A few days ago, I was sitting in a computer lab having just finished an exam in Penetration Testing (put simply, ethical hacking, I've had to explain to five people thsi week what Pen Testing is so thought I'd lay that out now) and I thought "Wow, how did I get here?".
....
I don't mean how did I literally get there or that I just randomly took the exam for the craic, that would be weird even for me, I mean that two years ago I was trapped in my flat and in my own mind with severe OCD and related agoraphobia and depression. I could barely leave my bed at some points, let alone go outside. Yet here I am, two years older but possibly not a great deal wiser, attending university on a cybersecurity Masters course and sitting exams.
.
To cut a long story short; My OCD focuses on worries about dirt and poisons, worrying that things have been left on in my home and I have intense anxiety that I might be harming other people or myself which si the thing that causes me the worst of the panics. A lot of therapy, medication and exercise has brought me to this very point - in my forties and going back to the university I attended almost twenty years ago to gain the skills to re-join the real world after the best part of ten years in paralysing anxiety and sweat soaked panic attacks. So, there you have the past roughly ten years of my life in one paragraph, apparently I am capable of being concise!
.-..
To be honest, I actually think that I'd believed it would be easier to re-enter 'real life' than the experience has been. I mean, my OCD was still moderately bad when I started the course but I naively believed that it would get easier. In some ways it has; I can touch a pen and paper these days, admittedly I have to buy my stationery from particular places and I don't like anyone to touch my pencil case or pen for fear of germs or poisons but I muddle through. I've found that I can get through a day with minimal handwashing but I scrub my hands when I go home. I can touch my laptop but I don't like anyone other than me and my husband touching it. The fears of harm have escalated a little, making my day more complicated than it ought to be as I check things repeatedly; I must reiterate that I'm of no threat to anyone, my brain tells me that I have shouted at people or stabbed them because I know that I never would and have no desire to hurt people, it's generally the things that you find the most abhorrent that which OCD brain hones in. So, yeah, as you can imagine, my inner brain life is not the calmest but somehow I keep on struggling through. I'm scrappy that way :-)
.-..
Anyways, so I'm sitting in a computer lab, having just sat an exam that I revised for fervently for weeks and feverishly in the days leading up. My poor long-suffering husband had to soothe me the night before as I cried "No information is going in anymore! I don't feel like I know anything! I haven’t codid in years! I think all of the things I learned about C have been pushed out of my head over the years by other useless things. I know info about that guy who was struck by lightning about six times, even after he died, yet I can’t remember the Linux command for making a directory! My brain isn’t getting the messege!!!". I have no idea as whether or not I have passed the exam but I do know that I haven't typed so quickly for many years and that, even going to that exam was a huge step for me.
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I have been at uni for six weeks now and it somehow seems hugely longer than that but I'm enjoying the work immensely. I have always loved puzzles and with the Masters degree that I am doing, I get to surround myself with deliciously difficult conundrums so I can't imagine there being any better place that I'd rather be. The course material is fascinating but very hard work; as you can imagine cryptography and lawful hacking is not a simplistic study and when you get your head around some of the weightier subjects and mathematics, it gives me a little dopamine fizz in my head that I have only gotten before through exercise and cigarettes. Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing to be honest but it certainly is an addictive subject area and healthier for me than nicotine or other drugs!
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The lecturers in each of the three modules I'm studying this trimester are inspiring chaps; I always think that it is easier ot learn complicated and dry material if the person serving it is humorous and interested in the work themselves and I'm very lucky for this to be case with the lecturers so far. I'm quite a visual person so seeing diagrams helps me a great deal. Also, you sea, as I frequently find it easier to digest information by associating it with a specific phrase or joke, it can actually help me hugely to connect to a piece of the course fi a lecturer tells a story or makes a joke. It's like little pointers in my head that I can anchor things in order to retain them. I find that you’r much more likely to get something if it amuses you or entertains you. Thankfully the lectures that I have attended so far have been enthralling.
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The funny thing is, when you have OCD, you analyse everything over and over and over, whether you really want to or not and this has led me to some excruciating moments over the past months. When I’m in a lecture, I have to write notes, voraciously scribbling away as my classmates probably look on thinking ‘Why is she writing down what is on the board? It’s in the lecture slides’. The reason for this is, if I don’t write notes, my brain will wander about unbidden and I’ll lose my focus and start wondering things such as:
- Why do horses have huge teeth when they only eat grass? Or
- Why hasn’t someone invented a lollipop for spies that, when sucked upon, can somehow transmit sound through bone conduction or something so that they don’t need to wear a wire or earpiece? Or
- I wonder what birds would look like with human ears? Or
- If I had a taser, would I taser myself? Or
- The Martians in War of the Worlds came down to Earth and were defeated by bacteria. I wonder who was on their design team working on their spaceships who said ‘Air filters? Nah, we probably don’t need those, what’s the worst that could happen?
-.--
This is just a tiny fraction of the ridiculous things that pop into my head if I don’t keep some sort of control over it by writing notes and I’m always worried that I’ll stop peying attention and have a funny thought and burst out laughing, as if I’m not strange enough without hysterically laughing for no apparent reason!
Then there’s my unnerving stare. What is the right proportion of eye contact that I should make with a lecturer so they at least know that I’m listening and comprehending but not so that I come across as a creepy weirdo? I don’t know the answer to this as I’m constantly walking the tightrope of appropriate interest in the subject and freaking out the person delivering the lecturer. The worst thing is that, I’m probably the only one worrying about this and I’m so consumed with not embarrassing myself that I don’t quite know what I’m doing with my face while I’m going through this traumatic set of concerns and probably look like the aforementioned creepy weirdo. Seriously, my life is exhausting.
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The university has been very welcoming and understanding of my particular mental health issues but some things are trickier for me than others. The hardest thing for me personally is getting to know people; I used to be incredibly chatty and sociable in my twenties (Although frankly I think that people will probably say that I've been very talkative my whole life, I believe one of my primary school reports said that I was bright but that I talked too much!) and, sadly, my OCD intensifying in my thirties led to almost a decade of isolation that I really could have done without. Within the walls of my agoraphobic prison, I was too anxious to go out alone without my husband and so socialising became a thing of the past, I turned to social media to get my human being fix and I communicated with people that I knew or had known in the past through that medium which provided me with a semblance of real life. The problem with social media though is that people generally tend to try and represent themselves in the best light so I was never really getting an accurate window into the world. My other problem was that, with the lack of any company, I had the TV on almost constantly and watching soaps, for example, is not going to give you a reasonable view of what life is like.
..-
So, starting university was a huge step for me but trying to get to know people has been a tough hurdle, I think mainly because of the way I am rather than a flaw in anyone else. As I'm so chatty, anyone who interacts with me is more or less going to be overwhelmed by my enthusiasm and desire to talk. When someone takes the time to talk to me, I am usually so grateful for the time and attontion that I can seem a little much. This can be quite off-putting to people and something I've been trying to work on but it's pretty difficult for me to reel myself in when I've been like this the majority of my life.
When I was home alone all day, my poor husband would barely get in the door before I was bombarding him with questions such as 'Have you had a good day?', 'Did you see any cute dogs when you were out and about?', 'Did you read the news today? What did you think about blah?' etc. I can be too much for people and I'm aware of it which makes it even harder. I tend to speak my mind and, if I think that someone deserves a compliment, I will say it but this can make people feel uncomfortable too, even though I'm just being nice. Throughout my life, I've actually seen people hide from me or see me and then walk the other way and, as you can imagine, that always does wonders for my confidence (!) but I see why. I also think that, if people know that I have OCD, they may think that I'll get obsessed with them, when I am much more likely to get obsessed with watching a particular TV show or eating something that I enjoy. I'm not a stalker. My obsessions generally do not include people in real life but I've had people swerve me completely once they know I have a condition with the word 'obsessive' in it. And, even though I understand to a certain extent, it still hurts to see someone avoid me.
I have made some friends and, as my husband keeps on reminding me, I've only been at uni six weeks, there's still plenty of time to get to know more folk and, as I started in January, a lot of the other students have been here since September so have had time to get settled in and find their friends.
So, back to where I am, mercifully far away from where I was over two years ago and I've got a great many things to look forward to and I'm working as hard as I can to get through my course and hopefully land myself an interesting job in the future. There's a long road ahead of me but, from where I came from, every day is an adventure and yet another step on the way to where I want to be.
