Into the matrix
OCD / staying alive / my birthday
My therapist recently said she often tells her OCD clients that they’re in the Matrix and need to find their way out. They need to refuse the blue pill, which in this metaphor represents the status quo of the obsession/compulsion/relief cycle, and be brave enough to take the red pill, a passport to the uncertain future and often painful truth of reality. With the red pill, you choose to believe that you have OCD. You choose to pursue treatment and try not to listen to the OCD voice which says (of course) no, listen, this isn’t OCD, this is real, pay attention now.
With the red pill, you must accept reality as it is: full of unknowns and terrifying possibilities. You might accidentally let your friend's dog off the lead and the dog might run into traffic. You might not love your long term partner at all, you might be lying to yourself and them and forgoing your chance for a more fulfilling life. You might secretly be a paedophile, somewhere in your subconscious. You might be giving your colleagues cancer with that bleach you used that time.
There is no 100% proof against any of these things. You must accept the unknowns and imperfection inherent to existence, or you will destroy everything precious in your life while trying to rid it of uncertainty. Because no reassurance is ever enough. The OCD cycle- the safety behaviours of the blue pill - will eventually have you giving away your dog, breaking up with your partner, choosing not to have a child, avoiding the outside world entirely, committing suicide because you cannot bear the fear.
(The trouble with OCD, of course, is that it convinces that your obsessional themes do in fact represent the red pill - they’re real! You need to investigate them and find the answers! and that the blue pill is the unexamined life, where you continue to live in comfortable illusion, soon to blunder into disaster. You have to take the risk of ‘getting it wrong’, or you will destroy everything precious in search of those impossible answers.)
It is so painful to choose the red pill and break the cycle. I was so struck by the scene in Don’t Worry Darling (an overall bad/hilarious film btw) where Florence Pugh’s character wraps the clingfilm round and round her head to suffocate, so she can die in the weird incel virtual world and wake up back in her real body. But she panics, and can’t go through with it. She can’t make herself wake up. To refuse your compulsions feels so unsafe that it’s like a kind of death, a cliff-leap, a dive into a wreck.
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The first few months of 2021 were some of the worst of my life. OCD had me in its grip. I was looking at the blue and red pill, refusing to choose, every day. My anxiety was so high, so relentless, the dread so all-consuming, that more than once I thought: This is what’s going to kill me. I'd sit at my desk at home trying to work and my adrenaline was so high from the thoughts that my hands would tremble. I was meant to be finishing my book, which felt like a joke. It was lockdown, again. No respite. I did compulsion after compulsion. I could not see the future.
My sister was pregnant and on January 20th I got the call. She was in labour and I was to come over to help. I got in an Uber and bolted towards Rotherhithe, feeling illicit and unreal. At that time they were telling people in labour to wait as long as possible before travelling to the hospital. I had no idea how to support somebody in labour, no idea what was going to happen. My sister almost gave birth in her own taxi, three hours later.
When I first saw my niece a few days afterwards, her dad was holding her little body in his two hands. She was tiny, tiny. I had never seen a newborn baby before. ‘Is she okay?’ I said. She was SO SMALL. She was SO BEAUTIFUL. I held her, terrified. When her parents were in the kitchen I whispered in her ear: I’m going to love you and take care of you for the rest of my life. However you turn out. I am always going to love you.
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Around the same time I read a poem by Margaret Atwood which included these words:
“Love is choosing, the snake said.
The kingdom of god is within you
because you ate it.”
I copied it into my journal.
You have to choose.
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Part of choosing to stay alive means accepting that there will be times it is very hard to make that choice. Because you are panic-stricken and your heart is thick with dread and your brain feels like it has been hijacked and you are sobbing every day before work and you are full of grief that you have OCD and that you will never return to the way you were before. And OCD is saying: do as I say and I will make all this pain go away. I will make everything perfect, safe, as it should be, if you just follow me.
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There’s another film scene I can’t stop thinking about and it’s near to the end of A Beautiful Mind, the 2001 biopic of the mathematician John Nash who suffered with schizophrenia. You can watch it here. In the scene, Nash realises his 6 year old companion Marcee, who he adores, can’t be real - because she never gets old. This realisation catalyses his recovery process.
It’s not that his hallucinations of Marcee and his best friend Charles (her Uncle) disappear. The film clearly shows that they are still there, in the background, for the rest of Nash’s life. He just chooses, again and again, not to engage with them.
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“In an interview someone asked me why I chose to talk about Muriel Rukeyser rather than Plath or Sexton and I said, ‘Because she lived'." - Ada Limón
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I want to be in the real world, where we all get older until the time of our death and where there is no way to skip suffering. I want to be disappointed and frightened and in awe. I want to write at least two more books and kiss the fat cheeks of all my friend’s babies. I want to be tired and slurping coffee on all the train platforms in London. I want to not know anything. I want to be a joyful, furious old woman. I am 31 years old today. I want to live for a very long time.
