DO I HAVE OCD?

Or am I just experiencing religious deconstruction. AKA: no one talks about how Hinduism can be just like Christianity if you try hard enough.

Recently, I finished a book for book club called Exalted by Anna Dorn. It was a witty, satiric, ridiculous book that touched on many important and timely themes like social media, parasocial relationships with content creators, burnout, depression…among…other…things…and if you read the book, you’ll know what I mean, but I won’t ruin it for you.

What I will ruin is its discussion of mental health and religosity, because that’s what this essay is about. Our main character, Emily, is a content creator who makes a living from doing astrological chart readings and posting memes to Instagram. She’s super popular and has a far reach, but in recent years felt depressed and burnt out from her work, seeking to return to the excitement she had in wanting to be an actress in LA. Her life has become about making the next rent payment through her astrological readings, which she does — and doesn’t — actually believe in. She learned how to read charts from the Instagram School of Pop Astrology, and gets people to pay her $200+ dollars just to tell them validating things about themselves, facets of who they are, thereby confirming and validating that their personalities cannot change and that they are in fact, rooted in the stars.

The book itself is funny and meaningful (in ways I did not expect. Anyone whose screen time is over 8 hours a day needs to read it, please). I absolutely love characters that are easy to hate, and sometimes kind of stupid. But the part that struck me the most was Emily’s discussion of mental health in connection to what she does and does not believe about astrology. Emily has OCD — something a therapist diagnosed her with when she was making enough money with her astrology work to pay for a therapist. Because Emily’s work was in identifying and diagnosing people’s personalities through astrology, it became the foundation of how she thinks about the world. From there, her OCD took over. While her rational brain understands and knows that in some capacity, astrology just reflects the very human attributes we all have, she cannot help but spiral about astrological traits, both within herself and other people. The sets of rules and numbers ran her life. The irony here, of course, is that the thing that was allowing her to pay the therapist was also the thing that was rooting itself so deeply in her brain that she was becoming depressed.

And as I was reading this book, I thought to myself: Oh, fuck. That’s how I treated Hinduism FOR MOST OF MY LIFE.

I grew up fairly orthodox Hindu, if not in practice, then definitely in theory. Where I lived in Ohio, there was a budding Satya Sai program, which follows Satya Sai Baba, a guru based in Puttaparthi, India, as an Avataram (another coming) of God. I could never get totally straight if people really thought he was divine or if the teachings simply say that everyone is divine, with some people just realizing their divinity. Now, in hindsight, I realize that confusion was probably on purpose. But Satya Sai Baba was so popular in the 90s and early 2000s, that now deposed leader of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, also followed him. His family did, too. In fact, they made a national day out of it, recognizing Baba’s divinity. He and his family once snuck themselves into seeing him in Puttaparthi, India. I cannot overstate this enough. The former leader of Venezuela, snuck out of his country to go see an Indian spiritual guru. This was a mere few years before my family went to go see Baba, too. That trip was wild, by the way. I had these really cute platform sandals (I was seven), and I left them outside of a temple, and they got stolen, and I was told by the adults around me that it’s okay because someone needed them more than I did. I had to buy new sandals that day. Thus begins my laundry list of examples of how I may have aqquired a form of religious OCD.

Aside from Baba, my family participated pretty heavily in the makings of the new Shiridi Sai Baba temple in Columbus, Ohio. At the time, there was only one other Hindu temple, which had been there for quite some time already. It came to be known as reflecting North Indian Hindus, of whom a majority do not recognize Shiridi Sai Baba, a later-born guru, as a divine figure. This man is interesting because he is important to both Hindus and Muslims of the region, but Muslims, of course, don’t participate in idoltry, and thus Hindus took on the burden of building him temples, I suppose. So, my family became really integrated in building the second Hindu temple in central Ohio, which would house a large marble Shiridi Sai Baba figurine. This consited of years of fundraising, bhajans (divine songs) in each of the founding family’s basements, hours spent building relationships, lectures from visiting guests from India who called themselves gurus, etc.

My childhood was spent spiritually nourished. I was never forced to worship in any particular way, as Hinduism is not dogmatic like that, but I was shaped by the currents of Satya Sai Baba’s society and Shiridi Sai Baba’s temple. I spent my Sunday mornings in Sai Spiritual Education with teachers who were certainly not qualified to lead discussions with children and teenagers, talking about ethics, morals, right vs wrong, etc. It really shaped my life and brought me to social justice. As you can see, liberation, freedom, and justice are some of the core values of SSE. Thus, in many ways, I felt aligned with the Catholics in the room at school, who spent their Sundays in a similar structure of school (though, I’d argue, nuns are likely more qualified to teach their spiritual education, as you do have to go through nun school, whereas my classes were being taught by folks who worked in insurance, tech, and academia — the last one would make them slightly more qualified to teach, but they were chemistry professors and the like). I was raised on the knife’s edge of right vs. wrong, with a precocious understanding of life and death, karma, and hyperreality. I was then, as I am now, fascinated by the other world, the one we escape to after death. I had not myself been touched — ravaged — by grief until my early adulthood. So happily, I spent years of my childhood engaging in extremely adult concepts, allowing my tiny body to become wracked with guilt about returning for seven more lifetimes should I break a rule or two. I wanted moksha — eternal liberation from the suffering of the body — so badly. As a child, this meant not lying to my parents. As a young adult, it meant denying my innate sexuality, my desire for love and touch, and attempting to kill myself when I wronged anyone about whom I cared deeply.

