Ellie Brown: Plant High School Class of 2012!

Since I live in New Hampshire and Ellie lives in Tampa, I often miss the big occasions in Ellie’s life. This week, however, I performed in Orlando and scooted over to Tampa to see Ellie so we could celebrate her upcoming graduation. Her mother Heddy and I thought the three of us could go have dinner together. Heddy told Ellie that I was coming over especially to see her and that we were all three going out for a meal. Ellie’s response: If she’s coming over to see me, why are you butting in? Classic Ellie.

We had a lovely afternoon going to Yogurtology and the bookstore. A voracious reader and gifted writer, Ellie loves books. Two of her favorite subjects are sports — her knowledge of sports trivia is unparalleled — and dogs. Ellie loves dogs, as do I, and we talk often about my dog, Andy, and her dog, Buster (full name: Buster Brown), the funniest bichon frise who literally smiles at you when you meet him. But Ellie’s love is not limited to dogs — she connects with all animals.

The original Winter, star of Dolphin Tale

A recent English assignment aptly combined her writing skills and love of animals. The students were asked to write about a favorite movie and pull several quotes that captured the film’s spirit. Ellie chose Dolphin Tale, a true story about a heroic dolphin named Winter, who loses her tail in a crab trap and learns to swim again with the aid of a prosthetic tail. I asked her the quotes she picked, and she rattled them off. Here are the ones that I remember:

• Just because you’re hurt doesn’t mean you’re broken.
• He’s going to be okay. You both are.
• Winter and I are family now. And family is forever.
• That dolphin’s taking us all somewhere. We just haven’t figured out where it is yet.

Ellie not only captured the spirit of the movie but also herself — full of compassion, loyalty, and adventure. She’s off to University of South Florida next August for a year of study and to determine her next steps. Who knows? We might be looking at the next Temple Grandin or possibly an NFL sports statistician. But one thing’s for sure: Ellie will keeps us laughing and honest. Happy graduation, Miss Ellie! You are a gift.

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Before I continue, a disclaimer: I have my husband’s permission to talk about his OCD (a brave act on his part), so you can relax while you’re reading.  I find it best to get people’s permission before you include them in a story unless you’re saying, “I won the lotto and I’m giving you half.”

OCD: On Screen and Real Life

For the unaware, OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) is a brain and behavior disorder that causes severe anxiety in those affected. The disorder involves both obsessions and compulsions that take tremendous time (e.g., taking a shower for six hours a day) and get in the way of important activities the person values (e.g., being employed).  According to the International OCD Foundation website, best estimates are that about 1 in 100 adults – or between 2 to 3 million adults in the United States – currently have OCD. This is roughly the same number of people living in Houston, Texas.

OCD as presented on Glee

More than likely, you’re now thinking of the OCD so commonly (and often inaccurately) portrayed on screen — a hand-washing Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets; a hand-wiping Tony Shalhoub in Monk; a germaphobic Emma in Glee. These characters all suffer from contamination issues, which are real and crippling, but also visual and apparent, so they can be easily depicted in TV and film.  The OCD spectrum is incredibly broad (it’s a very slippery disorder), many manifestations go unseen, and there are multitudes of silent sufferers, who tragically think they are alone — despite the fact their numbers equal Houston’s population.

Mind Games

OCD in real life, with our dog, Andy

If you look at my husband, Eric, you don’t see an OCD sufferer, you see an incredibly handsome Irishman, an expert birder, a valued employee, an exceptional writer, a soon-to-be-published book author, a gifted photographer, and according to a recent online IQ test we took on a lark, a genius. This is not surprising: OCD most often occurs in highly intelligent and highly creative people. That would be Eric. In truth, Eric has been battling with OCD for nearly 30 years, about 25 of those undiagnosed. Somewhere along our OCD journey, we were told it takes an average of 17 years and 5-7 therapists to get an accurate OCD diagnosis. Indeed, that was Eric’s case. Turns out, the first person to even mention the words OCD to him was our fertility specialist. Go figure.