Hope you'll all join me on this journey and I promise not to overwhelm you all with my enthusiasm. Well, OK, maybe not promise, but I'll do my best :-)
Thursday, 20 February 2020
Sunday, 26 May 2019
Back to Life: The Weirdo With The Gloves
As part of my recovery from OCD, depression and agoraphobia I decided that exercise classes were definitely the way to go for me. If I just spend time in the gym I feel unstructured and I just stand around, bedraggled amongst the beautiful people, doing exercises that I see other people do or pounding the treadmills until I'm slick with sweat and feeling on the road to nowhere. Then one day, while walking through a local park, I came across a club advertising a range of exciting classes to suit all ages and fitness levels, a great place in Edinburgh called North Merchiston Club. I examined the boards, filled with interesting and unusual activities and decided to go to my first exercise class in many years...
Swing Train - Aerobics and dance to Swing music
The first time I ventured into this class, I didn't really know what to expect and I didn't know anyone so was pretty anxious. I worried that I might perform the steps wrong and everyone might point and laugh or that I would fall over (Which to be honest I did at one point but that was almost a year in and is a story for another time!). Just after I entered the room I felt so anxious that I feared I might be sick. There were several women of various ages standing around with bottles of water, chattering to each other jovially. I was welcomed in by the instructor who gave me lots of information about the class and what to expect and with that we began the class. As I wear gloves virtually most of the time due to my fear of dirt and germs, I was conscious that people were curious as to why I was wearing gloves to a class in June when the weather was already clammy. To be fair, I'm sort of used to the "I wonder why she's wearing gloves" look and for the most part I tend to be as straightforward as possible and mention my OCD so I did to several of the ladies and everyone was mercifully kind. I'm so self conscious, I kept worrying my jogging trousers would fall down or I'd accidentally shout something or crash into someone. My OCD voice was screaming in my head 'Everyone thinks you're a weirdo! You've punched people in the class! Everyone hates you!' and it's unsurprisingly difficult to concentrate on what you're supposed to be doing with your limbs when your head is so noisy.
I loved the class from the very start, I've been to lots of aerobics classes over the years but Swing Train was a welcome shake up to the format. We learned routines to various classic songs such as 'Putting on the Ritz' and 'Green Onions' and, whilst it takes me a few classes to really master some of the steps, I found myself dancing around the room with the kind of confidence that I hadn't seen in myself for a long long time. I was around 16 stone when I began the class back in June 2018 and, over the weeks and months that followed, I started to see my weight lift and my confidence soar. As I dance around the hall, I feel like I'm practising for Strictly, cha cha-ing and charlestoning with all of my heart. We sometimes stand in a chorus line, each of us dancing as if we are going to be stars someday, we just need that one shot at dancing success! The ladies are warmly accepting and the instructor comprehensively goes through the moves for each dance so everyone can practise the steps before the music begins. The class has me always going back for more.
After each class, my husband would pick me up and we'd sometimes go for a walk before going home if the weather permitted. Over the past month or so I've actually been able to walk home alone as part of my therapy and while that has been difficult for me sometimes, I'm managing for now.
Once I'd become accustomed to going to classes, I decided to try out a slightly different class...
Zumba - Dancing and aerobics to some funky beats
I first tried out a Zumba Gold class as my fitness wasn't exactly perfect at that time and Zumba Gold was a toned down version of Zumba with some amazing music but with a slower pace. The instructor is a smiley, friendly lady who embodies happiness, her enthusiasm is infectious and makes you work that little bit harder as you watch her expertly perform each dance. I went to this class with a neighbour of mine so I wasn't on my own for a change. I threw myself into the class and by the end of it I was drenched in sweat but grinning from ear to ear. I don't know about anyone else but, during a Zumba class I get the most tremendous endorphin rush, a feeling of sheer ecstacy that, for a short period of time anyway, calms my OCD voice. Sadly the feeling doesn't last long as my OCD will throw something into my brain that completely distracts me from what I'm doing. For example, during one Zumba class, because I have to watch the instructor to work out what I'm supposed to do with my feet and arms, my OCD voice whispered in my ear 'The instructor thinks you're a creepy weirdo because you keep looking at her'. This threw me a bit and I started to feel horribly self conscious, I was worried what expression was on my face - was I pulling a strange face? Is my mouth lolling open and what am I doing with my eyebrows?? I became so anxious that, as I was looking at the ladies' feet in front of me when I couldn't see the instructor through the crowd, my brain kept saying 'You're looking at their feet but everyone thinks you're looking at their bums, you're a weirdo'. Even though I knew I was looking at feet, I was aware that I don't know anyone in the class and maybe they do think I'm a creepy person staring at their bums. On several occasions this fear has overwhelmed me and I've been shaking afterwards but the thing is that I love the class, I love the music and it's another chance for me to dance and throw my arms around in sheer abandon and for that reason alone, I fight my OCD every step of the way.
As it always gives me such a massive high, I started to realise that I'm essentially addicted, going back every time for that feeling of happiness and, for a few moments at least, a sense of peace and tranquility from my mental health problems. I suppose when it comes down to it, it's not a bad thing to be addicted to, I've been addicted to worse things. As well as my OCD thoughts, I've found that when I'm dancing around in a class, I frequently have 'naked lunch' moments where I stop for a moment and think 'what on earth must I look like??' or I have random thoughts that creep into my brain that are completely unrelated to anything. These thoughts have ranged from 'I wonder who first thought about keying a car?', 'In TV shows, if two characters are chatting about something then they go to another location and start chatting about the same thing, what do they talk about on the journey? Do they not mention the subject until they're at the second location?' or 'Does anyone else not have much control over their three smallest toes or is it just me?'. As you can imagine, the endorphin high that clears my mind when it's conjuring up thoughts like these is somewhat a relief! No matter how brief the quiet. I continue to attend these classes and, as with Swing, my weight has dropped with every sweaty dance session I enjoy.
With my confidence boosted by dance classes, I decided to try something a little different. With my fears of harm to others, I started to think that perhaps I should look at how it feels to hit things and in this way I would know the feeling and my brain might realise that I'm not doing it to other people. With this in mind, I went onto my next class.
Kickboxing - Learning the correct techniques to kicking and punching, increase stamina and improve belief in my own strength
When I first began this class, I had in mind my goals and I needed to find out how to achieve them. My main aims were to improve my fitness, strengthen my body particularly my upper body and to use the techniques to help me gain confidence in myself and show my OCD a thing or two. Our instructor, Metin Tuncay, is a friendly, highly skilled and encouraging gentleman who knows how to get the best out of you. There are various people in the class; some want to learn the full range of kickboxing skills and gain their belts, some want to become instructors and then there are people like me who are there for the fitness aspect of the sport. For every person, our instructor tailors the class to their needs so we each get out of it what we need, it's like having a personal trainer as he walks around the class giving us tips and helping us to perfect each move.
In the first class, I didn't even know how to fully make a fist, my thumb was in entirely the wrong position and I was terribly nervous but Metin was so supportive and the other people in the class welcomed me with open arms so that helped me a great deal. In order to build strength we also perform circuits; lifting weights, sit ups, stretches etc for a minute at a time before advancing to the next station. In the original few classes I was exhausted even in the warm up but I persevered. While some of the class was circuits, there was the option to spar or to practise technique with another member of the class or to work on the punch bag. I strangely seem to have some sort of untapped rage as I am particularly fond of laying into the punch bag with great aplomb! I always thought that I was reasonably well co-ordinated limb-wise but with each technique there are several things that each part of your body should be doing and I have found that trying to punch correctly, twist my body and step forward on one foot whilst staying on my toes is a little like patting your head and rubbing your tummy! However, it is uniquely satisfying when I get it right. A gentleman in the class said "Learning to do all of the different things you do with your body in the techniques, it's like driving in a way" and I replied "Hmm, problem with that is that I can't drive!" :-)
After every class my OCD was incredibly noisy, telling me that I have harmed those in the class, but week after week these thoughts actually started to ease, knowing the feeling of punching an inanimate object has gone some way to persuading my brain that I am not a violent, fighting machine when I'm simply walking along a street. I'm not saying that the thoughts or feelings have vanished entirely but it has been of great help to me not only physically but mentally too. Also, as well as the exercise aspects, I have also been able to begin making friends again and this was something I was finding hard. Who really wants to be friends with a person who constantly worries they are harming people? Well, it turns out that people are much more understanding than I could ever have hoped, and explaining my condition has not completely put people off speaking to me so that is one less worry for me.
Each of the classes I was attending was providing me with different and very important skills and mental resilience but after years of being overweight and feeling frumpy, I decided to go to a class that might make me feel like a sexy woman again.
