EVERYTHING IS AN EMERGENCY

A cartoonist’s graphic memoir of OCD.

Though he had previously dealt with obsessive routines, Katzenstein traces his full-blown OCD to his parents’ divorce, when “cracks form[ed] in my world, little gaps between what should be and what [wa]s. The cracks ma[d]e me furious. Everything ma[d]e me furious.” From that childhood explanation, the author spins a narrative of being trapped within a personal hell, one that makes it difficult to connect with other people, leaves him hiding, and occasionally renders him unable to get out of bed. As a germophobe, he can never shower or wash his hands enough. As an adolescent, he realized that he had “a diagnosed mental illness,” he writes, “and even as I begin to understand my strange behaviors as compulsions, I keep behaving compulsively.” Yet life continued. Katzenstein went to college, fell in love, and found solace in “a steady diet of partying, drinking too much, reveling in an insane myopia.” The author continued to draw and was ecstatic when, after much rejection, one of his cartoons was accepted by the New Yorker. It “was the single coolest moment of my career,” one that felt so good that he initially expected all of his problems to go away. They didn’t, of course. Katzenstein tried a variety of therapies (cognitive et al.), and he improved in fits and starts. But he has always worried that his creativity and OCD are inextricably linked. Interspersed throughout are illustrations of Sisyphus pushing the bolder up the hill, occasionally in danger of being crushed by it. There are also some astonishing drawings of how it feels to have his brain blowing apart from within, which contrast with others showing his attempts to keep things under control. As he notes, he is “an anxious cartoonist,” and this is his story.

Enlightening words and drawings show how it can feel inside when outside life appears to be just fine.