Lisa Taddeo

I have OCD. I think that if I don’t give my daughter one of her special animals before she leaves in the morning, a terrible accident will befall her. If Jackson picks her up from school and they don’t come straight home and he hasn’t told me about the change of plan, I will casually call a few hundred times. I will send gently nudging text messages like “I’m calling the police.”

I’m not simply unhinged. I’m partly unhinged but mostly I’ve been traumatized. In short: I lost much of my family in my 20s, including both of my parents — car crash, cancer — then spent many years living so utterly alone with my fears and pains. I planned and paid for a trip to South America with a friend but bailed the night before because I was sure a lingering headache was a brain tumor. As a consolation prize, I went to get a massage and while the aesthetician was trying to relax me, I was feeling my breasts for lumps and found something and jumped off the table and went to the emergency room.

Another time I was eating alone at the bar of a nice restaurant in downtown Manhattan and I swallowed a bad clam. The most stereotypical, most cliché of bad clams. The mouth-feel had that punishing sensation of rot — that punishment I believe that omnivores like myself must bear without complaint. And this regular old bad clam caused the expected chain of events in the annals of bad clammery. Even though it was logical to assume I had food poisoning, I was instead quite sure it was the stomach cancer that got my mother’s mother — not yet the lung cancer that got my mother — so when I got home I left my apartment door open so that if I died, they would find me easily. I wouldn’t stink up the place for too long.

Lisa Taddeo