literature

Primarily Obsessional OCD (Pure-O)

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I enjoy writing something personal and throwing it out into the world, knowing that what I write is nothing incriminating or something I'd regret, and that the only people who will be reading it will not be deterred by a memory of me, but rather will take my words at face value. With no image to solidify this event, this piece will blur and merge with the countless other texts people have read through the years and it'll be as though it never truly existed. Forgotten.

Take it from me, for someone who has difficulty forgetting, that is a very comforting thought.

Before I do this, for the love of Barry's Tea, don't take this so seriously. Nothing horrific has ever happened to me. I'm a healthy twenty-something year old with a loving family and the most amazing friends I could ask for!

So what's the big deal? Well, yesterday I spoke to my mother about something I probably should have told her about years ago. I told her I had OCD and it turns out she does too. It's funny how well you can hide these things, huh? We have different forms, but as you can imagine, they're both are pretty manageable. I say manageable, because I'm not too sure I can say mine is mild, but I've definitely learnt how to deal with it. I probably should have seen someone and had it diagnosed properly, but I honestly never saw the point. I believe in the benefits of therapy, I really do, but what could they do about it? Help me control it? Make it go away? The latter seems unlikely and the former? Well, from what I can gather each case is different to an extent, which would mean tailoring techniques to suit the individual, which in turn, requires learning a great deal about the person in question, and who knows me better than me? It might be flawed, but that was my logic!

While I did (and to a point, still do) keep the cause a secret, I don't bother keeping the consequences one. If anyone asks, I have no problem telling them what I can and cannot do. In fact, I make a point of letting people know as soon as socially acceptable, slipping it into conversation if the opportunity arises. For a while I didn't and the result was a lot of superficial friendships and false smiles. I was known as being reasonably friendly, polite and dull. Now it's cut and people's opinions fall into one of two categories. There are the ones who consider me a "stuck-up, brooding, emo bitch" (a friend told me that was her initial impression of me and I burst out laughing!) and the others who see me as a puppy in human form (my height doesn't exactly help shift the image >.>; ).

When you think of OCD, you probably see a person looking very nervous, with an odd need to touch objects or do something that is unnecessary and completely irrational. That's not entirely untrue for me, but I lean much more towards the O and less the C of OCD. I did feel compelled to have little rituals, but most of the habits were broken over time and now few remain, and those that do are well hidden. One example is turning around. I can turn 180 degrees no problem, but as soon as that 180 becomes 360, everything changes. I'm back to where I started and that causes an imbalance somehow. It feels wrong. Like a mistake. The part of my mind that records my movements and position detects an unnecessary input, which to avoid confusion and time wasting (oh, the irony) should records need to be followed later, must be undone. To achieve this, the same path must be taken, but in the opposite direction. This might sound ridiculous (and it is!), but it follows the same logic as you would if you wanted to undo the action of placing an object on a table. i.e. your hand would follow the same path to pick up the object, but the object would move in the opposite direction, going away from the table instead of towards. It's an odd little compulsion, but surprisingly easy to mask. If needs be, you turn 180, pause for a second so it seems like you forgot something, then with a subtle (and I do mean subtle. If it looks like you just got hit in the face with a frying pan, you're doing it wrong!) change of facial expression (so it looks like you realised something) continue with the other 180. People may think you're slightly ditzy (this can be swapped for "analytical", depending on how calm/cool you looked doing that turn), but no one suspects that you've just taken the weight of ten cars off your shoulders! An easy way to correct it if you're walking with friends, is to walk a little faster, turn (so you're in front of them) and walk backwards for a few seconds while still chatting to them. That action tends to come across as carefree and confident, especially if your style of clothes is raggy jeans, t-shirt and hoody. Eh, if you're trying to look sophisticated, this might not be the best move.

