“I want y’all to walk to the sign that represents the kind of OCD you most identify with,” announces the moderator, a young woman named Angie Bello who sits crosslegged on the carpet and whose service doodle, Sully, has docked his submarine snout in her lap. Around the room, volunteers hoist placards that say things like violent harm ocd, sexuality ocd, and contamination ocd. They smile benignly, and for an instant all one hundred of us—people ranging from twenty to seventy, joined by nothing but a particular kind of madness—stand frozen, a forest of amygdalas flaring. Outside, San Francisco at dusk: Bob Ross clouds in haphazard sweepings of pink and feathered gray and, darkening beneath them, the city itself, garishly beautiful and troubled.
We are in an upstairs conference room…
