Obsession

Obsession

Transcript for Obsession (full episode)

From Stanford University and KZSU, this is the Stanford Storytelling Project.

The delta between the wow you feel like you should be feeling and how you are is sort of missing the mark by about 25% or something.

And so I think you just have to do some work and figure out a way to let go of that self-expectation of that 25%.

I think you're just driving yourself neurotically nuts by that stupid 25%.

This is State of the Human.

It's the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

I'm Charlie Mintz.

We're in the waiting room at Stanford's Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Clinic.

Each week, we explore a common human experience through story.

Today, obsession.

Oh, here comes the professor.

What's that?

How's your day been?

Yeah.

Would you like to introduce yourself, please?

Elias Aboujaoude, I'm a psychiatrist and author based here at Stanford.

There's no end to the variety that you see in terms of what people's obsessions can be.

Professor Aboujaoude's fascination with OCD started years ago when he was in medical school.

He was doing rotations, going from patient to patient, when he met a woman who stood out.

A patient who was in her 40s, a very successful career person who had become obsessed about the water supply in her house, somehow becoming contaminated by the sewer system.

We all have unwanted thoughts of illness or harm or death, thoughts that are obscene, thoughts that are irrational, but persistent.

But OCD patients have a lot more of them than most people, and they respond differently.

They develop compulsions.

These are rituals that help ease the stress brought on by the thoughts.

She would have to have all these consultants and architects and contractors and plumbers come on a regular basis to reassure her that no, the sewer system and the freshwater system were completely separate and not linked.

And she would have these very elaborate, expensive tests done.

And that fear had led her to sell, I think, two houses prior to the one that she was residing in at the time I met her.

Naturally, we wonder, why?

Why, even after experts told her, no, you're fine, why did this woman persist in believing this crazy thought?

It makes no sense.

Professor Aboujaoude says that's common, and it's one of the more tragic things about OCD.

Sufferers know their fears are irrational.

In fact, they're the first to tell you, Doc, I know this is stupid, I know this makes no sense, but I can't help it.

He had to move on to other patients, so he doesn't know what happened to her or whether she sold another house.

But from his work with OCD patients now, he can guess how she was treated.

Like a lot of psychiatrists, Professor Aboujaoude believes a deficiency in a brain chemical known as serotonin is involved in obsessive-compulsive disorder.

So this woman was likely prescribed medication to help with that.

Then came cognitive behavioral therapy, probably.

It teaches patients how to overcome the anxiety their obsessions create without resorting to their compulsions.

In other words, without selling the house.

A majority of patients respond to these treatments.

But as for that original question, why?

Professor Aboujaoude says, we don't know.

Like many other conditions in psychiatry and I might say in medicine in general, we're better at treating the symptoms and treating patients and helping them than we are at explaining exactly what caused them.

Brain scans can tell us this much.

Something is going wrong in the way the brain communicates with itself.

That's it, I looked.

Which of course is totally frustrating because whether our intrusive thoughts happen for an hour or five hours or five minutes, we all want to know who's in charge.

Do we control our thoughts or do they control us?

It takes me to wondering about very fundamental things that have occupied everyone for millennia, meaning things like the definition of consciousness and selfhood and where those things reside.

This is where psychiatry becomes something else.

This is where psychiatry becomes a philosophical quest, if you will.

Well, today we are on that quest.

First we are going to say goodbye to Professor Aboujaoude.

He's written a book, we should say.

It's called Compulsive Acts, A Psychiatrist's Tales of Ritual and Obsession.

It's State of the Human.

Each week we take a common human experience, sleeplessness, compassion, recovery and we explore it with stories.

Today's show, Obsession.

I'm Charlie Mintz and our stories today don't offer easy answers.

But they do suggest new ways of thinking about the thoughts we don't want to think, but can't help thinking.

Today in our show, a father consults an expert about his fear of not feeling enough.

A philosopher consults a nutritionist about his fear of food.

School girls consult a Ouija board about what else?

Boys.

And super elite athletes consult lists, sports psychologists, their parents, anything to get them to the top.

It's all coming to you this hour.

Stay focused.

I'm somewhat nervous.

In our first story, we're going to meet someone with an obsession and also a phobia.

Normally we think of obsessions as things to be cured, treated, made to go away.

But in this case, the obsession is the cure.

Sometimes when I tell this story, I try to make it funny, but sometimes I try to make it more intriguing.

Nick DiBella is 24.

He's a third-year PhD student in philosophy at Stanford.

He wants to know the true nature of reality.

You might say he's obsessed.

But this isn't the obsession, the one I mentioned.

We'll get to that later.

For now, we're going to focus on the phobia.

Cybophobia.

Not cyberphobia, cybo-phobia.

Fear of food.

For about the ages of 5 to 22, like 99.2% of my entire diet was entirely pizza, pasta, cheeseburgers, french fries, pancakes, and cinnamon toast crutch.

That's right, you heard him correctly.

For 17 years, this person, now a PhD student in philosophy, ate only five things.

Pizza, pasta, cheeseburgers, french fries, pancakes, and cinnamon toast crutch.

Well, six, once you include...

An assortment of different varieties of Pringles.

That's almost exhaustive, yeah.

