By David Wise
This is like watching a child catch fire, watching them burn before you, and then being asked to stand and watch without giving in to the immense desire to act.
The imagery is harsh because it is the only way I can convey my experience. The burning child exists in my mind. My mind is not the child itself, but the emotional response—the anguish, and the compulsion to act. And as I watch this child, I am told the treatment is to do nothing, to sit intentionally in agony and embrace an immense threshold of discomfort.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder is not the tidy image of repetitive handwashing or checking locks that many associate with it. For me, it’s about feeling devoid of value, haunted by a fear of homelessness I’ve experienced before, and terrified of being nothing. At its core, OCD harbors a belief or fear detached from reality. Even when you know this, even when you can tell yourself the fear is irrational, it pulls you into action as if your life depends on it. The way your mind urges you to save the burning child is the way mine demands that I address a non-reality. And in doing so, it warps any sense of who I truly am.
How can I know my fears are unfounded while feeling so compelled to act? This question haunted me, particularly because those around me, and even I, saw a calm, grounded person. No one suspected my mind was on fire. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is adept at hiding in plain sight. Compulsions—even those as small as eating sugar—become secret rituals of reassurance. They bring you closer to an ideal-self, the version of yourself that feels capable and valuable. But the paradox is that to achieve this ideal-self, you must betray the actual-self—the you that exists in every action, not just the ones you’d show to others.
The actual-self is the most real because it encompasses all of your behaviors, unified as one being. Healing begins by recognizing that the ideal-self, which feels so aspirational, is born of compulsion and self-loathing. It’s a false promise that turning away from the burning child will make them disappear. But they don’t.
My awareness began to shift during a therapy session. My therapist, a small Japanese woman with an intense presence, practically jumped through the Zoom screen to tell me, “You are terrible at being uncomfortable!” Her words jolted me. I wanted to argue. After all, I’ve endured frigid nights outdoors, traversed mountains on foot, lost loved ones, and suffered physical and emotional pain. How could I be terrible at discomfort? But she was right. Even my need to defend myself betrayed my discomfort with what she was confronting in me. My mistake was believing resilience came from action—from doing—rather than from simply being.
Resilience, I’ve come to understand, is the ability to do nothing and, in doing so, become more aligned with the actual-self. This realization comes with sorrow because the pursuit reveals how deeply the ideal-self rejects the actual-self. Growth is not about becoming. It is about asking: Why does the ideal-self hate the actual-self so much? Compulsions reveal who you truly are, and they can be ugly, hidden things. I’ve treated my body in ways that would shock those who see me as grounded and capable. I’ve consumed immense amounts of sugar and caffeine, knowing they harm me, yet unable to stop.
When I told my therapist I didn’t want to eat sugar because it wasn’t healthy, she challenged me. “If it’s not you making that choice, then who is?” she asked. I realized then that my compulsions—even as I disavow them—are me. They are my choices, shaped by a terror of being nothing without them. Sugar and caffeine give me the illusion of power and value, a sense that I am enough, while simultaneously reinforcing the belief that I am not.
In Buddhism, there is a saying: “Many fingers point at the moon, but don’t mistake the fingers for the moon.” For so long, I’ve been looking in the wrong direction. Vulnerability, I’ve learned, is not simply about revealing pain. It’s about doing so without crafting the response you hope to receive. True vulnerability lays you bare without expectation. For me, even vulnerability became a compulsion, a performance to reassure myself that I had value.
The approach to obsessive-compulsive disorder is paradoxical. It requires falling in love with what I call the threshold of disquietude—leaning into the fear and anxiety without acting on it. My therapist rejected my well-intentioned attempts to reframe compulsions positively. When I suggested meditating on spinach to replace my need for sugar, she pointed out that I was still avoiding the fear. “What if you had no energy? What if you had no value?” she asked. “You need to see what happens when you are nothing.” She was asking me to stop saving the burning child—to sit and watch.
This is not apathy. Apathy avoids effort. Acceptance attempts without believing that effort will lead to worthiness. True resilience is the ability to look at yourself—unadorned, unremarkable, and flawed—and see a being worthy of love, not because of what you do, but because you are.
Through this process, I’ve learned to encounter my mind in stillness. To observe nothing, stripping away the distractions of external objects and experiences. To sit with only the mind—to see not just what arises, but the process of arising itself. And in this stillness, I begin to see the actual-self. It is not what I hoped it would be. It is wretched, simple, uninspiring, and unhealthy. And it is me.
Even now, I write these words knowing I use this medium as a tool to buffer myself from the rawness of being seen. I shape them to craft your response, to guide you to say, “Your writing is so beautiful and raw.” But this writing is worthless if it is only another compulsion. Do not console me. If you do anything, liberate me from your expectations. See me as I truly am: a body in suffering, striving to sit in stillness while the child burns.
Find a new language in your own mind for this version of me. Use it to allow space for such suffering. Use it to interrogate what it would truly take to alleviate suffering at its depths—mine, and your own.
losing our grip on purpose 