I used to think somebody was trying to kill me.
I wasn’t nearly important enough to warrant an assassination. Not many eleven year olds are. But still, the cupboards had to be checked for men with hacksaws and I had to ask my little sister to try a sip of my water first. (I was fine with sacrificing her.) But, I couldn’t work it out. How people could exist with such dark things skulking around, in broad daylight. Death was lurking everywhere. And, it was waiting to catch me out.
I called them my traditions. I wasn’t old enough to know to fact-check the influx of nonsense that whirled into my head. And so, when that funny voice internally declared IF YOU DO NOT WALK AROUND YOUR ROOM, EIGHT TIMES, RIGHT NOW, YOU WILL DIE, I thought I should probably start walking. I liked eight. Eight was a great number, I thought. Four, however — four we did not touch. I heard somewhere it was the Chinese number of death. If I looked at the clock and the time had anything to do with four, it meant something bad was going to happen to me. I wouldn’t even want to write it in a maths paper. There were a lot of things that had to be done: watching dinner be cooked, (poisoning is no joke), repeating prayers aloud again and again, listing off the names of everyone I wanted to protect. Tentatively whispering my own name at the end — hoping the universe wouldn’t punish me for being selfish. Eight books had to go around my bed at night. I had to hear the word sweet dreams at least five times before I slept, (and there were inconveniently only four other people in my family). I’d ask my dad if I was safe, and only upon hearing that one word, safe, would I feel able to breathe. And that relief never lasted particularly long. The more things I did, the more my brain would come up with. YOU WILL DIE IF YOU DO NOT LOOK BEHIND THAT DOOR. Like some perpetual balancing act. Like treading on eggshells all day long. I could have around 50 of these traditions at any given time.
My fixations changed as I got older. Now, I wasn’t delusional. I was able to rationally understand that the likelihood of my worries was spectacularly low. And yet, resisting the urge to do my little rituals felt near impossible. Like my anxiety would swallow me up whole. It got most ridiculous during an obsession with my stomach growling: I was so disturbed at the idea of my tummy rumbling in public, I would do all sorts of weird things to try and avoid it. If my body made any noise whatsoever, I would be perceived as gross, a social pariah — god forbid, people might know I eat. I didn’t even have an unusually vocal stomach. Not that anyone cares. But, it was genuinely all I was thinking about. I’d take a tablespoon of olive oil every morning, sneak off to the bathroom to eat snacks when I wasn’t even hungry, think that if it got past quarter to I was for some reason in the clear.
I went on to develop a fear of getting sick and had to carry a huge pouch of medications with me everywhere. Like a walking Boots. I went through the classic cleanliness one too, manically organising things just so my brain was quiet enough to get some sleep. And eventually, somewhere along the line, my school counsellor had told me to read into obsessive compulsive disorder.
It was actually exhausting. Doing these things all the time that I didn’t want to be doing. Like someone had a remote control and was perched far away, dictating my every move. I was a strikingly not entertaining puppet.
The kicker was the intrusive thoughts. Everyone gets these from time to time. You’re on a plane and suddenly, you’re plagued by the image of it plummeting from the sky. It pops up like an advert, like a spam notification. It was like that, but on a good day, a few times an hour — and on a bad day, one a minute. I was a child with a big, old imagination and I was faced with all manner of nasty thoughts. I knew these were not my own. I knew I didn’t feel that way and didn't want to be thinking that. And yet, here they were: in their guilt-ridden, violent and upsetting glory. Like listening to the worst podcast ever, constantly. I took comfort in knowing that sometimes, first-time mothers get OCD and obsess over the idea they might hurt their baby, despite having no intention to. Because I was stalked by these terrible thoughts and could do absolutely nothing about them. The worst were always wicked or embarrassing things about people I loved — they stewed, hot and uncomfortable, in my brain, sitting like a weight on my chest. YOU HAVE TO CONFESS. YOU HAVE TO SAY ALOUD THE TERRIBLE THING YOU HAVE THOUGHT. YOU ARE A VERY BAD FOURTEEN YEAR OLD. YOU DESERVE TO BE PUNISHED.
Sometimes, I’d get worried my brain wasn’t anything more than a scrappy, overheating tangle of obsessions. That I didn’t exist as a person outside of it. That I had been there, once, a very long time ago — but, this was a home for something else now, a dereliction of a mind overrun by some school-bully. What if everything I said was somehow checking for something, satisfying some sort of compulsion? What if all my time spent alone was the regurgitation of the same anxious thoughts, over and over? What if this was it? What if this was me? What if this very thought pattern was just more OCD? What if my most identifiable personality trait was just being scared?
When I went to a psychologist and she told me we were going to use exposure therapy, my OCD was all NOPE! ABSOLUTELY-FUCKING-NO-WAY-NOT! I started having to do things I was acutely frightened of. When you can’t do a compulsion, you get something called an extinction burst. Your body is starved of that momentary release, and instead, the stress just intensifies and eventually, culminates to a phenomenally mind-boggling panic attack. Which has happened to me during truly inconvenient times. I presumed, throughout my teenage years, that because I was able to do well at school, have cool friends and hobbies, and make conversations, that this was somehow all normal. That if there was something properly wrong with me, I’d be in a straight jacket somewhere. And nonetheless, there I was, standing with my back against a wall so no one could sneak up on me, ritualistically weighing myself three times a day or having to ask the same question over and over until the answer felt right.
More than anything, this was all deeply lonely. It was too strange to talk about, I knew that. I’d occasionally burst into tears with my dad or my best friend. There seemed to be stomach-able parts of conversations around mental health — but like the grimmer parts of any illness, half of it still did not feel remotely mentionable. Now, it is my absolute, god-given mission to talk about the bonkers ongoings of my mind. First, because my OCD would like me to be totally silent, it would like me to have a miserable day, everyday. And I’m committed to no longer being miserable. Second, because life would be way more fun if everyone was at ease with sharing mad parts of themselves. Everyone’s got something. And for all the bad things, I also know that I’ve got lots of wonderful things about me too: an encyclopaedic knowledge of films, an ability to tell you exactly what kind of a personality a tree has, a capacity to love people with every fibre of my being. So here is my not very sturdy conclusion because I haven’t cured myself of it yet. Occasionally, I have to imagine battling it off, with a huge umbrella whilst balancing a top hat on my head. But, this is my official declaration that both me and you do not have to exist in brains that are actively hostile environments. And that we don’t have to be nearly as quiet as we might think.
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