Nick grew up in a big New York Italian family, four siblings, large family dinners, like an Olive Garden commercial.

It was awful.

I had actually developed a phobia of food, a lot of different kinds of foods when I was young.

Banana, broccoli, chicken, chocolate cake.

I would see these different foods and I would have a visceral reaction.

I'd feel sick to my stomach.

I couldn't look at them.

Lots of kids don't eat certain foods.

Nick could hardly be in the same room as them.

At the dinner table, he'd make a barricade out of board games.

You know the board game mouse trap?

Nick doesn't know where the fear came from.

He thinks it started with just normal pickiness and then evolved into a full-on phobia.

Most parents would try to fix this, but Nick was a middle child.

His parents chose the path of least resistance.

They accommodated.

When his family went out to eat, Nick got his own table.

Often it was like at the end of the room, like in some corner, and my dad would order for me and would say, you know, plain pancakes for the nine-year-old sitting at the corner of the restaurant.

Eventually, Nick got to a point where he could look at other foods.

But eating them was still out of the question.

So for the next decade, I just continued with my basic diet of pizza and pasta.

Eventually, I added a multivitamin so that I wouldn't die, which has like 100% everything.

Nick knew his phobia was crazy, but that didn't make it any easier to overcome.

He was in battle with a thought, and he was losing.

But that all started to change one night after an encounter with some Indian food.

A few years ago, I was in a relationship with this person, and she would get very upset about my food issues.

We'd go to restaurants sometimes, and I would prefer to go to Italian restaurants.

And she didn't want to always eat Italian, and so she would want to go to other restaurants.

And I was always happy to go to whatever restaurants she wanted to go to, so long as I didn't have to eat the food there.

And one day, she just got extremely, she got very angry, and I said, OK, I'll go to whatever restaurant you want, and I'll eat something there.

And so she picked out an Indian place, and I promised her that I would try something.

So they go to the Indian restaurant, they take a seat.

Nick scans the menu, and he orders some naan, because that's basically bread.

And he's promised his girlfriend he'll try something.

So he gets a potato curry, too.

So I got this potato thing in front of me, and slowly, I mean, it was very difficult for me to try it.

I needed some time to muster the will to try it.

And she was getting upset and kind of mean about it.

She was saying, look, there are kids over there.

Even kids can eat the Indian food.

Why can't you?

Finally, after some period of time of her just being very upset and having this thing in front of me, I tried the potato curry thing, and I put it in my mouth.

And I swallowed it, and I instantly felt the need to vomit.

I did not vomit, but I felt very, very, I felt that there was something coming up.

I felt like there was something coming up.

And this didn't really please her.

She said, okay, now you have to eat the whole thing.

All these different potato things.

Okay, let's take a moment to acknowledge Nick's girlfriend is not being very nice to him.

But haven't we all been here?

Other people's crazy thoughts never make sense.

And now imagine this.

Every time you and your boyfriend or girlfriend go out to eat, you have to eat Italian food because your boyfriend or girlfriend is afraid of food.

That could get very annoying.

She just saw this.

It's just food.

What's the big problem?

It's not gonna hurt you.

I would tell her many times, I understand it's not going to hurt me.

I just have this physiological response that's very difficult for me to control.

I need to take very, very baby steps.

And I did have a strong desire to get over my food issues.

Not the least of which that it was causing all these problems in my relationship.

But she wanted me to just instantly change, which was psychologically impossible.

They broke up.

Nick says it needed to happen.

But he also needed to kick his phobia.

He'd been tired lately in the middle of the day, no matter how much sleep he got, he was tired.

Doctors he talked to suspected it was his diet's fault.

But sleepiness was just the beginning.

Nick knew there were other, more dire consequences if he kept up his crazy eating habits.

Well, I don't want to die shortly, anytime soon.

But I also don't want to die, period.

This is Nick's obsession.

Ever since he stopped believing in God and in afterlife as a teenager, he's been obsessed with death.

There are a lot of people that think that somehow death makes a life meaningful.

I have never found such arguments, if you want to call them arguments, to be convincing.

I just see no particularly good reason for why you can't have a meaningful, extremely, extremely long life, even an infinite life.

Nick wants to live forever.

A big part of that plan, to live forever, actually consists of hoping, hoping that medical technology cures aging and death.

He's pretty confident it will.

But all that will be moot if he drops dead from some diet-related illness.

That's why he had to fix how he ate, so he can live long enough to live forever.

It's quite possible that within the next century, we're going to figure out how to cure most of the major diseases, as well as figure out how the biological aging process works itself, and then figure out how to stop biological aging and reverse any damage that the aging process might have caused.

This isn't as far-fetched as you might think.

Nick's part of a pretty substantial group of scientists and technologists, a lot of them in the Bay Area, actually, who believe radical life extension is possible.

And whether or not you think we're on the verge of important life-extending breakthroughs, think of it this way.

We've all tried to be healthier.

We've all had to battle our thoughts to be better people.

That's what Nick was doing.

That's why he went to a Stanford nutritionist and said, help me, I'm afraid of food.

I described my food history, and she was very surprised that I somehow maintained biological vitality.

And I said, just help me, I don't know what to do.

And so we set up a program for me to gradually become a normal food eating member of society.