Burlesque Chair Dance - Learning to dance and shimmy with kind and supportive ladies
This was another class that I went to entirely alone and knowing little about what I would be doing. I knew that it would involve a chair for some routines but not much else. I went dressed as I would for other classes, a t-shirt and jogging trousers, but saw that while some were dressed in similar attire, a few of the ladies in the classes wore fishnet tights and leotards. I was so envious that I didn't have the courage to wear the same and I was again self conscious of my body. Losing weight is fantastic yes, but it does leave behind its mark, in my case I have flabby legs and stomach so thought that I would never brave sexy clothing to the class.
I introduced myself to the instructor, told her a little about myself, including my OCD then asked what I was to do. Our instructor is a confident and sassy woman, both in name and in personality, a lady who can show you how to really work your body to not only make you feel like a confident and sassy woman too, but to also strengthen muscles that you never knew you had.
We started the warm up sitting astride chairs and then moved onto the routine for the week. I never realised that you could do so many moves with merely a chair; One minute I was throwing my legs over the back of the chairs and the next I was perched atop of the cushioned seat, throwing my arms around before leaping to the floor. Our sassy instructor walked us through several of the moves, repeating each section two or three times, then we moved onto performing them together at speed and then to the music before moving to the next section of poses for the music track. Once we knew the moves for the entire track, the music would begin and we all shimmied, shoogled and stretched our limbs long, feeling like sexy dancers in the spotlight of a burlesque club. It really was a revelation to me, I suppose I didn't really know what to expect from the class, I went there wanting to gain more confidence in myself and, after several years of feeling unattractive and invisible due to my OCD and weight, I could dance with abandon as if I were truly a sexy lady. The other women in the class didn't judge me and were so very supportive that, after several weeks I decided to come to class dressed in costume. As Christmas was coming, some of the ladies would dress up as Santa, elves and even as a reindeer so I bought a Mrs Santa dress and went along to the class wearing that, I was still a little self conscious so I wore leggings underneath but it was fun to dress up for the first time in a long time. It was some weeks after this I decided to take the plunge and dress as some of the other girls in the class did...
Gaining such inspiration from the other confident and outgoing ladies and buoyed by my huge weight loss (I'd lost six stone by this point), I went online and purchased an outfit to wear for the next class. Helped by my husband, as there was no way to scoop myself into the outfit alone, I finally went to class wearing something other than my jogging trousers and large t-shirt. I stepped into class that night wearing frilly shorts, fishnet tights and a corset and I felt amazing. The ladies in the class and the instructor were so pleased for me, clapping and whooping appreciatively, I felt so brave and owning my inner sex kitten. That night I danced so happily, stretching my limbs and pointing my toes sharp, walking just that wee bit taller all because I finally felt like an attractive woman again rather than the worried, flustered mess that my OCD usually leaves me in. I still had intrusive thoughts in class and I constantly worried what everyone thought of me but this was a class where I could happily wear my gloves and no one thought anything of it. As we use props from time to time for Burlesque routines, wearing gloves doesn't make me stick out like a sore thumb so I never felt too awkward. This is a class where you can be whoever you want to be and, at least for an hour a week, I get to be a sexy, sensual woman who dances like everyone is watching :-)
At the start of 2018, I had never really thought about how I would re-enter the real world after having spent many years trapped in my own home and my own mind. I knew that at some point I would have to start interacting with people again but I didn't really know how to go about it. I'd not spent any time with friends for a long time and my only contact with the outside world was my husband, psychologist, doctor and psychiatrist. Attending regular exercise classes not only helped me with my mental therapy and physical strength but helped me to really get to know people again and how to interact with the world after so much isolation. Even though my brain still churns out ridiculous thoughts and sometimes comical scenarios, I know the world once again and, through every class I am taking another step towards being me, the old me before my mental health locked me away. I may still be the weirdo with the gloves but I have a smile on my face and more confidence in my recovery so, whatever happens next, bring it on! :-)
Swing Train - Aerobics and dance to Swing music
The first time I ventured into this class, I didn't really know what to expect and I didn't know anyone so was pretty anxious. I worried that I might perform the steps wrong and everyone might point and laugh or that I would fall over (Which to be honest I did at one point but that was almost a year in and is a story for another time!). Just after I entered the room I felt so anxious that I feared I might be sick. There were several women of various ages standing around with bottles of water, chattering to each other jovially. I was welcomed in by the instructor who gave me lots of information about the class and what to expect and with that we began the class. As I wear gloves virtually most of the time due to my fear of dirt and germs, I was conscious that people were curious as to why I was wearing gloves to a class in June when the weather was already clammy. To be fair, I'm sort of used to the "I wonder why she's wearing gloves" look and for the most part I tend to be as straightforward as possible and mention my OCD so I did to several of the ladies and everyone was mercifully kind. I'm so self conscious, I kept worrying my jogging trousers would fall down or I'd accidentally shout something or crash into someone. My OCD voice was screaming in my head 'Everyone thinks you're a weirdo! You've punched people in the class! Everyone hates you!' and it's unsurprisingly difficult to concentrate on what you're supposed to be doing with your limbs when your head is so noisy.
I loved the class from the very start, I've been to lots of aerobics classes over the years but Swing Train was a welcome shake up to the format. We learned routines to various classic songs such as 'Putting on the Ritz' and 'Green Onions' and, whilst it takes me a few classes to really master some of the steps, I found myself dancing around the room with the kind of confidence that I hadn't seen in myself for a long long time. I was around 16 stone when I began the class back in June 2018 and, over the weeks and months that followed, I started to see my weight lift and my confidence soar. As I dance around the hall, I feel like I'm practising for Strictly, cha cha-ing and charlestoning with all of my heart. We sometimes stand in a chorus line, each of us dancing as if we are going to be stars someday, we just need that one shot at dancing success! The ladies are warmly accepting and the instructor comprehensively goes through the moves for each dance so everyone can practise the steps before the music begins. The class has me always going back for more.
After each class, my husband would pick me up and we'd sometimes go for a walk before going home if the weather permitted. Over the past month or so I've actually been able to walk home alone as part of my therapy and while that has been difficult for me sometimes, I'm managing for now.
Once I'd become accustomed to going to classes, I decided to try out a slightly different class...
Zumba - Dancing and aerobics to some funky beats
I first tried out a Zumba Gold class as my fitness wasn't exactly perfect at that time and Zumba Gold was a toned down version of Zumba with some amazing music but with a slower pace. The instructor is a smiley, friendly lady who embodies happiness, her enthusiasm is infectious and makes you work that little bit harder as you watch her expertly perform each dance. I went to this class with a neighbour of mine so I wasn't on my own for a change. I threw myself into the class and by the end of it I was drenched in sweat but grinning from ear to ear. I don't know about anyone else but, during a Zumba class I get the most tremendous endorphin rush, a feeling of sheer ecstacy that, for a short period of time anyway, calms my OCD voice. Sadly the feeling doesn't last long as my OCD will throw something into my brain that completely distracts me from what I'm doing. For example, during one Zumba class, because I have to watch the instructor to work out what I'm supposed to do with my feet and arms, my OCD voice whispered in my ear 'The instructor thinks you're a creepy weirdo because you keep looking at her'. This threw me a bit and I started to feel horribly self conscious, I was worried what expression was on my face - was I pulling a strange face? Is my mouth lolling open and what am I doing with my eyebrows?? I became so anxious that, as I was looking at the ladies' feet in front of me when I couldn't see the instructor through the crowd, my brain kept saying 'You're looking at their feet but everyone thinks you're looking at their bums, you're a weirdo'. Even though I knew I was looking at feet, I was aware that I don't know anyone in the class and maybe they do think I'm a creepy person staring at their bums. On several occasions this fear has overwhelmed me and I've been shaking afterwards but the thing is that I love the class, I love the music and it's another chance for me to dance and throw my arms around in sheer abandon and for that reason alone, I fight my OCD every step of the way.
As it always gives me such a massive high, I started to realise that I'm essentially addicted, going back every time for that feeling of happiness and, for a few moments at least, a sense of peace and tranquility from my mental health problems. I suppose when it comes down to it, it's not a bad thing to be addicted to, I've been addicted to worse things. As well as my OCD thoughts, I've found that when I'm dancing around in a class, I frequently have 'naked lunch' moments where I stop for a moment and think 'what on earth must I look like??' or I have random thoughts that creep into my brain that are completely unrelated to anything. These thoughts have ranged from 'I wonder who first thought about keying a car?', 'In TV shows, if two characters are chatting about something then they go to another location and start chatting about the same thing, what do they talk about on the journey? Do they not mention the subject until they're at the second location?' or 'Does anyone else not have much control over their three smallest toes or is it just me?'. As you can imagine, the endorphin high that clears my mind when it's conjuring up thoughts like these is somewhat a relief! No matter how brief the quiet. I continue to attend these classes and, as with Swing, my weight has dropped with every sweaty dance session I enjoy.