Is anyone surprised that I turned out the way I did? I spent my later teen and early adult years trying to right my wrongs. I studied hard, I never partied, I dated monogomously and did not have sex with my first real boyfriend — ever — and for all intents and purposes, I was a good kid. So then, why did my community bad mouth me for mistakes I made when I was fifteen? (read: mistakes, meaning, a boy forcing himself on me, but don’t worry y’all! In Hinduism, a woman can only ever ask for it! We are so feminist like that!) Why did the people who raised me, in whose basements I sat singing about my devotion to the Gods we all shared, who debated scholarship with me, who praised me for reading the original Ramayana and Maha Bharata, talk about me like I was ruining my life and slut shame me? And why did I allow those rules to suffocate me until they killed me, if Hinduism is not dogmatic, if Hinduism is nothing like Christianity? If Hinduism is “not a religion, but a way of life,” called “Sanatana Dharma,” why did others forgo their dharma, their duty, to protect me or protect the more marginalized? If Hinduism answers the call to walk away from oppressive religious regimes, as the Hindu right wants you to think that it is, why did it walk away from its responsibility to save us?

Hinduism, like any religion, cannot be blanket statement-ed. We cannot say that it is somehow more or less progressive than Western Christianity. Not when Western Christianity also produced Black churches and freedom fighters in every corner of the North American and South American continents. Not when Western Christianity fused with indigenous peoples’ belief systems to create rich, beautiful tapestries of belief. That isn’t to somehow beautify the damage that Christianity has done in every corner of the world. But it is to say that there is no one without the other. There is no Hinduism as it stands today without the advent of Christianity as it was yesterday. The relationship between the two religions just isn’t an either/or — it’s dialectic. Hinduism today, especially as it’s practiced by the American diaspora, is in fact influenced by Christianity, which is why the Hindu Right Wing echoes the Christian Right Wing in so many ways. Caste supremacy and white/Christian supremacy are two sides of the same coin, but they are also somehow, facing each other.

And honestly, it takes real creativity to make Hinduism — a blatantly decentralized religion with a million+ ways of practicing it — into a Catholic church equivalent of producing religious trauma. Not only courage, but creativity. How did my community do it? Between terrorizing their kids for their ACT scores and judging other people’s kids while their own ran rampant under their own roofs, how did the aunties and uncles of Dublin, Ohio, manage to religiously traumatize us, too?

I’d like to think Hindus can have religious trauma, too. And in many ways, it feels reflective of OCD perpetuating people’s minds. Religion, apparently, is supposed to be an uplifting guide to how to understand and cope with the world’s realities. God is supposed to be a kind, devoted entity who specifically created you through His love. Even in Hinduism, where the relationship between man and God is more transactional, there are elements of divine love that shine through, like when Krishna is Arjuna’s charioteer in the most difficult battle of his life. Krishna tells Arjuna that he will not leave him. That Arjuna must complete his duty, but that he has Krishna on his side, and they will see their dharma through together. Religion is to believe that God is your charioteer. That you are righteous in your movement towards liberation, or Moksha, the eternal peace of not being reborn over and over again. In Hinduism, to be human is to suffer. To end suffering is the goal, which means, essentially, reunification with the divine eternal “being,” or cosmos.

To do so, we are inundated with rules. There capital K Karma, and then there’s little k karma. Karma dictates how the universe reacts to what you do. Every little thing has a karmic retribution — from drinking this coffee today to hurting your mother’s feelings tomorrow. There is little k karma, which dictates throughout your lifetime (this is the popularized form in Western media), and then there is capital K Karma, which carries over lifetime over lifetime. This is a super highly simplified definition for the sake of the article, but you get the gist. As a kid, the concept of Karma was fascinating to me. I lived in lockstep with the universe. I could feel spirituality in my bones, it was always sticking to me in ways I could see and others could not. Even more than my parents, I think I had an easier time aligning with what the “right” thing to do was. Later, I would find out that this is called integrity, and that was a value I would come to hold in very high regard. But what it also did was develop a set of rules for me to follow. I am still parsing out the ways in which this impacted me — but essentially, I was taught that everything mattered: thought, word, and deed. And while I don’t remember being terrified of negative consequences (as Christian kids might), I do remember taking my life so seriously even at the ripe, tender age of 10 years old, that I would try to follow all the rules to the best of my ability, to build good credit in the bank of Karma, even going so far as to school my own thoughts, to hide them under thick blankets in my brain, lest a negative thought of mine somehow changed the environment around me.