And so she described different fruits to me and talked about their various nutritional properties.

And in particular, she mentioned that berries, like blueberries, are very healthy, very good for you because of the antioxidants.

And so the first fruit that I decided to eat would be blueberries, because I want to get the best.

So Nick bought some blueberries.

I took a single blueberry and I put it under the sink to clean it.

And it took probably like 15 minutes or so just standing in my kitchen looking at these blueberries before I felt that I could do it.

But I put the blueberry in my mouth, and then I chewed it, and it wasn't awful.

He'd broken through.

From there, the dominoes fell.

Mangoes.

Mango, I instantly liked, instantly loved.

I loved the mango.

Kiwi.

Tastes a little weird at first, and then after a few pieces, I kind of liked it.

Banana.

I didn't particularly like the banana.

But there were still blueberries and kiwis and mangoes and oranges and pineapples too.

So that was fruit.

Nick had mastered fruit.

The nutritionist was pleased.

And that pleased me, that pleased her.

And she said, okay, now it's time to move on.

Now it's time to do vegetables.

Cucumber was a no-go.

But lettuce led to an epiphany.

This sounds like a trivial realization, but lettuce is just leaf.

It's just a bunch of leaves.

Same thing with spinach.

They're just a bunch of leaves.

I didn't realize this.

I had no idea.

I had to really know what these things were.

That made it less intimidating because leaves are things that you can just see outdoors.

Long story short, with the help of some salt, some pepper, some garlic, and some olive oil, Nick mastered vegetables.

With each new food that I eat, I would think to myself, okay, that's probably added like, what, six months?

Then when I started adding the green stuff, yeah, that's gotta be like two years right there, the spinach and the broccoli.

Yeah, that's pretty good.

He went back to the nutritionist who congratulated him.

Then she said there was a hugely vital nutrient he was still missing, Omega-3 fatty acids.

To get them, he'd have to eat one of his most loathed foods, salmon.

He was at his parents' home in Florida when he tried.

My parents had done, they had cooked, they had done something with the salmon, and I said, okay, just give me a small piece of it, and I'm going to take it to my room, and I'm not gonna come out until I've eaten it.

I also took some bread with me too, to try to hide it away.

All his life, Nick had tried to do the most rational thing.

That's why he dedicated himself to philosophy.

He figured that if he had a finite life, it was rational to spend it trying to understand the true nature of reality.

Now, if it was between living forever and giving into his fears, the rational choice was obvious.

Finally, after like an hour or so, I took a small piece of salmon, I put it in a big piece of bread, and then I ate the whole thing, and I was able to do it.

And so I had conquered salmon, and now I felt that I had done it all.

So I felt like I could try anything at this point.

But the story isn't over.

Nick had conquered his fear of food, but death would be trickier.

Sure, he was eating healthier, he was exercising, but what if he got sick or had an accident?

He died early, before science made us all immortal.

That's why he started looking into cryonics.

Which is the technology of cryogenically freezing people upon their death, with the aim of eventually reanimating them with future technologies.

Cryonics is real.

Strange as that might sound, a couple thousand people around the world are currently frozen, waiting to be reanimated.

Many are in the Bay Area, actually.

The process is expensive, tens of thousands of dollars for the freezing, the maintenance, and the reanimation.

A lot of people pay by taking out life insurance policies and making the cryonics company the beneficiary.

That's what Nick did.

I now have a life insurance policy.

24 years old, but I have a life insurance policy.

It was the final piece of the puzzle.

Nick says he went from thinking there was a very, very high possibility that he would die to thinking it was a 50-50 shot.

He'd live forever.

And that belief changed his life.

I'd actually had a very priestly attitude towards my life prior to making these changes.

Even though these distractions towards understanding the nature of reality can be fun, ultimately, my time with them should be minimized.

But with death vanquished, Nick's priorities changed.

I felt freer than I had ever felt in my entire life before.

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I suddenly started taking an interest in things that I had never had an interest in before.

So obviously, food was one thing.

I wanted to try new foods.

But there were other things too.

I just, I had a desire to learn new things.

I wanted to learn more about sports.

Another thing was clothes.

Nick had never bought clothes for himself before.

Suddenly, he wanted to.

So he went to the Gap and walked around the store, picking out clothes he liked.

He went to the changing room to try them on.

And there, he had an epiphany.

Certain clothes can make you appear better than other clothes.

It didn't stop with fashion either.

Nick picked up his bassoon again.

He started playing with a friend and he even joined the Stanford Orchestra.

He took an acting class too.

Why not?

He had all the time in the world.

I just, you know, go on long runs or I would watch sports or I would meet people or I would have these, just other kinds of new experiences.

And I kind of neglected my work, but I didn't really care.

I didn't really care about it because, well, one, maybe it's not really what I want to do anyway, but two, if it doesn't work out now, then maybe it could work out in 60 years from now.

I recognize these are very silly things to, I mean, just saying these things sound very silly to me, but I still feel them and they kind of guide my behavior and my thoughts.

There's a certain narrative we're all pretty used to.

You know, it's the one where a person realizes that life is short and that therefore they have to make the most of it.

Nick couldn't do that until he decided life was long.

I did have to wonder, though, what if he dies anyway?

