High-functioning OCD
Jul. 11th, 2004 10:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trocheeI've spent this weekend (and the last) breaking in our new garden plot. Six-plus hours of work each day for two days (three days last weekend -- a holiday).
My fellow p-patch gardeners have started to wonder about me, and so have I. I keep feeling like I just want to dig one more trench, pull out a few more morning-glory roots, break out another few cubic feet of clay and sand from under the topsoil, or mix in just a little more compost. I'm like a man obsessed.
But I think this is a regular personality trait for me -- it's just unusual to have the obsession in something so concrete and real-world [heh! I've pulled about 75 pounds of concrete fragments out from under the garden, too]. My success as a programmer and an academic comes largely from this same obsessive attention to detail. I'm reminded of Emma from Carla Speed McNeil's excellent Finder, who has a wonderful soliloquy regarding her talent, that rings at least partially true for me:
[Update on July 18: now that I think about it, I just realized that Emma is a gardener too!]
My fellow p-patch gardeners have started to wonder about me, and so have I. I keep feeling like I just want to dig one more trench, pull out a few more morning-glory roots, break out another few cubic feet of clay and sand from under the topsoil, or mix in just a little more compost. I'm like a man obsessed.
But I think this is a regular personality trait for me -- it's just unusual to have the obsession in something so concrete and real-world [heh! I've pulled about 75 pounds of concrete fragments out from under the garden, too]. My success as a programmer and an academic comes largely from this same obsessive attention to detail. I'm reminded of Emma from Carla Speed McNeil's excellent Finder, who has a wonderful soliloquy regarding her talent, that rings at least partially true for me:
I'd be sitting over some task... bored beyond death with the thought of all the work I had to do... wishing it was just done so I could take pleasure in being finished. And sometimes... it was only occasionally at first ... I'd just blink, and it would be done.I'm not quite as far gone as Emma -- I remember doing these things -- but I can sympathize with her inability to explain where it comes from.
And done well.
As if someone twice as bright, twice as skilled and careful had done it. Someone who never stinted, someone who always went back and fixed things. Someone who had concentration like a diamond drill. Who could hold every detail in her mind. Clean and precise as God in the first seven days. I'd look at the clock and see that it hadn't happened in an instant. My teachers would smile and tell me how intense concentration can block out all else, even the sense of time.
[Update on July 18: now that I think about it, I just realized that Emma is a gardener too!]
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Theta
Date: 2004-07-12 10:57 am (UTC)Do you go all meditatey when you're gardening? That's what I love about tasks like that and dishwashing. You can mentally disengage from them. I've heard this called the "Theta State"...
"The ideation that can take place during the theta state is often free flow and occurs without censorship or guilt. It is typically a very positive mental state."
Cheers!
Re: Theta
Date: 2004-07-13 01:16 am (UTC)Sometimes in a simple project like hole-digging, I get that moment of theta. I wish I could figure out what it is that invokes it; it's a neat place to be. If I do too much planning while I do the work, I can't get there.
What's interesting to me is that sometimes I get there while programming -- but not with any kind of combined physical and mental labor.