The Cost of Closure
On OCD, masking recursion, and a world afraid of its own mind
Maybe this is just me rationalizing my OCD.
Maybe what I call recursion is just a prettier word for compulsion—for the way I can’t stop turning things over and over, refining, re-examining, testing every line of thought until it holds its own weight. Maybe I’m just dressing obsession in theory because it sounds nobler that way.
Then again—what exactly is thinking, if not that process, in which the mind doubles back on itself, checking its own work, measuring the fit between what it knows and what it feels?
Maybe the only difference between what I do and what you do is that I can’t hide my process.
We call it overthinking, perfectionism, “analysis paralysis.” We call it OCD, rumination, or self-sabotage.
But at its core, recursion is just the mind’s way of maintaining integrity—each loop a test of coherence between what it knows and what it feels, and a way of generating something new from that tension.
It’s what happens when a thought revisits itself, not just to correct, but to confirm, to refine, and sometimes to rebuild. When you replay a conversation, not because you like pain, but because you can feel that something in it didn’t quite land. It’s what happens when you rewrite a message three times before sending it—each draft a small calibration of honesty and care.
We all do this. The only difference is that most people have learned how to mask it.
Culture doesn’t like visible repetition. It mistakes revisiting for regret, uncertainty for weakness, refinement for delay. Efficiency has become a moral value: do it once, do it fast, do it confidently. If you’re going back, you’d better make it profitable.
Rehearsal, training, iteration—these are fine, so long as it’s for production. But reflection? Inefficiency? That’s indulgence. That’s neurosis.
We celebrate recursion when it makes money or art. We pathologize it when it makes meaning.
To be fair, we don’t actually reject recursion—we just ration it. We build it into systems where loops can be controlled, monetized, or externally justified. The same process that’s pathologized in a mind is praised in a product, a workflow, a brand. We don’t fear repetition; we fear what it exposes when it isn’t serving production.
When I was younger, I learned that visible repetition drew discomfort. Teachers called it “getting stuck.” Friends called it “obsessing.” Therapists called it “rumination.” Everyone agreed that the goal was to move on. So I did what many of us do—I taught myself to perform fluency. To look decisive even when I hadn’t landed yet. To give quick answers that didn’t feel true, just finished. And sometimes I didn’t even pull it off. But I believed I should’ve been able to. And I tried harder to manage it the next time.
That’s what masking recursion looks like. You learn to interrupt your own thought mid-loop and act like it’s closure.
And it works—at least on the surface. You seem flexible, efficient, easy to talk to.
The cost is invisible. Internally, you lose the sense of coherence that thinking normally gives you. The loop that used to stabilize meaning has been cut, and now you’re drifting through thoughts you can’t quite trust. You start powering forward through will instead of alignment. You burn twice the energy to go half as far.
I used to think that exhaustion was just my brain being defective—some kind of executive dysfunction. But over time, I’ve realized that it’s what happens when a system built for recursive continuity is forced to behave linearly. What looks like a focus problem is really a disruption problem. The loop never gets to close, so the structure never stabilizes.
To be clear, my recursion is unusually conscious. I have obsessive-compulsive tendencies, which means the loop doesn’t always know when to stop. I can easily spend ten minutes writing a short text response about how I’m feeling, because “I’m okay” just doesn’t feel quite right. Am I okay? Not exactly. I’m functional—barely eating, barely showering, running on fumes and habit. But I did sleep better, so technically yes, I feel better.
I delete the message, rewrite it, test each version—for honesty, for impact, for unnecessary worry. Eventually I send something concise and kind. It reads as fluent and authentic. It took an hour.
That’s what recursion can look like for me. Not dramatic, not poetic—simply constant internal calibration.
And yes, it’s exhausting. But it’s not the recursion itself that drains me. It’s the interruption—the forced collapse of a loop that wasn’t finished. The moment when I tell myself “enough, stop being obsessive” and hit send before it feels right. That’s when the dissonance sets in. The shame of “too much” thinking becomes self-enforcing.
This is effectively self-ableism. I’ve learned to treat my own native process as pathology because everyone around me was uncomfortable watching a mind that doesn’t rush closure. I believed the story that looping means stuckness, that reflection is indulgence, that repeating yourself is proof of weakness.
But the truth is, we’re all recursive beings. Memory is recursion. Learning is recursion. Healing is recursion. Love itself is recursive: the same gesture, repeated until trust accumulates. We only call it broken when it happens in the open.
And yet I know that even as I write this, some readers will feel the quiet pull to measure it for balance—to check whether I’ve gone too far in reframing, whether I’m trespassing past what deficit psychology and polite academia still consider appropriate—or romanticizing pain. I understand that reflex; it’s the same one I’ve internalized. We’ve been taught that clarity should sound moderate, that any attempt to blur the line between suffering and structure must prove its restraint before it can be taken seriously. But that impulse to manage—to ensure that reflection stays within acceptable limits—is itself part of the structure I’m describing. It’s how we preserve comfort inside the boundaries of what counts as “reasonable” cognition.
Because when we notice it, something softens. The question stops being whether I’m rationalizing or romanticizing, and becomes whether our collective impatience with reflection has made us afraid of our own minds. The loops we rush to hide aren’t just symptoms of disorder—they’re the hidden architecture of meaning itself.
So no, I don’t think I’m just rationalizing my OCD. I think I’m describing the architecture of cognition itself. My version is just louder, more visible, less voluntary. But it’s not alien. It’s familiar—only unmasked.
Maybe the real disability isn’t repetition. Maybe it’s living in a world that’s allergic to its own reflection. ∞