That kind of thing is relatively insignificant in my day-to-day life. My main problem comes in the form of intrusive thoughts. These aren't the types of thoughts that occasionally drift into your consciousness throughout the day. They assault the mind violently, over and over again and are rarely pleasant in nature. Sometimes they're flashbacks, memories and other times they are purely my minds creation, completely unrelated to what I'm doing or how I'm feeling. They started when I was a kid and just kept getting worse and more frequent as I got older. I won't go into detail of what the thoughts actually are (they vary a LOT), but the most common (about 50%) are images of myself injured in some way or other. They really used to freak me out and by the time I was fifteen I had depression to a dangerous degree. All because I thought these thoughts were my own. It's never a single thought either, they come in a series. It's an onslaught of one after the other. It's not uncommon for me to get thirty or forty of these episodes daily or even more than a hundred, depending on the day.

Apart from the emotional stress that came with these thoughts, it started to make simple things in my life more difficult. Speaking, for one. It became very challenging to talk. There were too many thoughts, it was stupidly distracting and by the time I was halfway through what I was saying, I'd get confused and not remember what part I had said. Even simple sentences were an effort. Before long, I had stopped talking altogether. I would go into school, sit at the edge of my group of friends, give one word answers and go to class. Occasionally, there would even be tears running down my cheeks, if the thoughts got bad enough. People used to be shocked if I answered a question in class or got something right. They honestly thought I didn't understand stuff or I didn't care. Eventually I didn't care. About any of it. School was pointless, just a means to an end that I no longer wanted. There was only one end that held any appeal for me and while that time of my life was dark and painful beyond belief, it turned out to be one of the best things to happen to me. It took three years and two new schools to grasp it properly, but I finally knew the difference between what were my thoughts and what weren't. And it would have never happened if my own hadn't gotten as dark as they did.

After that, life actually got a hell of a lot better. I started to understand the benefits of this condition and how to cope with it. See, as well as the intrusive thoughts, there are the active obsessional ones. They're slightly more voluntary. When I get a thought in my head, it's almost impossible to let go of it until every single scenario of it has played out, sometimes repeatedly. I can spend hours walking around in circles, my mind doing the same, or sit at my laptop reading articles on something all night long. It's time consuming and for the most part, it doesn't matter how much information you get, you never quite reach a conclusion. This lack of closure then compels you to search more, think more. It never ends. So invariably, a huge part of my day is spent ruminating.

But the great thing about thinking so much is that eventually you think about your thinking. You start to pick up on patterns in your thought processes. You find loopholes.

While one part of my OCD caused my depression, I soon found that another part could save me from it. In a time when speaking was out of the question, I turned to writing. I started writing poetry and soon moved on to stories. With stories, came new worlds and characters with lives to develop. Suddenly I had so much to think about, to focus on, to obsess over. I researched history, mythology, grammar and started reading proper books for the first time to pick up on writing styles. I even learned I was good at writing humour! It wasn't long before I had a book written and 49 others fully planned out.

Writing had helped enormously and with time (and a lot of persuading on my mother's part) I decided not to drop out of school. Not only that, but I had gotten my ambition back and was determined to do well in my exams. To do this though, I had to learn to manage my existing thoughts better, not just cramming new ones in. I analysed my episodes more closely and realised my mind associated certain colours to my moods and depending on the consistency and shade of colour, the more frequent the intrusive thoughts were. When the pool of energy in my chest was electric blue and jittery, I was prone to episodes, which would then result in panic attacks and my hair going grey (it's actually a very shiny silver). On the other hand, a glowing, sloshy green meant I was calm and was less likely to be phased by something. I started meditating. Nothing fancy, just closing my eyes and visualising this green energy. Taking it from the earth and into my tummy where it would slosh and calm the blue, turning it green. I took five minutes at the start of every exam to do this. It worked. I also noticed that certain pieces of music could alter the energy too, so for the first time ever, I started collecting songs and compiling playlists.

By then I had figured out ways to help prevent episodes, but it took a lot of focus and wasn't practical to use all the time. Like it or not, the thoughts were going to happen at some point regardless. I had to find a way of stopping them in the middle of a series, so the obsessive part of my brain wouldn't have time to pick up on it and cause me hours of wasted time. That's where the training came in. I trained myself to perform a sudden movement to pull my mind out of whatever train of thought it was on. It sounds weird, but I tried moving a foot, a hand, an arm, but none of them were close enough to get me to snap out of it. Then I found it. My left shoulder. Now when I get those thoughts, my left shoulder twitches. It's not very useful in public since people will just think there's something wrong with you (there is, but they don't need to know that!), but it's definitely good for your own sanity when you're alone.