What if I die anyway, well, that's still be bad.

Nick and I talked about this for a while, and it was pretty tough to discuss because first it meant getting Nick to even consider the possibility of his life ending.

But eventually we got to this point.

I kind of want to become a very well-rounded individual.

For such a long time, I've been so focused on the intellectual that I've neglected all these other aspects of human activity.

For a long period of time, I just shunned them as being a waste of time.

But I don't really see them as a waste of time anymore.

Honestly, part of me doubts that Nick really thinks he'll live forever.

And he says he knows it sounds crazy, but he does.

He really believes there's a 50-50 chance he'll never die.

If you're skeptical, that might sound kind of like denial.

But look at the outcome.

He's freer, he's happier than he's ever been, and he can eat mangoes.

Obsessions can drive us into dark places inside ourselves.

But Nick's drove him out into the world, or at least to the Gap, an acting class, the orchestra.

Which is pretty good, when you think about it.

Nick DiBella is a third year PhD student in philosophy at Stanford.

You're listening to State of the Human.

It's the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

One of the all-time famous obsessives was the 18th century writer Samuel Johnson.

The author of such works as The Dictionary was plagued by melancholy and thoughts of suicide.

His suggestion to a friend on dealing with uncomfortable nighttime thoughts, read a book.

When that same friend asks if maybe some diversions, some classes might be a good idea, Johnson replies, let him take a course in chemistry, or a course of rope dancing, or a course of anything to which he is inclined at the time.

Let him contrive to have as many retreats for his mind as he can, as many things to which it can fly from itself.

The image of a mind trying to fly from itself makes me think of a dog on a leash.

Because how can we leave our minds behind?

Where do we run to escape our thoughts?

The answer is nowhere, but we can bury them, push them down, hold them there like balloons under water.

Of course, the first chance they get, they force their way back up.

That's what our next story is about.

It starts with an epigraph.

The phenomenon of Planet X has been researched since the late 1800s as a way to explain the deviations in the orbits of Neptune and Pluto.

Current research shows that Planet X is on a 3,600-year elliptical orbit.

On December 21st, 2012, Planet X will be in the proximity of the Earth, leading to catastrophic events.

Doomsday Information Guide.

In 8th grade, I qualified for Spring Regional Music Camp as a flutist.

I can't imagine why.

Even when I practiced, I had bad rhythm.

I couldn't mind the silences and rush the notes.

Playing flute was not my chief ambition then.

I wanted to meet a boy, in particular, a boy from another school.

I did not know him yet, but I pictured him, shaggy headed, intent as Schroeder on his trumpet or timpani, and most importantly, a mystery, not ruined, like all the guys in my grade by daily contact at the Cubbies.

How would I find my noble specimen?

I hoped for some accident, my flute falling and his wiry arm reaching out to catch it, but I was too scared of denting a rented instrument to let go.

Boys didn't sit near the flutists anyway.

They clustered in the horn section, their reflections shining in the murky gold.

Whenever practice ended, I scurried to meet my girlfriends in the auditorium and we quickly erected an impenetrable fortress of giggles and whispers.

One day Laura brought a Ouija board.

Ouija, she whispered clutching the box.

Laura had perfect bangs and long auburn hair.

She loved horror movies.

I think she married young.

Her Ouija set was made by Parker Brothers, a simple board with a white plastic pointer to glide over the letters and numerals.

We crouched down behind some seats to play, touching the pointer with our five hands.

It slid.

Then it slid again with a mysterious tension that reminded me of magnets.

You're pushing it, someone said.

Stop pushing it, I echoed.

But my finger was on the pointer too and the pointer moved between us with that same taut force.

We're not, it's a spirit, said Laura.

What's your name?

P-T-R-J-K, our hands spelled out.

Hi Patrick, said Laura.

Do you have a message for us?

Patrick was the only male who'd talk to us all day and he seemed as reluctant as the rest, skittering side to side before settling on letters.

A, L, L, all.

Our shoulders touched as we huddled closer, we who wore sweatshirts and jeans like our mothers, who hoped we were pretty, who thought life was an instrument to learn how to play and then the songs would follow.

We were either all pushing the pointer or none of us were.

P-E-R-J-S-H.

I'll perish, I said, the chill slipping over me.

The lights of the auditorium fell on the board, making it glare.

I'll perish?

That is so creepy, Laura said triumphantly.

She sat back on her heels, our tight circle broken.

Everyone else stayed.

When, someone said, our hands swept to the numbers.

Two, zero, one, four, 2014.

Before Patrick could tell us anything else, the bell rang for practice again.

We packed the Ouija board away and didn't dwell on it because eighth grade is full of prophecies and so few of them come true.

In 10 years, we'll be married to Michael and Randy Jackson and have their babies and live in Switzerland, Heather and Brittany screamed in the class yearbook.

Yet that night I went down to my father's study and wrote a story about a woman who turns 41 and suddenly recalls the day at Regionals when her friends Ouija board predicted the end of the world.

I used red ink and the curvy penmanship that I hoped made me look artistic.

The Cold War was at its height then and predictable bombs fell in the final paragraph, blasting the woman's house to pieces.

I could not imagine the world ending any other way.

