For most of my life I've been haphazardly abandoning my own mind to disappear into one obsession or another. When I was 10 years old I became fixated on hamsters, proceeding to spend every waking moment of the next two months reading hamster forums where people discussed taking care of and feeding and breeding the squirmy little things. Then I got bored of hamsters and moved onto learning everything I could about exotic cats. Over the years, I've been obsessed with pretty much every much every category of thing you can imagine: people, food, places, projects, books. I don't choose my obsessions so much as stumble into their open arms.



Over the years I've become interested in the line between obsession and passion. I think they appear externally similar but are deeply distinct from each other. Obsession is repetitive; passion is generative. Obsession is a way to redirect desire, to avoid the intensity of your emotions by channeling them into something else; passion is a way for you to fully integrate what you feel. Obsession is often used as a mechanism for control: it‘s unsettling how many women have obsessive, disordered relationships with food, unsettling how common it is for someone to be obsessed with a romantic partner. We obsess as a way of mastering our desire: as Caroline Knapp writes in Appetite, “This was the infinite hunger for love and recognition, the hunger for sex and satisfaction and beauty, the hunger to be and known and fed, the hunger to take and take, and I had conquered it, mastered it, roped it like a steer."



I believe that I'm obsessive because I'm acutely sensitive. As a kid I cried all the time; I was incredibly shy and terrified of everything; I was bullied and often felt incredibly lonely and hurt. We view the “stakes” of adulthood as being higher than that of childhood—you have “real life” concerns as an adult, after all, bills to pay and people to take care of—but in my opinion childhood is more fraught and more intense in every important way. Childhood makes us: it's when we learn how to attach to people, and develop our deepest traumas; it's when we develop a formative view of the world that often shapes our expectations for the rest of our life. As a child, I felt like the world was incredibly painful for me just by default: it seemed like other kids could just shrug things off, but I couldn't shrug anything off: everything caused me too much pain and too much joy. I couldn't live with my sensitivity, and so I learned how to distract myself by hyper-focusing. I threw all of my mental energy into obsessions.



In a place like San Francisco, the way I am is a rule, not an exception: all of my friends are insanely obsessive people. And there are, of course, rewards for obsession: you learn fast, you pursue your goals with a kind of berserk monomania. People praise you for being dedicated. It is seen as an explicitly good thing, for example, to care about nothing as much you care about your startup, to work 16 hours a day for years and years.



There's no denying brokenness is generative: obsession has shaped me and fed me and formed so much of who I am. But I got to a point where I didn't want to be so binary anymore. I wanted to learn how to manage obsession: to be attached to things and not have them destroy me. I wanted to learn how to believe that nothing is the answer, because everything is the answer; that joy is not concentrated but diffuse, that it's in the air around me already, that what I have is what I need. I wanted to learn to live at the center of myself.



Giving up obsession means that you have to be willing to feel your hunger and pain, to recognize your unmet needs, to fundamentally recognize that no dress, no car, no boyfriend, no job, can really make you feel better about yourself, and then inquire: what can make me feel better?



For me, writing is what makes me feel better. It seems logically possible that there is a version of me that doesn't need to write to stay sane, since there have been years of my life when I wrote very little, but looking back at those stretches of time I have to conclude that I was as unanchored as an asteroid spinning through space on its way to a collision. Here's how it works: I need to write to know what I'm thinking. Once I've learned what I'm thinking, I need to write to organize my thoughts. Once I've organized my thoughts, I need to edit my writing to make my thoughts better. I can't think without writing, but I also can't really feel. When I put my nebulous, complicated, demanding emotions onto the page, I'm able to synthesize them and let them go. Even when I'm not writing about me, writing makes me more myself. Moreover: it makes me more okay with myself.



So I try to write every day. I try to inhabit a version of myself with no ego and no fear, in hopes that consistency will make it real; I try to love things without needing to hold onto them; I let my feelings in, knowing that with time they'll pass through me. If obsession is a defense mechanism that has gradually become part of what I identify as my self, I'm trying to construct a new self with fewer defenses, choosing integration over compartmentalization, learning to attend not to one specific fixation, but to the entire breathing world around me.