I often have intrusive thoughts as I leave my house – and throughout my day. They all boil down to my wondering whether I will escape to the next “level,” as if I’m in a video game.
The first level? Getting out of the house. Will I close the door before someone behind me in the house calls my name? Will I make it down the steps before someone opens the door and calls my name? Will I make it to the sidewalk? And then as I walk down the street, will I get around the corner before someone calls my name?
I walk a short distance to a bike share, and as I unlock my bike, I think, “Will I get this bike out of the dock before someone else comes and claims it as theirs?” Once the bike is free from the dock, I get on the bike, and begin the next set of levels.
As I bike north on the north-south avenue that I take for about ten blocks, I find myself wondering, “At what point will I be sufficiently far from the block on which my house is to no longer be visible to someone standing on my corner, at the bottom of my block, and looking? At what point will I be far enough that if some freak explosion blew up my house, I would be safely clear of the explosion? Far enough that I would not hear it?
After those ten blocks, I turn right and head east one block. As I make this turn, I think, “I’ve made it one more level.” A level on which there is no universe in which I could be seen by someone looking north on the north-south street up which I just pedaled. But this relief is short-lived because in one block, I turn north again and find myself wondering, “Could I now be seen from the top of my block by someone standing and looking north?”
I reach my destination, I dock my bike, and I turn right. As I round the corner, I achieve the next level as my backpack passes from the view of anyone looking north on that street.
I approach the subway, and I enter. As I walk down the subway steps, I think, “Have I reached the point at which a car careening down the steps out of control would no longer crush me?” I reach that level definitively when I turn left at the foot of the stairs.
All of this has happened in less than ten minutes. On the one hand, it feels like, it sounds like, I’m escaping. I’m imagining fleeing. But the stakes feel so insanely low at each step. It’s not like I really care. It’s not like any of these steps holds any heft or valence. And as I think about it, it feels a little bit more like I’m hoping to get away with something rather than from something.
I don’t know what it is I’m hoping to get away with (cue: shame). I don’t know how this sequence of events got implanted in my brain. I wish I could say that this sequence were unique, that this is the only circumstance in which I have thoughts like this – but I can’t. I have these thoughts all day long. In millions of different circumstances, routine and otherwise.
They have at least a little anger embedded in them. The fantasy of the exploding house. Of the dispute over who got the bike first. The car careening down the steps. All of those have a little violence. But it’s all so… muted. The volume is so low.
It’s as if I once truly did fear having to escape, or getting caught, and I’ve channeled all those fears from some really dangerous set of earlier circumstances – some calamitous possible outcome – into these almost laughably small venues.
So that I can experience the thought? The feeling? But in a much less dangerous context.