I could not believe that it would die many times and begin again.

I miss her.

Only the woman remains standing by a bare window looking out.

Nothing has happened yet, but she knows it will.

Long ago, a message reached her that her life, like every life, was carrying her closer to its end.

Some days I still wait for the shattering.

Lately though, I've begun listening for a silence too, which in music is called rest.

Rest.

Maria Hummel is a lecturer in creative writing at Stanford.

Welcome back to State of the Human.

Today's show is about obsession, thoughts we can't control.

So far, the stakes have been pretty high.

Catastrophe, death, and eternal life.

In our next story, we focus in on a tiny persistent thought that's hard to even name, but chances are you can relate to it.

It's the thought that the big moments in life don't feel so big when they happen to you.

Stanford student, Jon Kleiman, had a nagging worry that this was his fate, to never feel as much as other people.

And then life brought him a really big moment.

Here's his story.

After my junior year of college, I got an internship at a movie production company in Hollywood.

I liked the idea of doing something creative for a living and thought maybe I could be a director.

On my first day, my boss asked me what my favorite movie was.

I couldn't think of one.

He asked if I'd seen The Godfather.

I'd thought it was lousy.

Casablanca?

I'd started watching it, but it dragged along and I turned it off halfway through.

My boss handed me a blank piece of paper and a pen and told me to ask everyone that worked at the company what his favorite movie was.

An hour later, I delivered a list of 12 movies to my boss.

He rated each movie on a scale of 1 to 5.

That's a 5 and damn it, that's like a 5 and a half.

His lowest score went to All About Eve, to which he had, with some reservation, given a 4.

He told me I had a week to watch all the movies on the list and to assign a rating to each.

As I walked out of his office, he offered his guarantee that these movies would change my life.

It had been a boring week, and my life had certainly not been changed.

With the exception of Kramer vs.

Kramer, I had not awarded any 5s.

In fact, I don't remember giving out any 4s either.

One flew over the cuckoo's nest.

It was fine.

Twelve angry men.

Shawshank Redemption.

They're 3s.

Network, though, that was boring as hell, and to this day, I feel guilty for having given it a 2 and not a 1.

On Monday, my boss called me into his office and asked for the results.

I handed him the piece of paper with all my ratings.

Really?

You didn't like Chinatown?

he asked.

And Annie f***ing Hall?

How can you not like Annie f***ing Hall?

He told me to reconsider my career as a director.

If I didn't love these movies, maybe movies weren't for me.

I wanted to believe him, and part of me did.

Maybe my ratings were so much lower than my colleagues because they were movie people and I was not.

Or maybe there was something else going on.

You see, the thing is, I have this sort of experience all the time, and not just with movies.

Can you think of a time when you were really excited about something and when you told me about it, I wasn't as excited as you thought I should be?

Actually, when you get accepted here, like when the university said yes to you, you weren't so excited.

I was more excited than you.

That's my wife, Caroline.

When I was accepted to grad school, we were in Boston, crashing with friends of ours, and I was aimlessly looking for work, trying to figure out what I wanted to do.

Grad school offered direction and momentum, and it would help beef up my credentials, which were all good things.

But the acceptance letter didn't feel like cause for celebration.

Why do you think that is?

Well, you were not excited.

I don't know, you just don't get excited.

You just don't do that.

Ever since you've known me?

Yeah, you get happy, I guess, but not excited.

Like, every people get more excited than you.

I've always assumed that other people are too easily impressed, that they want so badly to have positive experiences that they will themselves to have them.

And I don't, and that's the difference.

But then I've also wondered if it's me with the problem, and not everyone else.

I always imagine how I'd experience life's big moments, getting married, seeing my child for the first time.

How big would these moments feel to me?

I hoped for fives, but in my gut, I expected threes.

And then two years ago, I found out that I was having a kid.

And for those nine months, as we waited an inch closer to the day, I couldn't get this question out of my head.

How the hell was I gonna feel?

Late one evening, after Caroline had already fallen asleep, I came across an article that brought these questions back into view.

It was a transcribed interview with an artist I admired, and I had found a link to it on my favorite blog.

In the interview, the artist described his journey into fatherhood in such bloated terms that he sounded, well, nuts.

Here's what he says.

Yeah, it kind of fixed every mental problem that I had within an hour.

So I highly recommend it if anybody out there is thinking of having children.

You really should.

I mean, it's the only reason we're here.

If you have any doubts in your mind about yourself or where your life is going, it'll be answered easily and almost instantaneously.

I woke Caroline up when I read this so that I could ask what she thought.

She said, yeah, it sounded a little exaggerated, but it didn't seem so far-fetched.

She fell back asleep.

I couldn't sleep that night.

When you're about to become a parent, people tell you these stories all the time.

They speak about being pregnant, about giving birth, about seeing their kid for the first time, in such superlative terms.

It's like they hand you a list of moments and give each a rating of five.

And so I took a pregnancy test, and it was positive.

And Bart was, my husband was in the kitchen, and I went out and told him.

Then over, I would say, a course of a few days, the realization really sunk in, and we started to get really excited.

I think being pregnant with them, I was starting to fall in love.

We had Nolan, and he was there, and it was an amazing feeling.

He was plopped up down in my belly.