After that, I started to work on my speech. I could say a few words, a simple sentence, but the only time I could speak effortlessly was when I was angry. I wondered why that was and came to the conclusion that it had something to do with a strong emotion, since the same would occasionally happen when I was upset. It had to be an emotion that overpowered the rest of my mind, even if it was just for a moment. After all, it only needed to be long enough to stop the episodes while I communicated a message. Well, that was easier said than done. I'd spent years hiding my emotions and wearing so many masks, I didn't know where one began and I ended. This shit took a year, but by the end of it, I knew a hell of a lot more about my sexuality than I wanted to at the time and I found a way communicating with people; wit. I had spent so long writing sarcastic comments (low or not, it's a form of wit!), that saying them was becoming second nature. So long as I focused on the feel of the conversation and how it made me feel, instead of actual thoughts, I could hold my own when exchanging teasing remarks.

With my sarcastic building blocks now in use, I began building the most amazing friendships. I had started engineering and was in lecture halls packed with baby faced teenagers (I was short, so apparently I had fit right in) and despite me not looking particularly pleasant to talk to, we chatted and challenged each other to stupid, meaningless debates. It was all I could do (and what I still resort to if I feel stuck), but it was enough to make some of the most genuine friends I've ever had. I actually get pretty upset if someone insults that form of communication. It might seem unimportant to some, but to me, it's one of the most valuable skills I have. It gave me friends.

And couple those friends with that type of communication, I found another way to stop the episodes. Without them knowing any of the details, they knew when to pull me out of my thoughts, successfully I might add! Whenever they saw me having them, they would automatically throw some random teasing remark at me or drag me into the conversation. It was exactly what I needed and three years on, they do it without fail.

That was also around the time I learned how to tell a joke and for the first time in my entire life, I was finally able tell a story! I wish I could write how awesome that felt. But hey, maybe sometime I could tell you.

So that was me coping, but I mentioned benefits, didn't I? Believe it or not, they exist. Well, for example, due to a comment made by someone, my obsessional thoughts kicked into overdrive for about three months (that's how long it took to go through all the scenarios) and I developed depression again. It caused me to miss an entire semester of college (and eventually the second semester too, recovering). I had no lecture notes, no books and I had no idea what the subjects were even about. Until the mornings of the exams. I'd get up at 3:00 in the morning and would spend two hours doing research. After all the times I had looked up articles, I'd gotten exceptionally good at finding information on the internet and fast. What's more, because of the coping mechanisms I had in place from my exams in previous years, I was able to focus without any intrusive thoughts. In each case, I soaked up half a year's worth of material in an hour and a half, from scratch. I didn't fail one exam. In fact, I got a hell of a lot of A's that christmas.

This skill also came in handy when I was applying for a job in a medical device company. Originally we were supposed to have a week to prepare for the interview, but the next morning we were told we it had been rescheduled to later that day and had about two hours to prepare. By the time I was at the interview, I knew all about the company's history, their products, the design of their products (materials, how they're used, manufacturing process, the serial numbers of the products and their respective dimensions), what was available before their product and current opinions in the market. I was also able to express a lot of interest in it, since it truly was something that, within a few minutes of research, had fascinated me. Needless to say, I got the job.

That's another plus from this condition, I don't panic under extreme circumstances. Put me into a regular social environment and I'm a bag of nerves. So many things are triggers for an episode; people, places, sounds. Clubs are out of the question and it's not unusual for me to leave a bar to go to a late night café for an hour, before coming back or sometimes just leaving altogether. I constantly need to have either my beanie over my ears or my sound-cancelling headphones with me, in case something happens and the sounds get to me. It's odd, it's not the volume, but the quantity of sources that would agitate it. But as soon as anything out of the ordinary happens, and things get bad, I have no qualms going towards the source of the danger. Or if a loved one is badly hurt and everyone around me is going to pieces, I don't. I'm the one there holding them and staying "strong" for the others. It's not that I don't feel anything, it's just that I'm so used to seeing images of myself and others injured numerous times a day, that when it happens in reality I'm prepared. After the moment is past though, I always feel it.