With my confidence boosted by dance classes, I decided to try something a little different. With my fears of harm to others, I started to think that perhaps I should look at how it feels to hit things and in this way I would know the feeling and my brain might realise that I'm not doing it to other people. With this in mind, I went onto my next class.
Kickboxing - Learning the correct techniques to kicking and punching, increase stamina and improve belief in my own strength
When I first began this class, I had in mind my goals and I needed to find out how to achieve them. My main aims were to improve my fitness, strengthen my body particularly my upper body and to use the techniques to help me gain confidence in myself and show my OCD a thing or two. Our instructor, Metin Tuncay, is a friendly, highly skilled and encouraging gentleman who knows how to get the best out of you. There are various people in the class; some want to learn the full range of kickboxing skills and gain their belts, some want to become instructors and then there are people like me who are there for the fitness aspect of the sport. For every person, our instructor tailors the class to their needs so we each get out of it what we need, it's like having a personal trainer as he walks around the class giving us tips and helping us to perfect each move.
In the first class, I didn't even know how to fully make a fist, my thumb was in entirely the wrong position and I was terribly nervous but Metin was so supportive and the other people in the class welcomed me with open arms so that helped me a great deal. In order to build strength we also perform circuits; lifting weights, sit ups, stretches etc for a minute at a time before advancing to the next station. In the original few classes I was exhausted even in the warm up but I persevered. While some of the class was circuits, there was the option to spar or to practise technique with another member of the class or to work on the punch bag. I strangely seem to have some sort of untapped rage as I am particularly fond of laying into the punch bag with great aplomb! I always thought that I was reasonably well co-ordinated limb-wise but with each technique there are several things that each part of your body should be doing and I have found that trying to punch correctly, twist my body and step forward on one foot whilst staying on my toes is a little like patting your head and rubbing your tummy! However, it is uniquely satisfying when I get it right. A gentleman in the class said "Learning to do all of the different things you do with your body in the techniques, it's like driving in a way" and I replied "Hmm, problem with that is that I can't drive!" :-)
After every class my OCD was incredibly noisy, telling me that I have harmed those in the class, but week after week these thoughts actually started to ease, knowing the feeling of punching an inanimate object has gone some way to persuading my brain that I am not a violent, fighting machine when I'm simply walking along a street. I'm not saying that the thoughts or feelings have vanished entirely but it has been of great help to me not only physically but mentally too. Also, as well as the exercise aspects, I have also been able to begin making friends again and this was something I was finding hard. Who really wants to be friends with a person who constantly worries they are harming people? Well, it turns out that people are much more understanding than I could ever have hoped, and explaining my condition has not completely put people off speaking to me so that is one less worry for me.
Each of the classes I was attending was providing me with different and very important skills and mental resilience but after years of being overweight and feeling frumpy, I decided to go to a class that might make me feel like a sexy woman again.
Burlesque Chair Dance - Learning to dance and shimmy with kind and supportive ladies
This was another class that I went to entirely alone and knowing little about what I would be doing. I knew that it would involve a chair for some routines but not much else. I went dressed as I would for other classes, a t-shirt and jogging trousers, but saw that while some were dressed in similar attire, a few of the ladies in the classes wore fishnet tights and leotards. I was so envious that I didn't have the courage to wear the same and I was again self conscious of my body. Losing weight is fantastic yes, but it does leave behind its mark, in my case I have flabby legs and stomach so thought that I would never brave sexy clothing to the class.
I introduced myself to the instructor, told her a little about myself, including my OCD then asked what I was to do. Our instructor is a confident and sassy woman, both in name and in personality, a lady who can show you how to really work your body to not only make you feel like a confident and sassy woman too, but to also strengthen muscles that you never knew you had.
We started the warm up sitting astride chairs and then moved onto the routine for the week. I never realised that you could do so many moves with merely a chair; One minute I was throwing my legs over the back of the chairs and the next I was perched atop of the cushioned seat, throwing my arms around before leaping to the floor. Our sassy instructor walked us through several of the moves, repeating each section two or three times, then we moved onto performing them together at speed and then to the music before moving to the next section of poses for the music track. Once we knew the moves for the entire track, the music would begin and we all shimmied, shoogled and stretched our limbs long, feeling like sexy dancers in the spotlight of a burlesque club. It really was a revelation to me, I suppose I didn't really know what to expect from the class, I went there wanting to gain more confidence in myself and, after several years of feeling unattractive and invisible due to my OCD and weight, I could dance with abandon as if I were truly a sexy lady. The other women in the class didn't judge me and were so very supportive that, after several weeks I decided to come to class dressed in costume. As Christmas was coming, some of the ladies would dress up as Santa, elves and even as a reindeer so I bought a Mrs Santa dress and went along to the class wearing that, I was still a little self conscious so I wore leggings underneath but it was fun to dress up for the first time in a long time. It was some weeks after this I decided to take the plunge and dress as some of the other girls in the class did...
Gaining such inspiration from the other confident and outgoing ladies and buoyed by my huge weight loss (I'd lost six stone by this point), I went online and purchased an outfit to wear for the next class. Helped by my husband, as there was no way to scoop myself into the outfit alone, I finally went to class wearing something other than my jogging trousers and large t-shirt. I stepped into class that night wearing frilly shorts, fishnet tights and a corset and I felt amazing. The ladies in the class and the instructor were so pleased for me, clapping and whooping appreciatively, I felt so brave and owning my inner sex kitten. That night I danced so happily, stretching my limbs and pointing my toes sharp, walking just that wee bit taller all because I finally felt like an attractive woman again rather than the worried, flustered mess that my OCD usually leaves me in. I still had intrusive thoughts in class and I constantly worried what everyone thought of me but this was a class where I could happily wear my gloves and no one thought anything of it. As we use props from time to time for Burlesque routines, wearing gloves doesn't make me stick out like a sore thumb so I never felt too awkward. This is a class where you can be whoever you want to be and, at least for an hour a week, I get to be a sexy, sensual woman who dances like everyone is watching :-)
At the start of 2018, I had never really thought about how I would re-enter the real world after having spent many years trapped in my own home and my own mind. I knew that at some point I would have to start interacting with people again but I didn't really know how to go about it. I'd not spent any time with friends for a long time and my only contact with the outside world was my husband, psychologist, doctor and psychiatrist. Attending regular exercise classes not only helped me with my mental therapy and physical strength but helped me to really get to know people again and how to interact with the world after so much isolation. Even though my brain still churns out ridiculous thoughts and sometimes comical scenarios, I know the world once again and, through every class I am taking another step towards being me, the old me before my mental health locked me away. I may still be the weirdo with the gloves but I have a smile on my face and more confidence in my recovery so, whatever happens next, bring it on! :-)
Sunday, 19 May 2019
Back to Life: Recovery 101
After several years of suffering from the worst bout of OCD, Depression and Agoraphobia that I had ever endured, I was, needless to say, unconvinced that my New Year's resolutions to lose weight and work hard on my recovery would come to fruition. So many times I had embarked upon the journey to better health only for something like physical illness or extra stress to rear their ugly heads and, before I knew it, I was back hiding under my duvet struggling with panic attacks ad infinitum.
As you can imagine, while I had high hopes that this time would be burgeoning with success, I still worried that my attempts may be a little ambitious. It turns out that my husband was of a similar opinion, not that he didn't have faith in me, just that he thought that something external like the aforementioned illness and pressure would impact upon me before I had really got to grips with the tricky parts.
I began 2018 with the highest of hopes and with the one difference in my mental health toolkit - For once I didnt expect or want immediate results. I'm a kind of instant gratification sort of gal when it comes to me doing most things - particularly exercise, diet, recovery, smoking, playing games etc. What can I say, I have an addictive personality, and when I start something, I want to see results fast. In the past this had been enormously bad for my mental health when attempting recovery. If I didn't see myself improving quickly I would begin to think that it was all going to fail and I would end up back to square one. As part of my attempt to lose weight and regain control over my OCD demons, I started to accept that neither weight loss or improvement to my mental health was going to happen overnight and strangely this loosening of my expectations was to be the breakthrough that I finally needed to make leaps and bounds in my therapy.
