Counting Is Endless: On OCD and the Infinity Movie on Netflix

Counting Is Endless:On OCD and the Infinity Movie on Netflix Cynthia Marie Hoffman (bio) It's late. I'm watching a documentary on Netflix called A Trip to Infinity. Mathematicians are saying things like when you die, you'll be dead forever. And numbers never end. There's a whiteboard scribbled with incomprehensible formulas. There's a black orb the scientists are each holding. A train passes. An apple in a theoretical box experiences nuclear reactions over billions of years and expresses its energy in every possible state of being until it becomes an apple again. At some point, I realize I'm not breathing. Trying to hold infinity in my mind makes me feel like I'm sitting on a boat, the boat is rocking, the boat is already deep underwater, and I've already drowned. But the mathematicians are seated calmly for the camera, eyes sparkling. They're enamored with infinity. They find it beautiful. I'm no mathematician. My math skills hit their limit in eleventh-grade algebra when I ended up with the football coach as my teacher and most of the football team in my class. I was a shy, artsy teen afraid to ask questions. I got a D on a test. "I thought you were smart," one of the football boys said, leaning in. This was the kind of boy who would never normally talk to me, but that was fine because I had something else special going on, which was that I was smart. Except, apparently, I wasn't anymore. I had an intimate relationship with numbers, but it wasn't love. At some point in my childhood, I started counting, and I couldn't stop. It wasn't the kind of counting that added up to anything. It was mostly counting to the number four over and over again. Sometimes I felt upset or anxious, so I looked at things in my bedroom that had four sides, and I felt safe. I counted the four-sided things at school, too—desks, papers, blackboards, lockers. I was afraid the school would explode. I saw it in vivid detail: the fireball erupting from beneath, desks and bodies hurling into space. I walked the hall with my head down, counting the four sides of each gray tile that anchored my feet to the ground. It was all in my mind, silent and hidden. No one suspected a thing. It wasn't until high school, about the time I was handed that D, that I realized my counting was obsessive-compulsive disorder. It certainly wasn't algebra. When I was little, I begged for those plastic glow-in-the-dark stars to go on my bedroom ceiling. I wanted to lie at night and look up at a universe of my own making, neatly constrained within the four-sided bounds of my room. I was given the stars, but since the sticky side might damage the paint, I was restricted to pressing them to the curtains. So when the lights went out, two star-paths glowed toward the heavens, but where the heavens should have been, there was only the bare ceiling, that same terrible nothingness. The mathematicians point out that even if we started counting now and kept counting until we died, we would reach such an insignificant number compared to infinity that it might as well be zero. End Page 77 In the grand scheme of things, all my compulsive counting really adds up to nothing. Nothing matters. Counting doesn't matter. Algebra doesn't matter. That boy in high school doesn't matter, though he is surely somewhere, cracking open a can of beer, lifting weights in the basement with a wrestling mat unrolled across the concrete floor. The universe itself is an explosion. We're supposed to feel connected to it, but not in a dreadful celestial-bodies-hurling-through-space kind of way. Some nights, I lie with the quilt gathered at my throat, trying to conjure a connection. No matter how infinitely small my life may be, I tell myself, my existence is part of something infinitely bigger. I try to feel the unknowable expanse of the universe...