for myself so as to understand why I should be making this investment. This research triggered an already preexisting obsessive disorder, married as it was to my anxiety, and before I knew it I was head first in endless articles and diagnosis and information that would come to plaster my wall, fill my drawers, and be stored under my bed- it was everywhere.
To make matters worse, it was also deeply contradictory. When I became convinced something was healthy for me, another article would come out telling it is killing me. And vice versa. Before long all of this information was in my head, and my desperate need to make decisions based on truth and to use that truth to control my life became the thing that drived me.
Until the day I crashed. I was in such a state of crisis and anxiety that I broke my brain. And this was after finding out I was wrecking my body with the different diets and remedies and supplements I had been sold under the name of “science.” I didn’t sleep, and I mean not at all, for a straight 7 days, until a doctor prescribed a pill to rewire my brain. I was supposed to take two. I was distrustuful and took a half. Within minutes I heard a loud audible pop inside my head, and I was out for the count.
I had to throw everything that I had out, including articles and food and supplements, and create hard and fast boundaries for myself. Of course later on I became diagnosed with celiac disease, which is the most ironic thing for someone in my condition. That’s how things go I guess.
Another such term was the term “maphead.” This was first made aware to me through a book written by jeapordy winner Ken Jennings by the same name. It describes someone with a unique obsession and love for maps, and who understands the world best through cartographic representation and philosophy. There are few moments when a personal revelation makes me literally stand up and shout. That’s what I did when I heard his explantion. I would go on to embrace this part of myself in the ensuing years. I no longer needed to feel crazy for my need to have my head in a paper map whenever we went on roadtrips. The thrill I would get over understanding philosophy and politics and geography and history through maps made all the sense in the world.
I came across another word this morning- cherophobia. It’s defined as “an aversion to happiness.” Here it is characterized by someone who responds to feelings of happiness or good situations by repressing them, keeping them at a distance, or feeling guilty about them. For those with cherophobia, something good happening, or a feeling of happiness, means that something bad is inevitably aroound the corner.
I came across this word after a recent conversation with my wife where she was expressing feeling an impending sense of doom and dread and not knowing where that came from. While this term doesn’t apply to her (her’s was situational), when I was researching what that might be I came across this word that most definitely applies to me. In fact, I could locate it in this present moment right now. I have recently been offered an opportunity for full time work, which is an answer to the prayers, hope and attempts to supplement what is right now part time hours at a job I took a chance on when needing to make some changes at my old place of work a little over a year ago. Now that job has formulated into what has the makings of a perfect marriage, giving me the hours I need while being a mere three blocks from my home and with plenty of the necessary access and time I need to still be home during the day with our dogs. I’d still be driving, but I would be taking on more responsibility.
I should be happy and excited. But I have been plagued with anxiety, with any number of negative events entering into my head. I have a deep rooted anxiety over doctors (for good reason). I’ve been able to manage that through intentional distance, but my 5 year medical requirement for my license expires this year. Which means I not only have to go back, I have to find a new doctor and begin what for me is a very tricky process all over again. That begins with the thought that because this good thing has happened, it is inevitable that this forced appointment will be a fateful one.
Or there is my son, who presently is going through some stuff and walking a fine line with being a ticking time bomb in terms of certain choices he is making regarding his own physical health. More than my own visit to the doctors, I fear something happening to him.
And if something happened to me, my anxiety over the future of our dogs, also our kids, is also very much present. I don’t think that my wife has the capcitity to care for these pups on their own given their needs, and they wouldn’t be able to be rehomed given their struggles. I spend days breaking over the thought that my death would be their death.
I have extreme anxiety over whether our life insurance policy would go after my anxiety disorder and the role it plays in my needed and careful balancing act with doctors, especially since I don’t have a direct and official diagnosis (getting one has been near impossible over the years). The problem is, I know that I have a breaking point. I can force myself into a progression of testing with doctors, but only to a point. Eventually the whole psychological approach of gradual dessensitization does the opposite of what that approach is supposed to do, and I lose the capacity to continue to respond. I find myself below rock bottom. And it has been impossible to get doctors to understand this, and to help me with this or to listen to this. And thus my anxiety is very much present in my distrust of insurance companies as well, thinking that this company would somehow use this against me and not give my wife the money she is supposed to get.
I also have anxiety over this new position going badly. Over not getting my book done, my life story. Over finances and bank appointments and vet apppointments and the list goes on and on. My head cannot compartmentalize it all and it cripples me. Thus cherophobia becomes the only method I have for controlling anything. It’s a very real reality, I have discovered, for those who have this disorder. We need it, even though it obviously negatively impacts us. When we think about our reality, our history, this life and how it has unfolded, our brains logically justify these thoughts because they appear to correlate with what is true. It appears rational.
How does one counter this? Become irrational? My mind tells me I must become so. I have to allow myself to feel happiness even though it isn’t true or real, and is even dangerous. This is what makes it tough. Truth gets confused and muddled. I know I’m reading that this is a disorder, and I know that I don’t like this space, but I like the idea of being out of control even less. Even as I feel like everything is out of control. Which I suppose is to say, I don’t know the anwers. I don’t think there is any easy self help process that can say do steps 1-3 and you’ll have happiness. Life doesn’t work that way. I do know however that it always feels like an important foundation, to have a sense of what it is that I am experiencing and feeling and dealing with. Encountering these words feels helpful, at the very least. To have a categorization for all of that, a way to make sense of it. If that’s a small consolation in the moment, I guess I’ll take it.
The Stories of my Life 