Where I've been

The house is yours.

When I was 15 and wanted nothing more than to be thin I used to fantasise about being on the ‘tapeworm diet’, popularised in the 19th century. Dieters would eat a tapeworm cyst which would grow inside the intestine, absorbing any food before it could be digested. And so, weightloss: a grisly Victorian-era Ozempic.

I think about the tapeworms now because in bad moments I fantasise that my OCD is a tapeworm, a brain worm, and that the right surgeon could pull it clean out of my neural pathways with forceps.

But it isn’t like a tapeworm. It’s like mice in the walls: and some days you just hear them scurrying benignly, out of sight, and other days they are scratching and squealing and running all over your body while you sleep. And there is no way to get rid of the mice. And it’s not a rented house, the house is yours. You own this house, and you have to live in it for life.

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I’ve thought a lot (always the thinking!!) about whether to share the exact theme of OCD I suffer with. I think being misunderstood is my greatest fear, and for a reader who hasn’t got OCD they might well think: what? How is that a mental illness? But then lots of you, my friends who subscribe, already know about my theme, and for those who don’t I think I kind of need to include it for context. I primarily deal with the relationship OCD subtype, with a sprinkling of non-religious moral scrupulosity OCD and harm OCD (for spice!)

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It would be wrong to say that OCD has ‘taken everything from me’, both in terms of how my life actually looks, and also because there is something inaccurate about that expression. OCD is part of me, my brain, not an external actor, not a thief who steals into my house at night. Some OCD sufferers can point to the moment their brain broke, the moment an intrusive thought first stuck and their brain began its eternal loop around the track. I can’t pinpoint a moment like that from my own life - there’s a murky sense of continuation and ongoingness, though with notable accelerations too. The narrative I have about my own illness is probably something like:

• I can remember lots of anxious/obsessive tendencies from childhood and adolescence, but nothing debilitating

• I was very concerned about romantic relationships and experienced anxiety, dread, doubts, numbness, guilt etc in my teens/early twenties over boyfriends

• Relationship anxiety led to me ending my relationship with Jamie in 2015

• I regretted and obsessed over this for one year, I was depressed and left my job, three months off work, sad slut-era time?, sertraline, NHS group CBT in hot classroom on Brixton Road, loads of stalking Jamie’s new girlfriend on Linkedin

• Then we got back together in 2016, my brain was quieter for a time

• And then it was 2019 and 2020 and 2021 and the pandemic and we moved in together and there was Commitment and all of this was terrifying, terrifying because what if it’s not right - what if I fuck it up - what if I hurt him - what if it’s not really what I want secretly - what if we aren’t in love anymore - what if you’re in love with someone else in fact - better try and work that one out - how can I know how can I know how can I know for sure — maybe we should just break up - yes that sounds right DO IT NOW DO IT NOW THEN I PROMISE I WILL GO AWAY - i don’t want to - YES YOU DO DO IT NOW - but i would be sad - ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THAT - yes - LET ME CONSTRUCT AN ENTIRELY BASELESS EMOTIONAL AND MENTAL FANTASY THAT PROVES YOU WOULD BE HAPPY IF YOU LEFT HIM - you know i really think i would be sad, like i was before - LET ME MAKE YOU THINK ABOUT IT FROM THE MINUTE YOU WAKE UP UNTIL THE MINUTE YOU FALL ASLEEP - leave me alone - LEAVE HIM AND YOU CAN HAVE YOUR MIND BACK - i just want to live quietly with my love - YOU DON’T DESERVE TO LIVE - i do, as much as anyone else - I AM NOW GOING TO HAUNT YOUR DREAMS SO THAT EVEN WHEN YOU’RE ASLEEP YOU CANNOT REST - okay you do that - THE DREAMS MAKE YOU SO SAD DON’T THEY - yes - YOU CANNOT BEAR THIS SUFFERING FOREVER - well i have been doing okay so far - HAVE YOU REALLY -
  (and so on, ad infinitum).

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The theme is relevant, because this year I did something I never thought I’d be able to do in a million years: I got married. For someone with contamination OCD that would be like licking a toilet bowl. For someone with paedophile OCD that would be like letting a toddler kiss you on the lips the way some toddlers are wont to do. And, more than that: I got married, and I was okay. It was a lovely day. I was not anxious. I did not cry. OCD didn’t get to take Jamie from me. I feel pretty confident that it won’t. In this way, I am doing so much better.