Let me give you an example: if I was mean to my mom, I would have to sleep on the floor to correct it, because otherwise, my negative thought would cause her to have cancer. So while I couldn’t control my Scorpio mouth, at least I could course correct my behavior by self-punishing myself, which would not make the original action okay, but would help me proceed with my dharma of being a good daughter and protecting my mom. In tough moments like that, I remember debating with God. “Do I really have to do this?” a voice — mine — would ask. A response from a voice that sounded kind of like mine, but more distorted: “Yes. You behaved in a way that goes against your dharma, you must correct it.”

This practice transformed throughout the years as I became less and less religious. As a kid going to temple, I loved the social aspect of it, but was also enamored by the religious portion. To be able to pray and pay penance for my bad behaviors (I was a normal teenage kid who walked around with guilt the size of the moon). To be able to show society how devout I was. And yet, the normal teenage parts of my life were pulling me in a different direction.

For a long time, I was ashamed of my sexuality. I have always known myself to be bisexual, but I held it deep inside of me until I was around thirteen or fourteen years old. When I explored online, progressive Hindus would say that Hinduism is actually so open to queerness! But in practice, that really didn’t translate. Hindu Brahmin communities were, and continue to be, closed off. Hinduism is built specifically on the virtue of creating families, so you can be gay, as long as you don’t act on it. Hinduism’s core purpose is literally to create more Hindus, to procreate, to have a little Dharmic family. Anything that takes you out of that path has to be justified by another Dharmic pathway, and that’s often dictated by your Hindu community as opposed to yourself. And yes, you can say that being gay and queer is Dharmic, and I’d agree with you. But that’s the beauty of Dharma; anyone can say whatever, and it’s whatever. The thing that’s hard is getting your community to accept that. And while my community was deeply hypocritical — Brahmins who don’t eat meat buying Teslas and LV and high end leather, etc. — ultimately, they were still the ones who called the shots. And in a society that is so driven by shame as its primary motivator, who wouldn’t develop OCD in that framework? Therefore, to be bisexual was out of the question. Simply liking a boy was even out of the question, much less a girl. Hindu society, as much as Hindu progressives hate to admit it, is deeply homophobic, not just rooted in its culture, but indeed, rooted in the meaning and philosophy of its very religion. And, my mind riddled with holes and mental illness filling them, tried to think my way out of my sexuality. I only dated boys, I settled down quickly, and I put the issue to bed (because a non-practicing bisexual is just really kind of hated upon, but not in a way that denies you housing…so…that’s that, I suppose). While I did come out to my parents early on, since I married a man, they had forgotten, and I had to come out…again…when I spoke at my school’s queer graduation. So much for being honest, brave, and transparent as a kid!

But back to the point. You might see why an environment like this would make something like OCD hide in its own periphery. It doesn’t help that most of the time, I am right. The my little rituals — from prayers to studying in a specific way to cleaning up cat vomit right away when cat sitting instead of leaving it for my friend to come back to — might result in ruminating on the “right thing to do.” For a while, it felt like protection from society, to make sure I wasn’t stepping on any lines. Other times, it felt like a death spiral, worrying myself into wounds, into slices on my arms, punishing myself for things I couldn’t get myself to do. When John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down came out, I tried to ignore how much I related to the main character.

So now, I have some big questions to ask myself. If I do have OCD, then does that free me from my adherence to religion? Even now, I find the religious voices inside of my head, telling me that eating gelatin will make me go to a Hell my religion doesn’t even believe in. So, will I be able to eat the marshmallow, no problem? Will I be able to eat the Fish n’ Chips, without the decision eating at my insides? Is that even how normal people behave?

I should be allowed to be bad. I should be allowed to make mistakes I never made. Hinduism took a lot from me, but most of all, it took my autonomy, and told me, “it’s okay. Don’t make mistakes in this lifetime. You have the next to think about.” But I’m starting to suspect that was the OCD talking. The anxiety that would spout out of me like a uncapped fire hydrant, blaring red, if I took one small misstep. The control I need over my home, my clothes, my hair. If I am diagnosed, if I work on this, does that mean I get a second chance at developing a relationship with God, one that is truly with His voice and not the OCD?

I don’t know. The possibility feels endlessly optimistic, while the road ahead to get there is daunting. Perhaps the real question is whether I’m willing to do the work to find my way back home to religion, or if abandoning it altogether is the only way out. In any case, my somatic coach sent me a referral, and she’s South Asian! So I suppose we’ll get some answers, soon. I hope.

See you on the other side of diagnosis.

Yours,

Me