At the start of 2018 I was 17 and a half stone (approx 245 pounds/111kg), Size 26 and my agoraphobia was due to the panic attacks from my OCD thoughts. As well as being terrified of germs, dirt and chemicals and therefore having to wear gloves all the time, my OCD 'voice' in my head kept telling me that I was punching people in the street/pushing people in the canal/shouting at people on buses whereas I know for a fact that I would never do anything to deliberately harm a human or animal. For the uninitiated to my condition - OCD isn't what you think it is, people say things like "I'm a bit OCD about..." or "Well, at least if you have OCD then your house must be tidy!" when they have a misunderstanding how OCD really works. For those of you that already know (probably because you've seen me or heard me describing it to someone, maybe even several times, feel free to skip this bit. I won't be offended, or I might go on a tangent about something interesting and you'll miss that but let's face it, I'm not the most interesting of folk so you're more or less fine to skip to the next paragraph :-)
--
Well, the one after this one that is. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a series of intrusive thoughts that a sufferer is plagued with for the majority of their waking life, and sleeping life if you're me as I frequently have the thoughts in my dreams too and dream I'm completing rituals to try and counteract said thoughts. These thoughts can be about anything that you're particularly afraid of - germs, lack of symmetry, harm to yourself or others etc. In my case, I worry about harm coming to people, as OCD tends to pick on the things you are most afraid of, most of my 'OCD thoughts' are based on that. I can't speak for everyone's unique experiences but hopefully my case will help you understand a little of how it feels. Most people, as I found out several years ago, have intrusive thoughts. I would love to know the frequency of the rogue thoughts that go through people's minds as they go about their day. Things such as when parked at a set of traffic lights someone might think "I could just accelerate now and knock those people over" or they might think "That person looks annoying, I could punch them in the face" and the majority of the time they'll probably think "hmm, that was a weird thought. Oh well" and that will be that. In my case, and thousands of others of poor souls struggling with OCD, I may have the thought "I could punch that person in the face" and instead of dismissing it I attach a huge amount of significance to the thought leading to "You had that thought because you're an evil person. Why would you have such a wicked thought otherwise?" progressing to "You didn't just think that you punched them - you did punch them". It is at this point that I look at the person I have worried about punching and my brain sees the person with bruises all over their face, even though logically I know it's in my imagination and that the person looks fine.
This is where my brain needs a quick explanation - I don't know how other brains work, I can only go by what I'm told by other people and my brain seems to do something that few other people seem to be able to fathom - sadly this is not a compliment. All the time, I have three separate thought trains running through my head. Train 1 is my OCD irrational thoughts train e.g. 'You have definitely punched that person', 'You left the gas on', 'You didn't lock the door, burgulars are going to walk in and steal your stuff'. Train 2 is probably what remains of me after years of being battered down by Train 1, this is the more logical and rational train e.g. 'You didn't punch that person, you would never harm anyone', 'You definitely did turn the gas off', 'You did lock the door'. Trains 1 and 2 pass each other regularly, yelling expletives at each other from the train windows in a bid to outfox each other. Train 3 is a bit more mundane but ultimately helps me to function e.g. 'I must remember to get xyz from the shops', 'In TV programmes, when people talk about a subject in a particular place then we see them resume their conversation in another location, miles away, what do they talk about in the interim?' or 'Why do the English say 'leftenant' and Americans say 'Lieutenant'?' etc. I am particularly fond of Train 3 as I have the most fun with it, except when it won't tell me an actor's name or it remembers the music to a kid's TV show like 'The Get Along Gang' and decides to ride around the theoretical track singing it on loop for five hours. Then, well then Train 3 becomes an enormous pain in the arse - sorry for the language but it really does. Anyway, when Train 1 and 2 are fighting each other, and lets face it, this is most of my day and night, I need to do something to molify my aching brain. This naturally leads to yes, you've guessed it, the Compulsive side of the equation. If I think I've left a door unlocked or punched a person, I might try and check to make sure. At first this does something to assuage the fear but then Train 1 yells "Nope, the door is definitely unlocked/You've definitely punched the person!" and as much as I check and try to convince myself that I am not a wicked and evil person, nothing helps. In the case of germs or dirt Train 1 yells "Your hands are crawling with germs and poisons, you're going to die" and the ritual in this case would be to wash my hands but the thoughts keep coming, my imagination joins in the torture and makes me see crawling, festering insects and unspeakably horrific creatures crawling over my now soaking flesh so I wash my hands, again and again, yet the thoughts don't leave me alone until I'm constantly performing rituals; sobbing and shaking with the sheer exhausting undertaking of the task until I have a panic attack. This, my dear friends, is my life with OCD.
---
Welcome back to those of you who skipped my possibly overlong explanation of OCD. For those who joined me on the above journey, sorry if I've traumatised you but I did set out to be as honest and as clear as I can be and it's not a pleasant mental health condition to have so it's somewhat difficult to sugarcoat it. My apologies dear reader.
Anyway, returning to 2018, I was cautiously optimistic that, if I were to take small steps in both weight loss and my therapy and as long as I was equipped to identify which things were likely to derail me and cause relapse, I would have a chance at success. At the time, January 2018, I could barely walk 100 metres before having to sit down and I could only leave the flat and walk around outside when accompanied by my husband as alone I would have a panic attack in minutes and that is what kept me metaphorically chained up in agoraphobia. Again, as a brief aside, Agoraphobia is not necessarily a fear of open spaces - it's a fear of being in crowded spaces, leaving your home and not feeling able to escape to safety. Because my brain taunted me anytime I walked near anyone, it was unsurprisingly difficult to walk places, take buses etc. so I had become a recluse save for conversations on Facebook and seeing my husband.
I could do things like go to the park with my husband and, while it was incredibly difficult both physically due to my weight and back problems and mentally because of my OCD, we started taking small walks several times a week. This seemed to help my stamina and we could try Exposure Response Prevention a little whilst out and about. I found that, the more walks we did, the further I could go before needing to sit down, my back was (and sadly still is) excruciatingly painful but I managed.
When it came to diet, I'll be honest, I was eating such large portions that it was monumentally difficult to cut down at first. I was only eating three meals a day, no snacks, but I was eating several thousands of calories and vast quantities of fat in things such as cheese, ice cream, mayonnaise and so forth. It was stupendously hard to be sat eating a small amount of pasta and watch my husband scoff whole pizzas and biscuits but I think that in a way it helped me too. I have logged my food in a diary app for several years so I used that to work out what I could have that would be around 1200 to 1400 calories a day and, while that's not what I started out at at first, I soon found that 1200 to 1400 calories was enough to see the weight begin to drop. I chose healthier options like lower fat cheese and I cut out as much sugar as I could bear - I have a ridiculously sweet tooth so this was no easy feat I assure you. My dentist was overwhelmed by the change in my teeth and gums, especially as my usual diet had included sugary fizzy drinks, sweets and cake...mmmm delicious cake...
I digress. With the diet under a modicum of control, I began to attempt exercise in the flat. My treadmill can't have been exactly glorious for my neighbours in the flat beneath but I began briskly walking on it once a day for ten minutes, then 15 minutes then little by little I could walk for an hour on the treadmill and not be ludicrously knackered. The weight started to slide off, the scales began yielding and my clothing felt looser. Whatsmore, as my stamina grew and my waistline shrank, my spirits seemed to lift a little and my mind trains were being slightly less abusive to one another. After months of not being able to brush my teeth due to the repetitive handwashing afterwards and checking during, suddenly it was taking half an hour to brush my teeth instead of the usual hour. My ritualistic showers crept down from three hours of boiling under hot water while crying and washing my hair and body over and over again to a still unwieldly but improved one hour. Exercise began to give me deliciously thrilling endorphin highs and seeing my Fitbit register that I had undertaken 5000 steps with a display of pixelated fireworks would jolt my dopamine sky high, well, for a minute or two anyway.
It seemed that my mental and physical health were improving and that the two were intertwined in a way that I admittedly hadn't forseen. I heard people say that exercise was good for you but I usually thought "It's usually a thin and attractive person telling me that and I'm neither so it probably won't work for me". All those people who say "No pain, no gain" aren't all just trying to get me to torture myself with 50 sit ups, it really is true. It was something of a revelation to be honest, despite having lost weight in the past and knowing that exercise makes you feel good, I just thought that eating a huge chocolate cake makes you feel even better.