I was spiralling post-engagement last year and my therapist said something which was its own kind of terrible and its own kind of freeing. ‘Look, this will always be with you. You will live with some form of OCD for the rest of your life. Whether you get married or not. After you’re married, too.’ In that moment I knew that there was no ‘right’ decision that would fix me for life. There was no ‘wrong’ decision that would curse me for life. I could just choose what to do next.

And life would continue, and I would still have OCD.

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So while I am okay and functioning for the most part, my brain has changed in certain ways and this is something I am coming to terms with. I notice it when I am pursuing the activities I love most: reading and writing. My writing process has always involved sitting for long periods, reading and absorbing the poems of others. The mental and physical quiet was very important, and now - though I no longer suffer from debilitating anxiety the way I once did - there is always chatter. I can always feel the tug of the thoughts trying to pull me back. Sometimes I’ll snap out of a trance and realise I’ve been staring at the same stanza or paragraph for fifteen minutes.

The OCD is so clever - it’s as clever as me - and it’s relentless in its creativity, presenting feelings and memories and urges like a house might present a draughty window or mystery hum. Some fellow readers and writers say they’ve been similar since the pandemic, or that their attention span is shattered from phones and the internet, and I’m sure that plays a part too.

I feel exiled from a healthy mind, from a mind which had a sense of oneness and reliability - not that my mind was never in pain before, it was sometimes, but there was a straightforwardness to the pain. Imagine you’re climbing over a stile in the countryside, and you fall and skin your knees - but you’re okay, and there you are in the next wide field. OCD took my normal human pain and made it a revolving staircase that collapsed in on itself, a hall of mirrors, a climbing wall with holds that looked real but were holograms. A lift always landing at the wrong floor, no matter how many times you press the correct number.

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It has felt so humiliating, so helpless, to be bored of my own thoughts, to come to an insight and realise I’ve had it before. As a poet, this is exactly what I want to avoid in my use of language. To publish a poem and later realise it contained the same image or metaphor as a previous one would feel like a failure - a creative failure, a failure too of my relationship to the world, a failure to witness the world fully in its vastness and flux and relentless originality. Ending up at the same insights was like trying to find your way out of a multi-storey carpark and somehow continually missing the turning downwards, onto an open road. A kind of dementia of insight, repetitious and suffocating.

I miss so much the exhilaration of making something new come into the world - the rush to the notebook or notes app or laptop screen to get it down before it is forgotten. The OCD thoughts are unforgettable, but in a dull way, like the office layout of somewhere you’ve worked full-time for twenty years. The cognitive pathways and patterns are so well worn, and yet they keep asking me to come back.

Its not all the time, but I have periods - minutes or days - when I go missing from my real life. Maybe one of my students has just offered the kind of lightning fresh and profound insight about the poem we’re reading that decades of academic study couldn’t bring you to. And I’ve missed it, because a thought has entered. Maybe I’m doing deep breathing in the bathroom and I can hear a little girl’s voice saying: ‘Where has Aunty Bryony gone? I want her to come out and play.’ A best friend of mine, who also has a form of OCD, was sitting across from me at a cafe once. She had just said something to me and was waiting for a response: I hadn’t heard her, I was ruminating. ‘You’re ruminating,’ she said. ‘I can tell.’ A glazed over, dissociated look. I felt seen and loved and alarmed and not alone.
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Things have been bad recently, off and on. The OCD has evolved, like all the best parasites, and presents startling inventive new themes and ideas. Remixes, even! I have to laugh about it. I went to the doctor this week and got referred again. It was a doctor I hadn’t seen before and he was very gentle and kind.

I’m worried this essay is miserable, and I’m not a miserable person. It’s just complicated. I am very grateful for my luck in life and for my chance to have a beautiful love, the meaningfulness of which I find hard to put into words. I just don’t always feel strong, to be honest. I don’t always feel like I’ll get through it this time. Sometimes I still feel like a girl walking alone in a dark wood, at the mercy of the world and the weather. I do still have hope, though - for a different drug, a good doctor. Most of all, for another poem.