Matt Cook's Portfolio

My stepdad was an English major, so when I was first learning to format an essay, he broke it down into three easy blocks: “You tell them what you’re going to tell them. Then you tell them. Then you tell them what you told them.” It’s in that spirit I begin here by immediately ripping the band-aid off, cutting the bullshit and hitting you with that juicy topic sentence. Hey, I’m Matt Cook, I have a severe and sometimes crippling case of obsessive-compulsive disorder and it’s taught me the meaning of life.

In short, OCD causes one to believe if they don’t take certain actions, something bad will happen. For me, some of the lighter OCD fare is checking, and rechecking, and rechecking that the door is locked and the stove is off before I leave my house. Otherwise, something bad might happen to my dogs. Sometimes I go so deep into an OCD loop that I’m late for an event. Think of Phil Hartman’s “Anal Retentive Chef” on Saturday Night Live, who spent more time neatly packaging his food waste than actually cooking, and you get it.

OCD gets messy with ideas and thoughts that scare me, too. There have been multiple instances where I’ve been unable to leave my bedroom for days because I couldn’t process and relieve a single dark thought. It’s a hitch in my giddy-up that’s been with me for as long as I can remember. It’s an inescapable shadow capable of growing bigger than my body.

An OCD loop can be an out-of-body experience where I become so far removed from myself that the journey back to finding “Matt Cook” feels like climbing from the vents of the Marianas Trench to the summit of Everest. The journey is exhausting, perilous, and has gotten close to deadly. Yet, when I stand close to the clouds and see the distance traveled, I can see the points on the map where my body, mind and spirit grew permanently stronger. It’s in these moments of separateness I see the reason to live.

When the question is posed, “Why do we humans exist?”, I’ve heard it answered, “Well, if you were Mr. or Ms. Pure Consciousness and you were having dinner alone every night, wouldn’t you create someone to keep you company?” I vibe with this idea. It implies consciousness wants to know it exists and isn’t just a void staring back into itself. So, to acknowledge its existence, consciousness loudly sang, “Coo-coo ca-choo!” and orchestrated a duet that necessitated a Simon to its Garfunkel.  

Our universe is one of duality. Every moment is filled with myriad instances of opposites cohabitating as one. Just think of your closest friend. The person you love so much it paralyzes you. The person you consider your other half. Now think of something that irritates you about them. If you couldn’t think of anything, that means your best friend is imaginary. Or your best friend is yourself—to which I say, “Hell yeah!” But if there’s not one quality about yourself you find irritating, you might be a sociopath. Please seek therapy.

No matter how good and unified a relationship is—whether between animal or particle—one half of that union will have qualities that cause friction when meeting the other half. It’s a given that one will eventually do something that isn’t in the other’s absolute best interests. It will cause a certain amount of pushback for both parties, but without a certain level of conflict and tension, a union does not hold.

We all grow up in the church whether we like it or not. “In God We Trust” is plastered across our legal tender. We’re conditioned to live with a subconscious “fear of God.” An expectation to be a perfect cog in the Capitalist engine at every moment. And to be small. It’s productivity over pain. Pain is bad. Numb it and keep going. It’s not part of you. Say your prayers and it will go away. It has nothing for you.

For the last five years, I’ve had massive chronic pain and posture issues. At one point, I thought I might lose the ability to walk. As a kid, if I ever got hurt mid-peewee soccer game, my aforementioned stepdad would tell me to get back in the game and “play with the pain.” So when it came to the game of life, I thought that’s just how it was played, too. Ignore the pain until you’re eating Jell-O through a straw.

I’ve had two surgeries on my right shoulder now thanks to my stepfather’s genius philosophy, but also thanks to our whole medical system, which will look you dead in the eye and tell you nothing is wrong when everything is wrong. At one point in my trials of the last half-decade, I was unknowingly running 10-20 miles an outing with a bone fragment impinging the muscles in my shoulder. Doctors said they couldn’t see any problem and there was no reason to do an MRI. Stay in the game. Run with the pain.

Our current system of allopathic medicine and health insurance reinforces that doctors and surgeons examine the human body as a set of parts in proximity to each other, as opposed to an intricately wired meat suit with its own intelligence. I would scream at my doctors that all the bullshit happening with my right shoulder was linked to the rest of the newly developing chronic pain issues all over my body, but no. According to one of society’s most revered intellectual classes, that just couldn’t be the case. Pain isn’t a part of you. Pain is something that happens to a part of you.

My condition devolved and the pain became so great it had me pinned down. It pushed me deeper under the water and the mountain views I’d enjoyed for so many years were no longer in view. But it was in the drowning I realized the pain had become its own entity. It was a separation from self, but it was also my brother. My teacher. Both my thief of joy and my guide back to salvation. I talked to the pain — literally talked to the pain. I meditated. Gyrated. I let it point me in all the right directions until I found myself healing again. Not just healing my body. My mind and spirit, too. I’ve dealt with this chronic conundrum for a duration of time comparable to Dr. Doug Ross’ stint on NBC’s scintillating hit TV show ER, yet processed more physiological trauma than that beguiling devil. And I’ve never been more grateful to be alive than I am right at this very moment.

I’m wildly fortunate I had a support system around me that was able to lift me just enough above the cloud line that I could see my plight from the macro. Most people are heads-down attempting to maintain personal homeostasis throughout the day, week, month and year that they ignore what hurts, casting it aside in favor of the infinite methods of digital and destructive escape.  It’s terribly hard for anyone to befriend their pain when they’re being told not only to ignore it but to escape it, too.

Being told to befriend your pain is like trying to get yourself to go to a porcupine petting zoo. We all have that big, bully shadow we don’t want to face — whether it be OCD, physical ailments or other toxic traits.  But ignoring it is to be oblivious to 50% of the reason consciousness stuffed itself into human jumpsuits to begin with. It’s the space between pain and joy where you find the giant being of light who came to play this open-world MMORPG called “Earth.” It’s that space where we find out why some entity devoted billions of gigaflops of memory and data to the grandest and gaudiest clown show the gods have ever witnessed.

You are supposed to be here. You are supposed to make things better. You are supposed to fuck shit up. Don’t run from your pain. Learn to embrace it as much as you embrace joy. I think that’s called love or something. To paraphrase the great Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, a flower isn’t just made from petals and stem. It needs the hot sun, the dirt, and the gardener. You are not just one thing. You are all things. Embrace your pain and take good care of it. You won’t learn a thing if you don’t.