He was wrinkled and red and...

um...

perfect.

My husband brought him over to me, and I was still on the table, and I just remember crying and kissing his cheek, and it's the instant love.

When I pulled him into my arms, it was the rest of the world stopping.

I just never thought I could love.

I never thought I could love anybody as much as him.

He's an amazing child.

These are the stories that I wanted to tell, too, but didn't know if I would be able.

What made it even tougher was that Caroline had none of these anxieties.

As her belly began to grow, so did her attachment to the baby.

She spoke about the baby with an affection I had trouble understanding.

She talked to the baby.

She walked around with at least one, but often both hands on her stomach.

When she was five months pregnant, we took a trip with my brother and my friend Mark to Florida.

Our first day there, Caroline felt especially nauseated and decided to spend the morning resting in bed.

And when I woke up, I felt some bubbles in my belly and I was so excited.

So I jumped in the shower and tried to get ready.

And when you came back, I was so excited to tell you, and you were so unexcited.

It was so sad to me.

When Mark returned from the beach later that afternoon, Caroline put his hand on her belly and told him to wait.

When he felt a kick, Mark just about burst.

I've never seen him so happy.

And you never felt excited about it.

I thought that was so crazy that you were not excited about our baby moving in my belly and that you could feel it.

Why do you think that was?

That you were not excited?

I don't know.

Why?

I don't know.

It was as if both Mark and Caroline had rated the experience a 5, and I was stuck with my 3.

On a snowy New England morning four months later, when we had just entered the ninth month, Caroline started to have contractions during our baby shower.

And so we rushed to the hospital and spent the night there, waiting for the doctor to tell us if the time had come or not.

He greeted us early the next morning.

He told us to get ready.

The baby was flipped the wrong way, and the doctors wanted to perform Caesarean quickly.

I kissed Caroline as they rolled her to the operating room.

I donned my scrubs, I washed my hands, and I readied myself.

I was sitting beside Caroline at the head of the operating table when the doctors showed us Eliana for the first time.

We were both crying already, exhausted, relieved, and thrilled.

She was upside down, covered of blood.

I mean, I just remember saying to you that she was so beautiful.

And when I told you that she looked beautiful, you didn't have any reaction.

I did have a reaction, and it's one I'm frankly not proud to share.

When I saw Eliana, I thought she looked like an alien.

An upside down, covered in blood, alien.

In the recovery room several hours later, I unwrapped Eliana from the bundle of pink and blue striped blankets she was in and lowered her onto Caroline's naked chest.

We had heard it called skin-to-skin contact in our birthing class, and our teacher had insisted that it was an important way for mom and baby to bond.

Almost immediately, when contact was made, the two of them fell asleep.

Eliana nuzzled between Caroline's arm and her side, and with her tiny hands and her knobby nose, and her brown hair pressed against her scalp, she was the most beautiful baby I'd ever seen.

I pulled out my camera and circled the pair for a while so that I would remember the moment.

Later that day, I tried to recreate the event, this time casting myself in the lead role.

I removed my shirt, undressed Eliana, and gently I placed her against my chest.

Her body was warm.

I rubbed my thumb across her cheek again and again so I could feel how smooth her skin was.

I tried shutting out the world until everything else melted away.

I thought about if I'd been transformed, if my self-doubts had vanished, if I loved Eliana right then more than I'd ever loved anyone before.

I thought about the story I would tell.

One evening, when Eliana was a few months old, Caroline asked if I felt like a father.

We were sitting next to each other on the couch in our apartment, and Eliana had fallen asleep on my chest.

I told her that I loved Eliana, that I thought she was wonderful, but that I felt like I was babysitting someone else's child.

Many years before, I had worked as a nanny for two young kids.

I told Caroline that when I would put the kids to bed, I would tuck them in, kiss their foreheads, and picture how much sweeter the moment would be if the kids were my own.

It didn't feel much different with Eliana, and desperately, I wanted it to.

For the first year of Eliana's life, I stayed home with her.

I changed her diapers.

I took baths with her.

I fed her breast milk Caroline had pumped.

And then she turned nine months old, and it was wonderful, and I loved her deeply, and I felt maybe less like the babysitter.

Elias is almost two now, and somehow, at some point, this giant personality started to emerge from this tiny body.

She has preferences now, preferences.

She prefers regular Cheerios to Honey Nut.

She prefers sleeping with three dogs and two dolls, but none of her companions can wear their hats to bed.

It's like she's suddenly a person.

Hello.

Hello.

Hello.

And with those puffy red cheeks and those meaty thighs, she's just about the cutest person you've ever seen.

And just as they do for most parents, my feelings towards Eliana grow every day.

At night, when she lies down on the changing table and she reaches her arms up and wraps them around my neck and says, Abbie.

Hug, please.

And I put my cheek next to hers and she holds me and I hold her.

I could stay like that forever.

But the questions haven't gone away.

They're still floating in my head just as they have been since before her birth.

Hey there.

Hello.

So I found an expert.

Good, how about you?

I can see.

Is this gonna work for you?

This is perfect.

That's Dr.

Luanne Bresendine.

I'm an MD.