I started going out alone; very briefly at first, just 5 minutes to the bottom of the stairs in our building and standing outside. Then I would walk up the road a little next time. Then around the block a few times after that. I improved so much by around May 2018 that I could walk to the park up the road from my flat and back - alone. I'm not going to say it was all plain sailing as it wasn't. I had panic attacks, I had blips but I always made sure that no matter what happened, I would try again the next day.
It wasn't easy, it was a phenomenal struggle but,as they say, nothing good ever comes easy and over the months that passed my weight dropped, pleasingly quickly at first then I would plateau at various points whereupon I would eat more than usual for a day or two - just 1800 to 2000 calories - then resume my low calorie diet and that seemed to kick my body out of starvation mode and back onto weightloss. I went from size 26, having to buy my clothes online as I could seldom find anything suitable in stores, and that's not easy with OCD when you can't touch things that come through the post, to a size 20 then to a size 18 and over the full 17 months to a size 12, which is what I am today.
I began to go to exercise classes, something unthinkable without my husband being nearby, in June 2018 and for the first few classes I was terrified as I didn't know anyone and my intrusive thoughts would make me feel massively self conscious. My husband would pick me up from the classes and thankfully, as the club I attended classes at was a few streets away from my home, it was easy for my husband to come to my aid if I had a panic attack. Mercifully I never needed to call him and he would come to pick me up after class so that was a weight off my mind. I started going to several different exercise classes at the same place, each class giving me more confidence and great satisfaction.
Through a healthy minds scheme I was assigned a befriender to take me for walks to various places, as well as the walks and therapy with my psychologist, and get me out of the house more frequently. It was hard for me to go out on a regular basis if I didn't have a plan in mind of where to go and I was still struggling to go long distances without my husband. My befriender, a lovely lady, met with me regularly in a local cafe and took me for longer and longer walks, slowly meeting me further and further from my home to improve my confidence. I even got on my first bus alone in years after a walk with her. Then, I also ticked another milestone off my list - I managed to go shopping alone and was able to use the items I had purchased afterwards. You see, for years my husband had to do the shopping alone as I could barely touch anything. When I was shopping with him I would need him to pick items from the back of the shelves and I couldn't look at what he chose otherwise I would feel it to be contaminated in some way. I would also frequently worry that people had poisoned items in our basket and would have to worriedly ask him to put the items back and select another from the shelf. All in all, shopping with me was so stressful for us both that it was decided that he should do it and that was how it was for years.The first time I went shopping alone, I had just got on the bus after a walk with my befriender and I made the unusually brave decision to go to a supermarket near my home. I didn't tell my befriender as I didn't want her or my own mind to talk me out of it. I walked to the shop shaking and the persistant nagging feeling that I was going to have a massive meltdown mid-shop was making me feel nauseated but I pressed on regardless. In short, it took about two hours and a bit of rearranging and guarding my trolley but I managed. Not only managed but did pretty well considering the trainwreck that was my brain that day. I continued to do it, buying at least one thing whenever I went for a walk and that helped immensely. Now, after about 8 months, I can do the shopping with the minimum of fuss, and when I say that what I really mean is the minimum of fuss for me while I still have to do my small rituals. It's not a perfect system but I cope, by and large.
Realistically, there are still more things that I can't do than those that I can but I try not to put too much pressure on myself to achieve too much as, well, that way madness lies, literally for me.
When I look back on my progress these past seventeen months, it would be easy to focus more on the things I cannot yet do alone but from where I started in 2018, I'm so far from the panic stricken, nervous, overweight, unfit person that I was. The best thing I ever did was to do things slowly, carefully and thankfully I have a wonderful husband who not only supported me throughout my journey of recovery but who didn't put pressure on me to do too much too soon. I may not be completely better, I may never be, but at some points in my life I have been as high functioning as I'm ever likely to be and I've been there before and I will be again. I'm cautiously optimistic, despite a few blips the past few months, and as far as I can see, that's as good as it gets for now. And that's just fine by me.
As you can imagine, while I had high hopes that this time would be burgeoning with success, I still worried that my attempts may be a little ambitious. It turns out that my husband was of a similar opinion, not that he didn't have faith in me, just that he thought that something external like the aforementioned illness and pressure would impact upon me before I had really got to grips with the tricky parts.
I began 2018 with the highest of hopes and with the one difference in my mental health toolkit - For once I didnt expect or want immediate results. I'm a kind of instant gratification sort of gal when it comes to me doing most things - particularly exercise, diet, recovery, smoking, playing games etc. What can I say, I have an addictive personality, and when I start something, I want to see results fast. In the past this had been enormously bad for my mental health when attempting recovery. If I didn't see myself improving quickly I would begin to think that it was all going to fail and I would end up back to square one. As part of my attempt to lose weight and regain control over my OCD demons, I started to accept that neither weight loss or improvement to my mental health was going to happen overnight and strangely this loosening of my expectations was to be the breakthrough that I finally needed to make leaps and bounds in my therapy.
At the start of 2018 I was 17 and a half stone (approx 245 pounds/111kg), Size 26 and my agoraphobia was due to the panic attacks from my OCD thoughts. As well as being terrified of germs, dirt and chemicals and therefore having to wear gloves all the time, my OCD 'voice' in my head kept telling me that I was punching people in the street/pushing people in the canal/shouting at people on buses whereas I know for a fact that I would never do anything to deliberately harm a human or animal. For the uninitiated to my condition - OCD isn't what you think it is, people say things like "I'm a bit OCD about..." or "Well, at least if you have OCD then your house must be tidy!" when they have a misunderstanding how OCD really works. For those of you that already know (probably because you've seen me or heard me describing it to someone, maybe even several times, feel free to skip this bit. I won't be offended, or I might go on a tangent about something interesting and you'll miss that but let's face it, I'm not the most interesting of folk so you're more or less fine to skip to the next paragraph :-)
--
Well, the one after this one that is. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a series of intrusive thoughts that a sufferer is plagued with for the majority of their waking life, and sleeping life if you're me as I frequently have the thoughts in my dreams too and dream I'm completing rituals to try and counteract said thoughts. These thoughts can be about anything that you're particularly afraid of - germs, lack of symmetry, harm to yourself or others etc. In my case, I worry about harm coming to people, as OCD tends to pick on the things you are most afraid of, most of my 'OCD thoughts' are based on that. I can't speak for everyone's unique experiences but hopefully my case will help you understand a little of how it feels. Most people, as I found out several years ago, have intrusive thoughts. I would love to know the frequency of the rogue thoughts that go through people's minds as they go about their day. Things such as when parked at a set of traffic lights someone might think "I could just accelerate now and knock those people over" or they might think "That person looks annoying, I could punch them in the face" and the majority of the time they'll probably think "hmm, that was a weird thought. Oh well" and that will be that. In my case, and thousands of others of poor souls struggling with OCD, I may have the thought "I could punch that person in the face" and instead of dismissing it I attach a huge amount of significance to the thought leading to "You had that thought because you're an evil person. Why would you have such a wicked thought otherwise?" progressing to "You didn't just think that you punched them - you did punch them". It is at this point that I look at the person I have worried about punching and my brain sees the person with bruises all over their face, even though logically I know it's in my imagination and that the person looks fine.
This is where my brain needs a quick explanation - I don't know how other brains work, I can only go by what I'm told by other people and my brain seems to do something that few other people seem to be able to fathom - sadly this is not a compliment. All the time, I have three separate thought trains running through my head. Train 1 is my OCD irrational thoughts train e.g. 'You have definitely punched that person', 'You left the gas on', 'You didn't lock the door, burgulars are going to walk in and steal your stuff'. Train 2 is probably what remains of me after years of being battered down by Train 1, this is the more logical and rational train e.g. 'You didn't punch that person, you would never harm anyone', 'You definitely did turn the gas off', 'You did lock the door'. Trains 1 and 2 pass each other regularly, yelling expletives at each other from the train windows in a bid to outfox each other. Train 3 is a bit more mundane but ultimately helps me to function e.g. 'I must remember to get xyz from the shops', 'In TV programmes, when people talk about a subject in a particular place then we see them resume their conversation in another location, miles away, what do they talk about in the interim?' or 'Why do the English say 'leftenant' and Americans say 'Lieutenant'?' etc. I am particularly fond of Train 3 as I have the most fun with it, except when it won't tell me an actor's name or it remembers the music to a kid's TV show like 'The Get Along Gang' and decides to ride around the theoretical track singing it on loop for five hours. Then, well then Train 3 becomes an enormous pain in the arse - sorry for the language but it really does. Anyway, when Train 1 and 2 are fighting each other, and lets face it, this is most of my day and night, I need to do something to molify my aching brain. This naturally leads to yes, you've guessed it, the Compulsive side of the equation. If I think I've left a door unlocked or punched a person, I might try and check to make sure. At first this does something to assuage the fear but then Train 1 yells "Nope, the door is definitely unlocked/You've definitely punched the person!" and as much as I check and try to convince myself that I am not a wicked and evil person, nothing helps. In the case of germs or dirt Train 1 yells "Your hands are crawling with germs and poisons, you're going to die" and the ritual in this case would be to wash my hands but the thoughts keep coming, my imagination joins in the torture and makes me see crawling, festering insects and unspeakably horrific creatures crawling over my now soaking flesh so I wash my hands, again and again, yet the thoughts don't leave me alone until I'm constantly performing rituals; sobbing and shaking with the sheer exhausting undertaking of the task until I have a panic attack. This, my dear friends, is my life with OCD.
