spherical

12 Nov, 2026

“I was in the bath the other day,” I told my dietitian today, “imagining myself working at Wal-Mart. And none of the other employees could get along with me because I’m so bitter. Because the kids around me don’t get it—”

You’d think I’d be bitter about my education or experience. Nope, I’m bitter because I can’t afford to keep dragging around my grandfather clock and my great-grandmother’s piano. I was stewing in the tub, so frustrated I bet I could’ve made the water around me boil. Imagine, at my big age, giving up all the things I’ve accumulated; imagine me getting onto Facebook Marketplace trying to give away my great-grandmother’s piano. Imagine trying to explain why I’m like this to my way-younger coworkers.

“And then I thought to myself—but it felt as if it’d come from outside me,” I told my dietitian, “but this voice inside me said, ‘Can you not just be grateful?’ And then I was like, yyyyeeeaaaahhhh okay.”

We both laughed.

“And I’m really grateful for this shift in voice,” I continued. “Have we ever talked about my scrupulosity OCD?”

“I think so. Remind me what that is?”

I nodded. “In practice, it just looks like being paralyzed because you’re so afraid about the effects your behavior might have on other people.” I hesitated, frowning, pausing to consider the equally-true inverse—that inaction, or perhaps a lack of preparation, can hurt the people you love way worse—before continuing my explanation. “Internally, it’s just the fear that you’re going to Hell. And so it can look like—did you ever see The Good Place?”

She nodded.

“Do you remember the episode about the Only Guy in Heaven?” I asked her.

She nodded.

“Right, so it’s untenable. He is constantly doing the most. He basically lives in Hell already,” I said. I added something here about corporate deflection marketing, about how an individual’s recycling habits make a negligible ecological difference compared to some corporate entity poisoning the water.

“So scrupulosity OCD typically looks like this constant testing of your most fiercely-held ethics and beliefs. A voice inside you is constantly asking, ‘Are you sure you feel that way? Are you sure, though? But what if this happened. But what if this happened. Or this?’ So it’s your very own accuser riding along on your shoulder. What you’re really trying to get yourself to do, obviously, is either make your beliefs bulletproof, or just chill out.” We laughed.

The answer, often, is to chill out, to try to slow your roll with all your strongly-held opinions when they don’t even affect you personally. Unless you would like to wake up trapped in the situation you’ve been dwelling on? If I were ever held at gunpoint, I would simply—¹.

“So I’m very grateful that my inner voice has chilled out, too,” I told her now.

“Could you try to be grateful,” she laughed. “Like, just stop.”

“Enough,” I said, laughing. Yeah, having an intrusive voice that can interrupt a rumination spiral is pretty fresh and new for me! “It’s metacognitive, but an intrusive thought feels like a completely outside, separate thing,” I explained now. Which is why a lot of people might think exorcism before they think therapy, I added.

She looked horrified.

“This is just what healing from OCD looks like,” I said to her, shrugging. “Uh. So in Internal Family Systems,” I said, “which is a therapeutic model, we do talk about the other voices inside us, introjects, that are not our own. A lot of these are going to be people who, at one point or another, gave us advice that hurt us in some way.” People give us advice or opinions or lessons that might’ve shaped our behaviors or thought patterns, advice that is now outdated, or which otherwise continues to wound us and others. “So you kind of have to get to the bottom of, whose voice is that really? And you can kind of identify that they were operating on some bad information, or maybe an unclear picture. So then it’s just like, shoo, get outta here.”

“Not relevant!” my dietitian supplied.

I laughed. “Exactly. Not germane! Not relevant to the conversation!”

I paused, thinking about this. I admitted that anyone’s inner voice is already a pastiche of other voices. “This is very autistic of me,” I joked, but I do tend to quote movies². (“My whole family,” she said to me wryly.) Or I will think in song lyrics, little snatches of something I heard once. Or, God help me, I think in memes. We are always doing a lyrical mash-up. I’m Me: the Remix: of my parents and other loved ones, and then some not-so-likable people, too.

“So it is about purging what is not useful, and keeping what is useful,” I said now. I sighed. It’s more complicated than that, obviously. Things that were useful yesterday might not be quite as useful today. Things that once felt very painful to hear might take on different, richer significance in the cold light of day.