I'm a neuropsychiatrist and I'm the Mark and Lynn Benioff endowed professor in clinical psychiatry and founder and director of the Women's Mood and Horror Clinic.

As I said, I found an expert.

I contacted Dr.

Bresendine because I wanted to know if there was something I could do to feel more connected to my daughter.

It wasn't so much advice I was after.

I wanted concrete steps.

So how old is your daughter again?

I have a almost two-year-old daughter.

Oh, that's adorable.

That's a perfect age.

We spoke for about an hour.

Do you think that men's experiences and women's experiences...

She explained how pregnancy and giving birth and breastfeeding all release huge amounts of hormones in mothers and how these hormones strengthen the connection between mother and baby.

She explained how the brain circuitry in men is wired such that it makes caretaking a less natural experience.

I told her how I didn't experience fatherhood as other parents I'd spoken to had.

She told me this was normal.

And then I asked the question that had motivated this whole conversation.

I hear everything you're saying.

I hear other people saying to me that my experience is not that unusual.

And yet I'm still feeling like I should be feeling more.

I should be feeling more connected.

I should be feeling more like a parent than I sometimes do.

What's a person to do?

What's a dad to do in that situation?

You have a narrative in your head about what it's supposed to be to be head over heels in love with your child daddy-wise.

The delta between the wow you feel like you should be feeling and how you are is sort of missing the mark by about 20% or something, or 25%.

Is that about right?

And so I think you just have to do some work on that and figure out a way to let go of that self expectation of that 25%.

I think you're just driving yourself neurotically nuts by that stupid 25%, you know?

I liked this woman.

So how do you let go of that?

Freud says basically when you're well analyzed after you've done all this therapy, whatever, when you know that you're done, when you realize that basically life is disappointing.

Is that really what he says?

That's really what he says.

If your expectations are like this whole thing is going to change when she's nine months old, then if it doesn't happen, that's the amount that you're disappointed.

If you have very low expectations, then you're happy all the time.

So I recommend to you that you set your expectations as low as you can get them.

It made sense what she said, but this wasn't the antidote I was looking for.

The thing is, my expectations are already low.

In my heart of hearts, I expected my own experience of fatherhood to trail behind those of other parents.

I expect disappointment.

I wanted her to tell me to get out of my head and be present in the moment.

I wanted her to tell me to stop thinking about how I feel and instead just feel however it is I do.

I wanted her to tell me that making a radio piece in which I revisit and reevaluate all the feelings I've had about my daughter is the opposite of what I should be doing.

Because I know it is.

Because I know I need to stop thinking about all this.

It's just hard to do.

But I'm working on it.

I asked Caroline to watch Casablanca with me next weekend, and I told her when we reached the end not to ask me what I think.

We'll see how it goes.

Jon Kleiman is a graduate student at Stanford.

He is currently studying Learning Design and Technology.

So far, our show has been pretty negative on obsession.

But of course, just about everything worthwhile that's ever been done has been a product of obsession.

The lightbulb, obsession.

The Wright brothers, total obsessives.

Because that's the only way you can get through failure after failure, on your way to something that's not a failure.

Athletes, too, have to be obsessed.

So when we went looking for positive stories about obsession, we reached out to Stanford Athletes, and we found two who told stories about living with and overcoming obsession.

First, we hear from sailor Helena Scutt.

She was interviewed by our producer Rachel Hamburg with help from Zainab Tamori.

So this is my list, grip tape.

I need to stick new grip tape on my boat.

Find new lose gauge spring.

Figure out main sheet system.

These are four videos of a training camp that I need to watch the recap.

Mailing list, email, blog, old mask, $500.

Saving for a tactic, which is a compass.

UV top cover is a cover for my boat.

And GPS VHF radio.

I'm trying to buy a waterproof radio to alert the Coast Guard if anything goes drastically wrong.

Yeah, there's a little list of things on my mind.

I'm Helena Scutt.

I'm a junior at Stanford majoring in biomechanical engineering.

I'm also a Stanford student athlete.

I'm co-captain of the varsity sailing team.

And I'm also on the US sailing team's very top sider, which is the senior national team.

Obsession in sailing, you're really trying to minimize the variables because there are so many.

So you're controlling everything that you could possibly control.

You're really meticulous about your boat.

You make sure that all of your lines, so lines are all the ropes that are controlling everything, they're the perfect length, they have marks on them, and they're tied in exactly the right place and exactly the right way.

The bottom of your boat is completely smooth, no scratches.

Your sails, you have to usually get new sails for any real competitive event because the old ones crinkle, they stretch a little bit.

So you can imagine the amount of time that we put in to maintaining these boats.

So what percentage of the day are you thinking about sailing?

Well, I guess there's at least three hours during practice and there's an hour during workout.

But if I had to throw out a number, I would say 50%, which doesn't sound like a lot, but maybe it does.

Next, we hear from an athlete whose obsession is helpful, but also an obstacle.

I feel like people always talk about, especially with the Olympics, they always talk about how glamorous it is because they only see people getting medals and things like that.

But then people also don't see maybe the internal struggles that athletes have or the things that are going on away from the television cameras.

Especially for me, I was really obsessed with playing a huge role in my life during the spring.

I'm Kristian Ipsen.

I'm from the Bay Area, Clayton, California.