---
Welcome back to those of you who skipped my possibly overlong explanation of OCD. For those who joined me on the above journey, sorry if I've traumatised you but I did set out to be as honest and as clear as I can be and it's not a pleasant mental health condition to have so it's somewhat difficult to sugarcoat it. My apologies dear reader.
Anyway, returning to 2018, I was cautiously optimistic that, if I were to take small steps in both weight loss and my therapy and as long as I was equipped to identify which things were likely to derail me and cause relapse, I would have a chance at success. At the time, January 2018, I could barely walk 100 metres before having to sit down and I could only leave the flat and walk around outside when accompanied by my husband as alone I would have a panic attack in minutes and that is what kept me metaphorically chained up in agoraphobia. Again, as a brief aside, Agoraphobia is not necessarily a fear of open spaces - it's a fear of being in crowded spaces, leaving your home and not feeling able to escape to safety. Because my brain taunted me anytime I walked near anyone, it was unsurprisingly difficult to walk places, take buses etc. so I had become a recluse save for conversations on Facebook and seeing my husband.
I could do things like go to the park with my husband and, while it was incredibly difficult both physically due to my weight and back problems and mentally because of my OCD, we started taking small walks several times a week. This seemed to help my stamina and we could try Exposure Response Prevention a little whilst out and about. I found that, the more walks we did, the further I could go before needing to sit down, my back was (and sadly still is) excruciatingly painful but I managed.
When it came to diet, I'll be honest, I was eating such large portions that it was monumentally difficult to cut down at first. I was only eating three meals a day, no snacks, but I was eating several thousands of calories and vast quantities of fat in things such as cheese, ice cream, mayonnaise and so forth. It was stupendously hard to be sat eating a small amount of pasta and watch my husband scoff whole pizzas and biscuits but I think that in a way it helped me too. I have logged my food in a diary app for several years so I used that to work out what I could have that would be around 1200 to 1400 calories a day and, while that's not what I started out at at first, I soon found that 1200 to 1400 calories was enough to see the weight begin to drop. I chose healthier options like lower fat cheese and I cut out as much sugar as I could bear - I have a ridiculously sweet tooth so this was no easy feat I assure you. My dentist was overwhelmed by the change in my teeth and gums, especially as my usual diet had included sugary fizzy drinks, sweets and cake...mmmm delicious cake...
I digress. With the diet under a modicum of control, I began to attempt exercise in the flat. My treadmill can't have been exactly glorious for my neighbours in the flat beneath but I began briskly walking on it once a day for ten minutes, then 15 minutes then little by little I could walk for an hour on the treadmill and not be ludicrously knackered. The weight started to slide off, the scales began yielding and my clothing felt looser. Whatsmore, as my stamina grew and my waistline shrank, my spirits seemed to lift a little and my mind trains were being slightly less abusive to one another. After months of not being able to brush my teeth due to the repetitive handwashing afterwards and checking during, suddenly it was taking half an hour to brush my teeth instead of the usual hour. My ritualistic showers crept down from three hours of boiling under hot water while crying and washing my hair and body over and over again to a still unwieldly but improved one hour. Exercise began to give me deliciously thrilling endorphin highs and seeing my Fitbit register that I had undertaken 5000 steps with a display of pixelated fireworks would jolt my dopamine sky high, well, for a minute or two anyway.
It seemed that my mental and physical health were improving and that the two were intertwined in a way that I admittedly hadn't forseen. I heard people say that exercise was good for you but I usually thought "It's usually a thin and attractive person telling me that and I'm neither so it probably won't work for me". All those people who say "No pain, no gain" aren't all just trying to get me to torture myself with 50 sit ups, it really is true. It was something of a revelation to be honest, despite having lost weight in the past and knowing that exercise makes you feel good, I just thought that eating a huge chocolate cake makes you feel even better.
I started going out alone; very briefly at first, just 5 minutes to the bottom of the stairs in our building and standing outside. Then I would walk up the road a little next time. Then around the block a few times after that. I improved so much by around May 2018 that I could walk to the park up the road from my flat and back - alone. I'm not going to say it was all plain sailing as it wasn't. I had panic attacks, I had blips but I always made sure that no matter what happened, I would try again the next day.
It wasn't easy, it was a phenomenal struggle but,as they say, nothing good ever comes easy and over the months that passed my weight dropped, pleasingly quickly at first then I would plateau at various points whereupon I would eat more than usual for a day or two - just 1800 to 2000 calories - then resume my low calorie diet and that seemed to kick my body out of starvation mode and back onto weightloss. I went from size 26, having to buy my clothes online as I could seldom find anything suitable in stores, and that's not easy with OCD when you can't touch things that come through the post, to a size 20 then to a size 18 and over the full 17 months to a size 12, which is what I am today.
I began to go to exercise classes, something unthinkable without my husband being nearby, in June 2018 and for the first few classes I was terrified as I didn't know anyone and my intrusive thoughts would make me feel massively self conscious. My husband would pick me up from the classes and thankfully, as the club I attended classes at was a few streets away from my home, it was easy for my husband to come to my aid if I had a panic attack. Mercifully I never needed to call him and he would come to pick me up after class so that was a weight off my mind. I started going to several different exercise classes at the same place, each class giving me more confidence and great satisfaction.
Through a healthy minds scheme I was assigned a befriender to take me for walks to various places, as well as the walks and therapy with my psychologist, and get me out of the house more frequently. It was hard for me to go out on a regular basis if I didn't have a plan in mind of where to go and I was still struggling to go long distances without my husband. My befriender, a lovely lady, met with me regularly in a local cafe and took me for longer and longer walks, slowly meeting me further and further from my home to improve my confidence. I even got on my first bus alone in years after a walk with her. Then, I also ticked another milestone off my list - I managed to go shopping alone and was able to use the items I had purchased afterwards. You see, for years my husband had to do the shopping alone as I could barely touch anything. When I was shopping with him I would need him to pick items from the back of the shelves and I couldn't look at what he chose otherwise I would feel it to be contaminated in some way. I would also frequently worry that people had poisoned items in our basket and would have to worriedly ask him to put the items back and select another from the shelf. All in all, shopping with me was so stressful for us both that it was decided that he should do it and that was how it was for years.The first time I went shopping alone, I had just got on the bus after a walk with my befriender and I made the unusually brave decision to go to a supermarket near my home. I didn't tell my befriender as I didn't want her or my own mind to talk me out of it. I walked to the shop shaking and the persistant nagging feeling that I was going to have a massive meltdown mid-shop was making me feel nauseated but I pressed on regardless. In short, it took about two hours and a bit of rearranging and guarding my trolley but I managed. Not only managed but did pretty well considering the trainwreck that was my brain that day. I continued to do it, buying at least one thing whenever I went for a walk and that helped immensely. Now, after about 8 months, I can do the shopping with the minimum of fuss, and when I say that what I really mean is the minimum of fuss for me while I still have to do my small rituals. It's not a perfect system but I cope, by and large.
Realistically, there are still more things that I can't do than those that I can but I try not to put too much pressure on myself to achieve too much as, well, that way madness lies, literally for me.
When I look back on my progress these past seventeen months, it would be easy to focus more on the things I cannot yet do alone but from where I started in 2018, I'm so far from the panic stricken, nervous, overweight, unfit person that I was. The best thing I ever did was to do things slowly, carefully and thankfully I have a wonderful husband who not only supported me throughout my journey of recovery but who didn't put pressure on me to do too much too soon. I may not be completely better, I may never be, but at some points in my life I have been as high functioning as I'm ever likely to be and I've been there before and I will be again. I'm cautiously optimistic, despite a few blips the past few months, and as far as I can see, that's as good as it gets for now. And that's just fine by me.
