Triskaidekaphobia

In my last post I noted that this was looking like a very writerly summer, even though I wasn’t actually doing very much writing. Well, it looks like a little triskaidekaphobia was all I needed to start writing again, because I’ve been way more productive ever since starting my thirteenth creative writing notebook last week. It’s not because I actually have ideas for things to write; most of it is just sub-par flash fiction or daily anecdotes that really don’t deserve being put to print. But ever since starting that journal, I’ve been living through cursed time, and it’ll only end when I fill up that notebook and move onto my fourteenth. Nothing too unlucky has actually happened yet; it’s been a perfectly decent week all things considered. But, to my OCD-riddled mind, always unraveling a vast mathematic conspiracy that doesn’t exist, evidence is a vestigial concern when compared to the evil of the number thirteen.

I became triskaidekaphobic* when my family moved from Texas to Minnesota on my thirteenth birthday. I don’t entirely remember if I legitimately thought we moved because I turned thirteen or if it was some really weird and ineffective form of protest, but either way, it stuck around long past its usefulness (if it ever had any to begin with). And it’s not just the number thirteen itself either; there’s a whole host of family of unlucky numbers that all tie back to thirteen somehow. If I’m reading a book, say, then I’ll never stop reading on page twenty-six because, of course, twenty-six divided by two is thirteen. If I’m on a run, I’ll never go six miles on a main route and then add on an extra mile to make it seven, since six plus seven equals thirteen. Six and a half miles is also off the table, because if you double that, you get thirteen**. This makes reading and running and keeping a calendar and a whole host of other things pretty difficult, especially when you get into the three and four digits and there are just too many hidden links to keep track of. I’ve often said that I’m not really a math person, but that’s not true, I guess. I’m just really, really good at a kind of math that doesn’t matter to anyone but me, and doesn’t ever help me at all.

To be clear, I’m not a slave to my fear of thirteen, more of an employee. I’ll slack off on my duties if I have a good reason, but then try to do something to make up for it later, and feel guilty the whole time. I would intentionally make mistakes to avoid an unlucky answer on high school math homework, but I’d usually pull it together for quizzes or tests. I always knew that the fear was imaginary, and that good grades were worth whatever stress writing the forbidden numbers would put me under. But, imaginary as it was, the fear was always there, and I could never be entirely at ease until it was neutralized. Reading over those last two sentences, I realize that I probably came off as crazier than I meant to, writing something that no one with a totally healthy mind could ever really understand. I guess that’s because I don’t have a totally healthy mind: I’ve got clinical OCD, and fear of thirteen is one of my less stressful but more noticeable symptoms.

The few times that I’ve tried explaining this fear to someone, they’ve usually proposed a test: read a book to its thirteenth page (or something like that), leave it for a whole day, and see if anything bad happens. But there’s just too much stimulus in a day, and I can always find something that goes wrong and claim to myself that it was all the thirteen’s fault. I’ve even made thirteen into something of a character in my mind to explain these discrepancies: a tempter who offers a couple pleasant days, maybe even a spot or two of unusually good luck, then strikes when you look away, and when you realize your mistake, it’s been on you too long and left a stain too large to clean simply by flipping to the fourteenth page***.

I’m not sure if any of this is at all interesting to anyone but me. All these conflicts are so deep in my own mind that I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t translate well to anyone else’s. This is still a blog post, though, so I feel like I need some kind of a conclusion. It’d be nice to say that I’m still fighting it, that I won’t surrender to the illogical disease in my brain. But, even at my best, I’m not a terribly logical person, and don’t want to be one either. And as far as OCD symptoms go, this is a pretty innocuous one. Maybe it’s all just striving for some kind of control, the result of a faulty survival instinct finding a pattern where there isn’t one. If that’s the case, then I’m fine living with the illusion. 

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* In case you haven’t caught on, yes, someone took the time to designate a seventeen-letter, seven-syllable word for people who fear the number thirteen. Either there are a disturbing number of people who share my superstition or lexicographers just have too much time on their hands.

** Fun fact: in my personal numerology, one hundred and thirty nine is the absolute worst number. The first two digits on their own make thirteen, the last two digits on their own are three times thirteen, and all the digits added together make up thirteen.

*** I’ve actually made up a whole cast of characters for the numbers to explain their odd interactions: one and three are toddlers, innocent but with infected blood, doomed to grow up into the demonic numbers. Six and seven are brother and sister (six is the girl and seven is the boy, of course), who are each okay on their own, but when you put them together they begin to resemble their evil aunt thirteen. They relentlessly bully number five, by the way, who is the put-upon middle child of the single-digit family. As I said, I’m decent at the parts of math that don’t actually solve problems, like character-development.