The great thing is that I can usually have a really shit day, where everything goes wrong and I can still consider myself the luckiest person on the planet. My mind makes a point of reminding me of all the terrible things that could go wrong, so when I realise none of them have, it's hard not to smile. Hell, you know when you think you've forgotten something and then you check and it turns out you hadn't? Well, most people I know shrug it off or think to themselves, "Good. I would've been a f***ing idiot if I had." With me it's more like, "YES! Holy f***! Woohoo! I'm a genius!!!" and cue the internal celebratory dance. I like that I can take joy in the little things. I love even more, when my enthusiasm is infectious and I see the excitement in other people's eyes after I get them pumped about a project or an idea. I even had a friend message me the other day saying that I had "influenced his usually dark and sarcastic demeanour with happy thoughts". Apparently, "it felt like being shot with bullets made of smiles". It was an entertaining message, to say the least.

Then there are the obsessions. Those were tricky, until I learned how to handle them. It can be very hard to stop obsessing about something. Almost impossible. So I don't. I don't stop an obsession. Instead, I monitor its duration and when it gets to a unhealthy or inconvenient length of time, I swap it for another. I got myself interested and "obsessed" with a lot of things, all of which I get hooked on. I like them all so much, it's impossible for me to pick one, so it makes swapping them easy. I might change them five or six times a day. The downside means I can never just focus solely on one thing for weeks at a time, without getting an itch for the the others. The great part is that I get to experience a lot of different things! I've designed car systems, variable gear systems for toy vehicles, heart valves, hip replacements, artwork for companies in Asia, graphics for posters, graphics for cards, worked as a bouncer for VIP suites and headliner dressing rooms, qualified as a security guard, tutor in adult literacy, tutor most levels of maths, babysat, volunteered as a treasurer for a year, wrote a scientific review paper to a publishing standard (I really need to learn to use Endnote!!), currently writing a maths book and figured out how to do decent anamorphic sketches (if anyone is waiting for another one, you might be waiting a while. That obsession has kinda ran its course. I know how to do it, so it's time to do other things!). That's just the stuff I've done in the last two years, the things I plan on doing are endless! I'm learning animation and audio engineering, I'm doing a drama course during the summer, I want to continue learning Krav Maga and I'll be starting back at Roller Derby soon (I used to get bad episodes during it, so I had to quit. I need to face it though. It's way too awesome a sport to let go!).

Another advantage, and the one I enjoy the most, is how my dreams work. I've already written pieces on them, so I won't go into detail. I love them, they're usually so action packed, with car chases, gun fights, sword fights, they can be political, they can be sarcastic (once I dreamt I was on Facebook and my mind created its own memes!), they can be beautiful. Sometimes, they are mysteries that aren't solved until the end of the dream. But what's so different about my dreams? Nothing, apart from the fact that they've always been in the same world and they can be revisited. Like during the day, my mind doesn't let go of the thoughts from my sleep. I can revisit my dreams. This becomes necessary if I've been woken before the dream has reached a satisfying conclusion, one that won't cause me to ruminate for days. At times, my dreams may present a question that can only be resolved by returning to the situation and seeing it through. Or if it ended on a particularly disturbing note, I have to go to sleep and change the course of the dream so it has a better outcome. In the case of a few weeks ago, I dreamt I was watching a movie trailer and when I woke up, I couldn't wait to watch the movie, only to discover that it was one my mind had made up. I had an exam that morning so I couldn't stay in bed. The minute I got home though, I went straight to sleep and was able to go back to the house I was in and watch almost the entire movie. The night before another exam, I realised I had forgotten to revise some mathematical methods that I hadn't used in a year. I had learned them over the years, but for the life of me, I couldn't remember (one of the few times I can't!). It was bugging me, but not enough to study or worry about it, so I went to sleep. That night I dreamt I was in the engineering part of the campus and I met a female lecturer who was determined to teach me those maths (there was a male lecturer present also, but he was useless!). I spent the entire dream doing mathematical problems and by morning, I remembered everything.