“Or, you probably run into this a lot,” I said to my dietitian, “body-image stuff. Noticing all the times your mom was just projecting.” We said more about this, but I don’t feel like recounting it. “I’ve really been working on this again,” I said to her now. “A couple nights ago I actually expressed gratitude for my body—for, um,” and I hesitated, “God making me in their image.”

My dietitian raised her eyebrows. She said something about trying to become ever more perfect—

My eyes narrowed. I let her finish.

“I was a lot thinner when I was younger,” I finally said to her, “and then I became a lot bigger, and I can tell you that people definitely treat you differently.” She nodded. “It’s very difficult to get to a point where you can filter out all that external noise. And I think that’s really what it is. I grew up evangelical, so I always heard I was perfect just how God made me. Made in His image,” I said, smirking. “And then when you get older, people around you are like ‘not you, though.’”

She burst out laughing.

“Just, like… not you,” I said. “And yeah. It’s a multitudinous God. I think you can see, uh,” and I shifted in my seat, and I swiveled my camera, “yeah, so I always have Rainbow Jesus right behind me,” I said, centering the wall artwork of Brown Jesus in His technicolor dream-robe in frame.

“So if we’re already made in the image of a multitudinous God,” I continued, back in frame again, “and if we’re all made in God’s image, that’s going to require a huge spectrum of people,” and now I was inexplicably doing ASL of the sun rising, “who are every possible dimension, expression, permutation of God.”

I called my financial guy to inform him of my change of phone number.

“So that’s the order of importance, huh,” he said. “A few closest friends and family members and your dietitian?”

“Yes,” I said to him, amused and a little startled. Actually it’d been a few friends, my dietitian, then my uncle the next day.

“I appreciate it,” he said slowly. “I guess if I’d called you and the number didn’t connect, I would’ve wondered if you’d lost your phone, jumped off a bridge, gotten sick—”

I started coughing. “Yeah, I—” I said, suddenly unable to get it together. “That’s the reason I texted my dietitian. I didn’t want her to… to, uh, leap to any conclusions.” I took a swig of water. “Honestly I meant to call you yesterday before end-of-day. I’m sorry I didn’t.”

Man. The fact that people think, “well, I knew she was going through it, maybe she finally jumped” does not feel great, but it is why my financial adviser and my dietitian are both in my top ten. Maybe I’d been calling and texting a list of Top 10 people most likely to believe I jumped off a bridge. Oh, dear.

After we got off the phone I called my dentist next. The office sends appointment reminder texts that are really useful.

A couple years ago I went to lunch with a friend, K, telling her about a dream I’d had on ketamine. I don’t remember why I’d brought it up, except the dream itself had been bugging me.

In the dream I’d been asleep on the ocean floor, in the darkest, deepest part. I was surrounded by glowy alien animals, weird eldritch things. I could feel the coldness of the water on my skin. I remember I felt very alone but, more than that, I felt very tired. Thingamajigs would scuttle past me, creating micromovements in the water around me, and I’d feel a numbed-out irritation, please don’t disturb.

K was thoughtful, and then she pulled out a lovely copper coin, yes on one side, no on the other side.

“I want you to have this,” she said.

I protested—a lot, because, weirdly enough, I already have two other yes/no decision coins—but I finally accepted it, accepted that I would never understand her sudden insistence and certainty.

Then I started fidgeting with it and, in the ensuing 27 months, I’ve continued to fidget with it. I find myself thinking about how there are so many more options in the world than a simple “yes” or “no,” but we often flatten reality into a 2D thing, typically when we’ve gotten too flattened ourselves, to the point that we can no longer cope with anything beyond a simple binary this-or-that. I think about Archer Prewitt’s comic book Sof’Boy, where the title character regularly gets flattened by a car or an anvil, and—indomitable—he keeps puffing himself into 3D again.

And so a real ‘decisionmaking’ coin, an options coin that reflects reality, would be a die that has so many sides, it has finally become a sphere. A sphere is a coin with every face on it, instead of just two faces. I guess Sophie Houlden inadvertently taught me that. And then I bought a hundred-sided die and I saw that it was true.