Eric experiences an uncommon OCD subtype which requires him to do almost constant mental rituals in order to make decisions or simply move through his day. Think of it as mental hand washing, over and over again. His disorder — which he will always have — exhausts and frustrates him and if he’s not incredibly vigilant, robs him of time, opportunities, self-esteem, and joy. As with any disorder (e.g., anxiety, depression), Eric’s OCD can wreak havoc on both of us and when I reach my wit’s end as all humans will do, I am sometimes less than compassionate. But if you don’t have OCD, you really can’t appreciate what those afflicted with the disorder are going through. Here’s how an OCD expert described it: To an OCD sufferer, the anxiety they experience is the same as if you were standing in the middle of a train track and a train is bearing down on you and you can’t escape. With that picture painted, compassion starts to resurface.

Healing OCD Through Stories and Prayer

Yesterday, I had an email correspondence with the doctor — I’ll call him Dr. J — who accurately diagnosed Eric. A true healer, Dr. J is always looking for new ways to approach his patients at the OCD Institute in Belmont, MA, and I was recommending a book to him I thought he’d appreciate (The War of Art, about battling resistance, discussed in a previous blog).

Former stutterer, now big cat savior

In the course of our discussion, I found out Dr. J loves The Moth and routinely plays The Moth story Man Vs. Beast by Dr. Alan Rabinowitz to his OCD therapy groups. One of the world’s leading big cat experts, Rabinowitz was a severe stutterer who did not speak a complete sentence until he was a college senior. To hear Dr. Rabinowitz, you would never know his still constant battle. But he conquered his stuttering, and now he literally is the voice for animals that cannot speak for themselves. I urge you to listen to Dr. Rabinowitz’s story — it is beyond inspiring and made Stephen Colbert cry.

And when you’ve got a moment, please join me in praying for all those who are fighting great battles and for the folks that love them. I think that covers all of us.

*****

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The red shoes should have been the first clue

I have had this big personality since I was a little girl, probably since the womb. Mama said if I was her first child she would have never had another one. It’s not clear she was joking.

Throughout my life, I have battled with this big personality and not always successfully (example one: my pesky practice marriage). I have tried to contain it or squelch it or at least learn to use it appropriately (I’m called in quite often for boring dinner parties). But through the years, the words of well-meaning yet misdirected authority figures echoed in my head: “Don’t draw attention to yourself.” I tried my best to obey.

Turning Points

Somewhere around age 48 — after a lifetime of careers where I attempted to stay appropriately behind the scenes — I had a revelation. I was lecting at my church (reading the Old or New Testament lessons on Sundays) and I realized how much pure joy I experienced while reading the lessons in front of the congregation. My fellow church goers would tell me how much they loved listening to me read, how I brought the stories and the words to life. They even asked if I’d ever considered reading books on tape.

At the same time, I had my own stories I wanted to tell. As a visual artist, I told the stories through obsessive pencil drawings, trying to expand the images beyond the boundaries of the page, allowing the marks to travel off the paper and keep going, limitless. I felt compelled to make larger and larger artwork. Instead of drawings, I was creating installations in my mind, large-scale work that took up space. Lots and lots of space.

Cell Chain 1, graphite on paper, 2008

Also at the same time, a friend asked me if I wanted to take a public speaking class with her because she was afraid of talking in front of an audience. I thought to myself, “That’s so strange. How can someone be afraid of an audience? I actually look for audiences.” I took the class.

And it hit me. I didn’t want my artwork to take up space; I wanted to take up space. I wanted to tell my stories firsthand, not just visually through drawings. I wanted to draw attention to myself. Most importantly, what apparently terrified other people — standing in front of an audience — felt perfectly natural to me. That right there is the definition of a gift, some would say a gift from God. I knew I had to use this gift, humbly of course, no matter who got upset.