Not only are my dreams important for my sanity, they're also crucial for designs I do. Remarkably, despite what I learn in engineering, none of the designs are more complicated than the ones I would have come up when I was six years old. Back then, it was go-karts and tree houses I used to design. But the mechanisms are still the same, the only differences are the purpose and the inspiration. While the purpose is engineering based, the inspiration comes from everything else. They're all taken from things I've seen or experienced throughout life. A breathing apparatus I designed was from seeing a woman having difficulty breathing while I was working in security. She hated having to use an oxygen mask because of its appearance, so I designed a more discrete version, which would still provide the flow rate necessary. (I also designed various tools that day. It was a good day. For me. Not so much for her.) Another design was an electronic device that I thought of when I learned that my granduncle had fallen and since no one was around and he couldn't reach into his pocket for his phone, he had to wait on the ground for a few hours. The variable heart valve design was triggered by reading an article about using kidney catheters in babies' cardiovascular systems. It took a year of that thought popping in and out of my head, but it wasn't until I was bored and doodling in a lecture, that the solution hit me all of a sudden. And BAM! New design!

Not everything about OCD is good, but likewise, not everything is bad. It's just about doing the best with what you're given. I mean, I still have bad days and I end up letting people down because of it. That's probably the part that kills me the most. When someone wants you to meet their friends and you can't be as relaxed and sociable as you'd like and you disappoint them. Or when you have to work as part of a team and have trouble explaining something because you're tripping over your words and getting confused, which causes them to snap, "Spit it out!" and makes the intrusive thoughts so much worse. Or if someone you care about is acting passive aggressively towards you and you wish to god they would just talk to you about it, because whatever they say can't possibly compare to the torture your mind is putting you through, so much so that it manifests into physical pain that you swear you can feel and has you clutching at your head/chest/abdomen in agony. Yes, this condition most certainly has its downsides. It will test you, it will taunt you. It will even break you. But as long as you have those special few people around - the ones who help you cheat it, who laugh with you, who pick up the pieces, who call you god-awful nicknames like "cutsie", the ones who make appointments to get a hug off you because they've had a shit day and you're the one who can make it better - yeah, as long as they're around you, you'll get through it. And trust me, you'll be stronger because of it. And because of them.

I'm glad I wrote all this down here, but part of me feels guilty. See, not that those of you reading this aren't important, you are! But I do feel bad knowing that the people who may have been hurt in any way as a result of my episodes, don't actually get the option of reading this, of understanding that if I'm weird around them, it has nothing to do with them. And I know, you're probably thinking why don't I link it to them via Facebook or some other media site? Truth is I'm scared. While in theory I have no problem talking to people about this, the thought of everyone I know and deal with on a daily basis reading this, terrifies me as much as any intrusive thought ever has. In saying that, don't they deserve to know?

After a lot of thought (did you expect anything less?), I decided a few minutes ago to make a light comment of it on my Facebook wall. I don't want to make it a major thing, because it isn't. Like I've said, I'm healthy and have everything in life I could possibly want. While this does make things more complicated, it in no way is going to stop me from doing what I want or what makes me happy. So I figured by mentioning it jokingly, those who are interested enough or care enough about it will look it up and those who don't, won't. No fuss. And most importantly, no one acting like a babysitter or carer, just my friends.
 
Something I wrote as a journal, but I figured why not make into a text submission?
© 2014 - 2024 CelticD
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pachunka's avatar
While I want to respond in the enormous detail what you've written deserves, but I hope for now a thanks-for-posting-this will do. :j

It's tricky, for a million reasons, to refine most thoughts into words, and then especially thoughts-concerning-thoughts, and especially-especially thoughts-concerning-thoughts that simply aren't talked about in everyday speech, ever.

Exploring the mind and coming back with results isn't the same as exploring land, ocean, or the night sky; at least until you get into relativity and all the other magic out there, then it becomes harder to describe to a non-expert. And when it comes to the mind, everything is that way. The closest thing we have to nuance in everyday speech is people referring to short-term-memory vs. long term, attention span -- nothing much deeper (at least in my experience).

In any case, it's too early for me too describe exactly what I got for this without killing it by forcing words out of it - but it was something reeeally really good that I'm already getting benefit from, and that I'm now gonna switch back to practicing and making-things-stick. More news as it happens. ;)