A PORTRAIT OF PANIC
Not for Orange County, California, but for Obsessive-Compulsive disorder. I had a bad case of it at age 10. All of a sudden, I couldn't bear the thought that my thoughts, once they passed from my mind, would be lost forever without anyone in the world ever having known they once existed. The loneliness and anxiety of that realization hit me like a thick, echo-swallowing black curtain of oblivion. So, in order to keep panic at bay I went around literally thinking out loud, voicing every thought, so that there would be some kind of external trace of my mind moment-to-moment. There were other symptoms, too, of course, the usual ones like having to add up all the numbers I saw and checking things over and over, but the constant mumbling got on people's nerves. Everybody knew I was being weird and bothersome, but whether anyone had an inkling that I was mentally ill, I have no idea. I certainly didn't. Only later, while reading the big medical encyclopedia in the family library did I accidentally come across a description of my symptoms in the mental illness section.
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