Coming Full Circle

On stage with The Moth in NYC; photo by Sarah Stacke

Fortunately for me (and with a huge amount of Divine help), I have opportunities to use this finally-figured-out gift on a regular basis, and most recently with The Moth, the acclaimed national storytelling organization. At their recent sold-out Mainstage Event at the 900-seat Somerville Theater, the director approached me backstage and said, “Tricia, we need for you to open the show. I realize that’s a tough spot. But you have that big personality, and we know you can fill up the space.”

Home at last.

Hopefully, my big personality will be coming to you in book form next year. To that end, I am doing a great deal of research and this blog topic came to me while I was reading a fabulous book edited by William Zinsser called, Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. He includes a whole host of authors who’ve written memoirs, including Frank McCourt, Annie Dillard, and Toni Morrison. Morrison writes a marvelous passage about memory and imagination. Her words are intended for writers, but I think they’re for all of us, as we think about who we are and who we were originally meant to be:

You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.

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The Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, who creates magical gunpowder drawings, feels the same way about the importance of going beyond his comfort zone. Here’s what he said in a recent Wall Street Journal interview:

The primary reason I use gunpowder is that I’m very rhetorical, very logical and very cautious and sometimes very timid. As a person, it’s probably fine for me to be that way. As an artist, I need to liberate myself and self-destruct this personality.

Installation view of an amazing gunpowder drawing

Chicks with Guns

I shot the .22 and the Glock with seven of my closest college friends, all of us members of the same sorority. Now, you may think sororities are silly, irrelevant, or elitist organizations. When some of my artists friends discovered I was in a sorority, they were shocked and announced, only half kidding, that they had to rethink our friendship. Say what you will — all I know is, we graduated 30 years ago and we are still the closest of friends.

As luck would have it, the stars and schedules aligned, and we found ourselves happily together on a Texas ranch. Entertainment included an afternoon on a firing range, under the very watchful and experienced eye of the local sheriff and his son.

I began with the .22 and was a disaster from the start. I kept trying to line the target up with the gun sight, using my dominant right eye, but continually overshot not only the silhouette but also the gigantic plywood board it was mounted on. This was an impressive feat, but not in a good way.

Packing heat in Texas

I moved onto the Glock. Again, trying to line the target up with the gun sight, I missed my silhouette altogether, and even worse, hit the neighboring one. In the meantime, one friend looked like a modern day Angie Dickinson; another quickly earned the name Dead Eye (a native Texan now living in California, her training returned in a flash). The sheriff suggested I try to line the gun sight up with my left eye. Still no luck. An expert marksman and gifted teacher, he persevered and said, “Point the gun to the ground. Focus your eyes on the target. Lift the gun. Don’t look through the sights. Just focus on the target and shoot.”

Bull’s Eye

Well, it wasn’t actually a bull’s eye but it was a heck of a lot closer than before. The sheriff called me an instinct shooter — a person who fires their gun by relying on the innate quality of hand-eye coordination. Basically, you point your weapon at the target just like you’d point your finger. As the sheriff said, “Those sights were just getting in your way.”

Talk about metaphors. Gun sights are supposed to help shooters aim accurately. The guides were working for most everybody else but not for me. The more I tried to conform to that method of shooting, the more I missed my target. The moment I did what was right for me — followed my instincts — I found my aim.

The Ties that Bind

Like my fellow artist Cai Guo-Qiang, I need to spend time out of my comfort zone — for instance, shooting a Glock on a firing range — and be careful of guides that are meant to be helpful but actually limit my efforts. This can be pretty scary, but as long as I follow my instincts and focus on my target, I can’t miss.

Plus, I’m definitely not alone out here. I’ve got my sisters with me. When my show I Will Be Good (now named How to Draw a Nekkid Man) opened at FringeNYC last year, two of them were in the audience with their college-aged children in tow. Three of them hosted a performance in their homes while the show was in development. Many of them donated to the production efforts or sent friends to see the show. All of them cheered me on.

It’s what we do. When one of us achieves, the celebration begins. When one of us is in trouble, the wagons circle. We’ve got each others backs. And be careful. Now we know how to shoot guns.

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