Notes on recovery

'Maybe the future needs you'

-       Content warning for suicidal ideation -

OCD does funny things with your memory, so I have to search 'OCD' in my WhatsApp conversations to find when I was last reaching out to friends about it. From these searches I know that February 2023 was my last serious OCD spike, where my anxiety got so high at work that I sat crying and panicking in the creche toilet where no one would find me, then slipped away two hours early through the side gate.

I didn’t want to be alone, so Sarah met me at Finsbury Park and I went to her flat viewing with her. It was the kind of neutral, sterile activity I needed to calm down. The estate agent gave us both a firm handshake, as though we were successful metropolitan lesbians securing a joint mortgage and not a kind person and her mentally unstable friend who'd had to leave work early. Afterwards we sat quietly and drank some expensive juices.

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I look in the beautiful personalised notebook Holly got me for my 30^th birthday.  This is the hard bit: it’s my writing from 2021, when I was in the worst pain. I don’t remember a lot of it. I kept thinking about shooting myself - the cold clean pain of that, the finality of that. I looked online and there were people on Reddit who had shot themselves and survived. I would not survive, I was sure. I would be thorough, careful.

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I was walking home with Jamie one summer day, through our beautiful neighbourhood, and I told him how bad I was feeling again. I couldn’t stop thinking about fast trains, and how I could get in front of one. My brain cells felt like they’d been filled up with petroleum. There was nothing else to add, nothing I could resolve in that moment.

He asked how he could help. I just needed a distraction, so we decided to play Would You Rather, our own dark version. Would you rather commit armed robbery or push a child into a lake? Would you rather teleport into the middle of the 15^th century or the middle of the 23^rd? Faulty submarine or faulty areoplane? At first it’s hard for me to choose my answers, but I do.

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'I remember sitting down and thinking: I am terribly depressed and this cannot go on.  And then I thought:  You can kill yourself or you can get interested in absolutely everything.' – A.S. Byatt

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When I was ill, everything was very repetitive. Though the intrusive thoughts always felt newly terrifying, they were always basically the same in content. I'd meet up one of the girls and they'd ask me how I was. Oh, you know, I’d answer - still thinking about this thing or this person or having this same bad feeling, running through this same imaginative scenario or scary set of possibilities. I'd repeat the same thoughts that I'd had a thousand times before as though they were new information. They'd listen to me with the same softness and patience they always showed.

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I could say lots of things about recovery, and I hope to, perhaps in more essays or a book even, but I want to talk about one aspect of it which is that it’s interesting. It’s a lot more interesting than being ill is. Whether you have OCD or an addiction or an eating disorder, it is always the ‘safer’ set of problems in a certain way, because they are all about numbing and control. In recovery, you are out of the submarine and on to the boat: you are truly at sea.

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Recovering from OCD has its own particular quality, I think. The thoughts which once felt so important still occur, but have lost their power: you just cannot comprehend how it felt to take them on board the way you did in the height of it.

What is it like, this recovery? It feels ordinary. It's like being on the bus, and seeing a man running on the pavement in jeans. You think, he's running because he's about to get on the bus too. Why else do people run in jeans? But the bus stops and he doesn't get on, just keeps running.  And now you're sailing off, and you'll never know why he was running. It doesn't feel important to find out anymore. He is no longer part of your story.

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That's not to say I've been fine since February:  August, for example, was a very bad month. I went into a depressive spike on holiday after making the incredible choice to drink eight drinks at Margate Pride and then go to Italy where it was 35 degrees every day. I don’t like holidays, unfortunately.  The second I land in a gorgeous new location it's like a switch goes off in my brain and I instantly plunge into existential darkness against a backdrop of sunloungers and interesting pastries. I like to be at home, listening to the kettle or plumping the sofa cushions.

