Andrew Lipstein opens his essay with a political newsletter that becomes impossible to stop reading. He rereads it, speaks it aloud, and finally sings it, trying to extract every possible meaning. Obsessive-compulsive disorder has made ordinary language a trap, threatening his work, parenting, and ability to write.
- After the birth of his twins, compulsions intensify around messages, household safety, and prose. A single sentence can consume a day.
- His therapist uses exposure and response prevention: encountering a trigger while resisting the ritual normally used to relieve distress.
- Kitchen exercises make the process tangible. The harder literary exercise is closing the laptop with imperfections still unresolved.
- Editing becomes elaborate choreography. Lipstein reduces paragraphs to abstract concepts, then rehearses hand movements until the sequence feels harmonious.
- Treatment costs $350 a session with a therapist who does not take his insurance. Even after progress, compulsions still consume roughly ninety minutes daily.
Writing about the disorder forces Lipstein to work inside the very medium it has made unbearable. He starts treating unfinished prose as an exposure, recovering some pleasure in making a first draft. But his drive to succeed also turns tolerating anxiety into another demanding project.
The ending offers an altered relationship to ordinary objects and uncertainty, without establishing a durable cure. This is a literary account of one person’s treatment, not instructions for reproducing his exercises. Its force comes from showing how the search for a perfectly resolved sentence can consume the life around it.