In the fall of 2017megapanalo, I moved into a pale green Victorian house in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. I’d recently left Chicago after a one-year stint — though it felt as if I had escaped.

At the time, I was in the midst of an all-consuming battle with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, one that I was desperate to figure out. San Francisco, I hoped, with its Pacific vistas, endlessly green parks and people from just about everywhere, would give me the space to shift my life in a sunnier direction.

I dropped my suitcases at my new apartment and decided to head outside. But as I walked around the neighborhood, passing a large purple mural of Jimi Hendrix, I couldn’t appreciate my new home. I was too focused on willing my intrusive thoughts to stop.

My O.C.D. is not like the one you see in movies. I don’t check doors or wash my hands eight times before leaving the house. For many people with O.C.D., including me, it’s more internal: Irrational thoughts enter the mind and remain there, festering.

The circular thought I experienced in front of that mural was absurd: that I would never live the life I wanted because I wouldn’t be able to focus on anything except,pnxbet casino well, worrying.

But in that old Victorian house, I met Nate, and we quickly morphed from roommates into friends. We played guitar in the living room, prepared homemade dessert hummus and dissected our ongoing exoduses from the Judeo-Christian faiths in which we’d grown up. Not only that, Nate was a meditation teacher and he gradually became mine.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Among national universities, Princeton was ranked No. 1 again, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Stanford, which tied for third last year, fell to No. 4. U.S. News again judged Williams College the best among national liberal arts colleges. Spelman College was declared the country’s top historically Black institution.

Calls for school crackdowns have mounted with reports of cyberbullying among adolescents and studies indicating that smartphones, which offer round-the-clock distraction and social media accessmegapanalo, have hindered academic instruction and the mental health of children.