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Even post-recovery, if there is such a thing, you of course do not always feel good. I am amazed at the things I am sad about now. My parents ageing or I’m disappointed in someone or it’s my Grandad’s birthday three years after he died or I am appalled by the state of the world or I do not trust the government or any government or I love my niece and she is so tiny.

But these are what I think of as good pains. They are interesting to me, they come from my heart. They exhibit variety! When I was at the height of OCD, I simply did not think about anything else. From dawn til dusk, my particular obsessions were literally the only thing I thought about. So, I am amazed at these pains, in awe of them, their colour and aliveness. Randomly, I think of Steve Jobs. It’s alleged that when he was dying he took a lingering look at his family and said his last words: Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow.

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‘The great strangeness still may come, even for you.’ – Jane Hirshfield

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What helps, for me: Running on a treadmill, faster and faster, for longer and longer, until my face is bright red and I am coated in sweat. Yoga. This meditation and this meditation. This workbook. 150mg sertraline. Vitamins. A lot of sleep. Therapists who understand OCD. Writing ‘lines’ – writing the intrusive thought down a hundred times until it is just words on a page. Exposure and response prevention. CBT.  Period tracking. Keeping journals. Talking to my friends who have other forms of OCD. And time. Just moving forwards into time. As Peter Behrens wrote: ‘The law of dreams is, keep moving.’

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One interesting thing about recovery is that rage was part of it. I grew enraged at OCD, and rage was at least dynamic, something I could move with. (Anger, I don't know about anger - I think often it's a panacea for something else. I think it can trap you, like a screw in wood. But rage? Rage can build monuments. Or burn them down. Rage got me through the worst days of my life).

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Yeek yeek woop woop! why you all in my ear?!
Talking a whole bunch of shit
That I ain't trying to hear!
Get back motherfucker! You don't know me like that!
(Get back motherfucker! You don't know me like that!)
Yeek yeek woop woop! I ain't playing around!
Make one false move I'll take ya down
Get back motherfucker! You don't know me like that!
(Get back motherfucker! You don't know me like that!)

- Get Back by Ludacris

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Self-compassion. I sit down on the floor and look at my own face in the wardrobe mirror. I say: ‘You are good. You are a wonderful person. Even if you make mistakes or hurt people, you are still good. You are still a wonderful person. You still deserve peace in your heart. Even if you are lying to yourself, and your fears are real, you are still so good.’ Then I cry. I kiss my own wrist and I cry. (this is another thing about recovery: it is so embarrassing.)

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After getting my first tattoo, I now understand why people in recovery or sobriety so often get tattoos. You lie there for hours, deeply uncomfortable, the artist stabbing and buzzing away at your flesh. It hurts. You sweat. You think it will never end. Then they are finished, and you are forever changed.

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This poem by Stephen Dunn – ‘and the group began to soften / as they remembered their own early days / the pain before the transformation.’
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Language, generally. You have to get interested in the world and get interested in yourself and language is a good tool for doing that. I knew I would have to do with my own self what I do with language.  Which is turn it over and over in my hands, no matter how boring or hopeless it feels. Thinking: how would fudgy sadness feel? What about the fondant of regret? Through the tedium of trying to write poetry, I have always trusted language, trusted that, every once in a while, it will flip over and show me its silvery belly.

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You have to get stubborn. Though I am uncomfortable on holidays, I took a solo break in early 2022 to Vilnius and was determined to eek out some joy, though I still felt depressed, numb and obsessive.  You have to insist on yourself. I sat outside and ate a delicious pizza with my hands. I went to the picture gallery to see the Mary Magdalene exhibit. I went to the Museum of Illusions. Because it was a weekday and I was one of a few people there, I had my own staff member to guide me around. She was very nice to me. She would say, would you like to try these goggles on? and I would.

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'Most of the seeds you plant become trees you can hide among. / Do not think your days are worthless.' - Allis Hamilton.  And lastly, Roddy Lumsden: 'Walk, walk in a heavy coat. Maybe the future needs you.'