While driving down to Boston this past weekend, I listened to David McCullough read from The Wright Brothers, and explain how Orville and Wilbur Wright, a pair of lifelong bachelors, were able to focus on their task to the exclusion of almost everything else. Perhaps you've heard this story.  Learning to fly took years of failure, and without a sister willing to take over their bicycle shop, their dream might well have led them, ultimately, to poverty. Of course, McCullough's take is pretty clear : what determination! What pluck! But I heard a different tune : what a pair of obsessives!  That many failures? They taught themselves the math? Did they sleep?

You rarely hear the word obsessive used in an admiring context these days. It has the ring of something overdone, an attention flaw, and even in the Wright's day I doubt the amount of time they put in to their project was seen as wholly sane. Success, after all, only reveals itself in hindsight, and as I neared Boston and traffic thickened, it was that progression - the tenuous links between obsession and success and mental health - that struck a chord.

Both the American and British Dictionaries on my computer seem to think that to obsess means to "preoccupy or fill the mind continually and to a troubling extent." This seems about right - given my experience with the thing. Troubling feels correct. Not hysterical, just not ... distractible. Troubled.  "Like a splinter in your mind," (thanks Morpheous) a thing obsessed over will stubbornly refuse to be dislodged until at a certain point, like a nail pounded in to the side of a tree, what was once alien becomes part of the organism itself.  And that acceptance - that eventual feeling of defeat - can change you in important ways.

My own bouts of obsession - not OCD level, thank god, but still the kind of inescapable thought loops that I think qualify - have always been marked by a strange feeling of distance from self; of a temporary break with the inner clarity upon which "reasonable and rational behavior" depend. (Reasonable and rational used here because they appear in every definition of sanity I've been able to find. They're meaningless without context, obviously (Reasonable to whom? Rational along what metric?) so to the extent possible, I'm using them here from the vantage point of a person trying to measure their current state against a remembered one.) This sort of break is what makes a story like the Wright's so exciting. They stepped out of themselves- beyond themselves - and the risk paid off. However, as I am not a Wright, and as my particular obsessions will not crack open the mystery of manned flight, this overwhelming preoccupation with a single thing - such that I no longer feel like myself - can seem more curse than blessing. "The spins", as I've described them to people closest to me, can get to be pretty trying.

I'm currently at the part of the book where the the Wrights realize that all the charts and equations that they had started with were wrong - that all the 'flying experts' up to that point had no idea what they were doing. "In typical fashion," McCullough writes, Orville and Wilbur set about making a new set from their own calculations. And they could do that - not everyone can. Let's abandon the example of flight for a moment, and consider less concrete questions, like "what to do next" or "how to act like a responsible adult in 2015." These are important questions, and it is tempting the think that given their importance, you should use the same techniques you might to solve other important questions. Break it down, tackle the thing from several angles, treat it the same way you would any other achievable goal. But that is where the bait and switch occurs. Without a solid finish line, the search will drag on, and before long, the questioning brain will start to inspect its own foundation; begin to pick apart what it thought it knew about the process of thinking as a means of unearthing new clues. In short, it will realize that the charts might be wrong. But these are not charts you can easily redraw, and the moment you stop trusting your own set is the moment the spins set in.

How do you find an invisible (or moving) finish line? It's impossible to untangle individual credit for a popular script these days, but one of the writers who contributed to Tomorrow Never Dies put the following formulation in the mouth of that film's villain: "the distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success." Isolated, it sounds heroic (and not a little like that old Apple ad, here's to the crazy ones) but the line has always struck me as containing the kernel of something important. When you tone it down some, when you lower the stakes and adjust the volume of insanity and genius to the more broadly accessible anxiety and calm, say, it begins to feel like an important part of the conversation. It gets at the heart of an obsessive's only way out: in matters of cognition, how is success measured? At what point does an obsessed brain register completion? (Is 'success' just a matter of accepting the splinter until the nerve dies and the pain dulls to the noise of a normal day?)

I'm afraid this essay does not have a tidy ending. I'm no closer to answering that question than I ever was.  Instead of an answer, I've developed coping mechanisms, and after several years of flailing around in my own head without any real way of determining the size and stakes of this race (I'm still looking for the starting line, let alone the finish), the closest I have come to a solution is to write it down. All of it. Writing has become my best defense against the spins. Journal writing. Letter writing. Story writing. This. As a genre, the spins don't tend to inspire the most captivating prose, but getting it off my chest and in to paragraphs can give shape to questions, test the depth of splinters, and feel, occasionally, like the slow unfurling of new set of charts.