For me, it started at World Cup.

It was like the test event to make it to the Olympics, and it was the last chance for the United States team to get spots to actually go to the Olympics.

And I just had a really bad meet.

I was not happy with the way I did.

I didn't final in one of the events that I wanted to, and I messed up in the synchronized contest, and I almost didn't qualify our country to go.

So after that, I was like, this will not happen again.

Like, it won't.

And I did everything to make sure that it didn't.

The majority of diving is mental, and it's like, you start to get really obsessed, especially because that's all I was doing for the spring leading up to it.

I didn't have school, and every part of what I did was focused on diving.

And it started to get a little bit, to be a little bit too much.

Before the Olympics, I could do my dives for maybe eights or nines, or eight and a halfs, and I feel like I got to this plateau when I was like, I don't know what to do, I don't know how to get nines and tens.

In order to get to that point, I didn't intentionally obsess over it, but I did, I was just super obsessive.

I didn't go to school the spring quarter last year, I took off, all I did in the spring was dive.

I would wake up at about like 7.30, I would eat like egg white omelet or something, and I would maybe have like Greek yogurt and coffee, I'm just a coffee addict, so I had to have it.

So I would go to the pool, get there around 8.30, and I'd be there probably until like almost 11, and then we'd get a little bit of a break, like have lunch and then come back around 1.30, and train from 1.30 until four, and then most of the time we would have some form of weights or conditioning or Pilates afterwards, and that was every day.

But then when I would go home, and like especially if the family that I was living with was gone, I would just like sit in the room and just focus on everything that I like even messed up on or that I did good on, mostly what I messed up on and how I was going to fix it.

Just all this internal dialogue, how am I going to make that better tomorrow?

Like what am I going to do to change that?

That can't be like that tomorrow.

It's funny to look back on it now, but it's like, okay, the first week it was fine.

I went to normal training, I did this, I did that.

Then the next week, I like went to the store and was like, okay, I need to get all these foods and I need to make sure that they're really healthy for me.

Then the week after that, I was like, I'm really mad.

I'm not training as well as I want to.

And it was totally fine.

It's how I was training the whole year, but I was like, this isn't good enough.

This isn't good enough.

It was just kind of eating away at me.

I had my parents come to a practice and it was probably in May and it was a perfectly fine practice.

Like it wasn't great, but it wasn't bad at all.

And I just was so angry.

And they're like, no, Kristian, you drove well.

Like that was a good practice.

And then I just broke down crying.

Like just broke down uncontrollably.

I could not stop for like 15 minutes.

And I was like, this is absurd.

What am I doing?

I was like, I need to start voicing this to someone.

I need to talk to my parents.

I need to maybe go to a sports psychologist in Seattle, like turn this negative energy more positive.

I like to figure everything out by myself.

I remember at the beginning of our first session, I didn't want to talk that much.

I was just like, I don't know how I feel about this.

But then within 40 minutes, there was so much going on in my head.

And then when I started talking, I remember I just couldn't stop.

It's about everything I was frustrated about, why I was thinking so negatively, just everything.

And he's like kind of smiling and nodding along.

I was like, I think I just talked for 20 minutes.

Can you tell us the story of when you went to the Olympics?

You flew there, how early did you get there?

We got there, we were one of the first teams there.

There was no one in the village, so we got there and it was just deserted.

It was weird going to the dining hall, though, because it's just this massive complex that they set up, and it was just us.

For the final events, you're in this room, the call room, and you walk out and then they introduce each team.

You like wave to the crowd, go back in.

There was a lot of people there, yeah.

I think there were about 20,000 people in the stands.

And I spotted my parents right before the competition.

So we walked up the board, and then the buzzer went off, and it was just, it's crazy for diving, because it's like everyone's super, super loud and yelling right before your dive, but then the buzzer goes off, and it's complete silence.

I go, one, two, three, go.

After we did our last dive, we knew that we were going to be in third.

It was impossible for us to catch second place, and it was just like we couldn't catch first either, but we snuck in the third.

I think it hit me later, because I stayed at my parents' hotel that night and just talked to them because I couldn't sleep.

I was so excited.

And I, like when you're getting it, it's just like this crazy moment and people are pulling you in every direction.

And then like right after you get the medal, you have to do all these press conferences.

And it honestly went on probably for about six hours.

So when I finally sat down or laid down in bed that night, and I was just like talking to my parents, I was like, wait, that just happened.

Like I'm an Olympic medalist.

I've been through a lot.

Thanks to Helena and Kristian for sharing their stories.

Today's program was produced by me, Charlie Mintz, with help from Jonah Willingans, Natasha Ruck, Rachel Hamburg, Kristi Hartman, Zandra Clark, Sophia Palisa, Victoria Hurst, Josh Hoyt, and Will Rogers.

Thanks to all the amazing musicians who made music and shared it with a Creative Commons license.

You can find a complete list of the music on our website, storytelling.stanford.edu.

For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts, the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, and Bruce Braden.

Remember that you can find this and every episode of State of the Human on iTunes, and you can download our episodes and find out more about the Stanford Storytelling Project's live events, grants, and workshops at our website.

Again, that's storytelling.stanford.edu.

For State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Charlie Mintz.