Monday, 24 February 2014
Safe
Imagine someone offered you a place where
you would be around 95 per cent safe. A place where you would feel warm, safe
and protected with several rooms and serenity to read and maybe relax. You
would probably at least consider it no? Imagine you take this offer and you are
in a place where you feel most safe but you start to realise that this safety
comes at a price – your ordinary life. At first it seems like a reasonable
trade; a feeling of safety and calm in place of the anxiety you feel outside,
you can still communicate with people over the phone or online, you can still
have friends even though it is tricky when you can’t go out and about, you can
still work online. It all seems a good solution.
Now imagine you start to worry about being
misunderstood, that you might lead people on accidentally, that you might
offend people, that people may start to dislike you so you only communicate
through text, email and Facebook so that you can read and reread your text over
and over and over again to make sure that you are clear and non offensive. You
start to feel lonely but see this as a side effect of only communicating
through text rather than verbally. You start to lose friendships and slowly
people start to forget you, to care less and less about you so you start to
feel lonelier.
When it comes to shopping for food, you
can’t leave your place of safety – that would be unsafe – so someone has to bring
food to you. You need to trust this person literally with your life, to keep
you both safe so that person ends up being your eyes and ears in the outside
world, a source of knowledge that you lap up, desperately asking for morsels of
life until they are tired and weary. If you do absolutely have to leave the
safe place you want to leave it with as much safety as possible so you go out
with the person you trust the most; waiting outside of shops that you are too
afraid to go into like a dog being taken for a walk.
Then, after a while of living in your safe
space you start to believe that some areas are unsafe, untouchable and ‘dirty’
so you avoid them. Your safe space gets smaller and smaller until you stay in
one place, everyday, communicating online when you can actually pluck up the
courage to touch gadgets for communication or get up the courage to talk. Eventually
depression takes over; the helplessness you feel is immense and the person that
you love is doing everything they can to help while having to see you suffer.
Suddenly, this safe place, this haven of safety becomes a prison in which you
are bound with fear of no reprieve.
This is precisely what has happened to me
and the thing that is my jailor is my own mind. My own brain has created this
smaller and smaller space for me to dwell, terrified of the outside world and
so unable to remember what I used to be like that I don’t feel that I can go
back to myself again. This is my OCD and agoraphobia working deviously with
depression to crush my spirit, to remove any kind of hope that I may dare to
feel. I have to tell you that it feels like the worst feeling in the world.
If it were someone oppressing me, keeping
me down then I could fight back; tell them no, I’m not staying in anymore! But
the battle is in my own mind so no matter how much one part of my brain fights
for freedom and survival, there is a stronger, darker part of my mind pushing
me further and further into despair. It sounds melodramatic but I assure you
that this constant struggle in my brain is throttling the life out of my
freedom, stopping me from being brave enough to be me again even though I don’t
know what ‘me’ is anymore.
It is little surprise that this feeling has
built up over years of happiness with my wonderful loving husband as I now have
so much to lose. I want to keep what we have safe, to keep him safe to have a
chance at joy and happiness. Afraid that anything could remove that chance of
happiness from me has ironically robbed me of living a life with him happily.
Now our lives revolve around ritual, safety precaution and my constant need for
reassurance. So afraid am I that I could ruin such a loving union that I want
to freeze time, not allow anything to permeate our happiness. My need to
preserve and maintain our happiness is the one thing that is making us
miserable.
So how do I fight this? At the moment I am
having therapy and doing what I can to minimise the intrusive thoughts from my
OCD. Part of me wants to fling the door wide and venture out into the world
unencumbered by my brain but it’s not the type of thing I can leave behind so I
have only been able to go out with my husband and just three or four times a
month. The rest of the time I try and exit my safe place, still hiding behind
curtains and doors but for the most part I am still stuck in the dungeon of my
OCD addled agoraphobic brain. I worry that I’m losing friends, more and more I
find my inbox empty or with few mails other than the usual junk telling me I
should buy various things that I don’t need. I worry that if I meet new friends
that my friendliness will be mistaken for advances and that the person will be
hurt unintentionally and the one thing I can’t bear to do is hurt anyone. I can
barely focus on anything for the worry and intrusive thoughts but somewhere
beneath it all I am still putting up a fight.
What is life without risk and possibility
of things going wrong? Probably much worse than you thought huh? Barely any
life at all. But it is still life and a life that I want to be better. I want
safety and no anxiety but life can’t offer that completely and I have to make
peace with that. I want a life with my husband and whatever it brings. I just
have to get the anxiety sodden part of my brain to see how good it can be.
Tuesday, 5 November 2013
Choosing Life
Around a month ago I travelled, very bravely from my haven
in Scotland to the bright lights and big city of London. This was something of
a triumph for me as often even leaving the house can be a painful journey
filled with panic attacks and doubt. However, despite my worries, my husband
and I made it to our lovely hotel in London. I struggled a great deal around
the city, worrying that people might hurt me or I might shout at them or hurt
them (even though I know that this is something I would never want to do, the
intrusive thoughts still torture me) but even with these worries I managed to
navigate around the musty but exciting London Underground (even at rush hour!),
wander through the beauty of Richmond Park avoiding terrifying roaring stags
and even a trip to the Whispering Gallery of St Paul’s Cathedral (almost 100ft
up). These were all things that I never thought that I would manage but manage
I did. I wish that my bravery had continued after London but sadly I am writing
this having only left the house for a walk around the block once in the past 4
weeks.
The problem started as I developed a really nasty cold on
returning home. You see, while away I decided to wash my hands as little as
possible as some Exposure Response Prevention but it seems that as my body is
not used to a vast amount of germs due to me not going out very often, I came
down with the most horrendous bug. I developed the worst cold I’ve had in a
long time and then the resulting recovery time has taken me almost three weeks
and I still feel dreadfully tired. Herein lies the problem: after being so ill
my OCD has gotten worse again to the point where I can barely feed myself or
shower without repeating my actions over and over again.
A shower currently takes me three hours, most of which
revolves around me putting a product into my hand like shampoo then immediately
I feel that it is contaminated the moment it is in my hair so I rinse it. I
then feel that I have to wash my hair twice more to get it clean and as the
second time I try to wash my hair results in the same worries as the first; you
can imagine this becomes a fairly lengthy process. No matter what I do I just
end up washing and washing and washing over and over again. It’s torturous.
This goes for every item I need to wash – body, hair, face etc so I end up
spending three hours, washing and crying until I am so covered in sweat that it
was pointless washing in the first place.
I can’t go out as even the merest thought of going out seems
to lead to a bubbling panic attack. I went for a walk around the block with my
husband last weekend but that was a tremendous struggle.
You see, when you get to this point, it seems like the
easiest thing in the world to become more insular, to think that as the world
outside feels so scary and frightening; perhaps a life away from it all, inside
my home is safest of all? The pain and the fear would surely all go away if I
just stay where it feels safe and warm?
But is that a life? Really? Any kind of life? I’ve been
thinking about it a lot recently as the longer I spend in my home, the more I
feel like delaying the inevitable of having to go out. Curling up in a ball and
cowering from the world is hardly a life is it?
The problem is that the idea of even stepping outside my
door at the moment seems like the most monumentally terrifying action I could
take at the moment and that’s where my OCD has me over a barrel. Stay in, stay
safe Fred tells me in my head whereas Brian is telling me that there is a whole
world of adventure out there to experience, relax, and enjoy it – except I
can’t. I’m trapped in my own head with an angry M yelling at me that I’m
useless, pointless and that I’ll never get better and to be honest, at times it
is difficult to believe that I will ever
get better.
I recently watched National Theatre at 50 and there was a
short piece with Benedict Cumberbatch and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith
in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard and Benedict said
“Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect” and that’s effectively
where I am, in a box. Admittedly it has a window in the form of social media
and my husband but essentially I am trapped in my mind, in my home with my only
conversation my husband, various medical people and online comfort in the form
of chats with friends over Facebook. It’s a life, of sorts but I shouldn’t be
in this box. I’m there because of my OCD. It’s not life. What I live everyday
is not life; too scared to touch items in my own home, too scared to venture
outside, too nervous to even speak to people I’ve known for the longest time.
I want a proper life. I want to regale my husband with the
minutiae of my day, I want to feel the wind and rain on my face without panic
and I want to function as a normal human being like I used to. It sounds so
easy doesn’t it? But for me and other OCD sufferers, even a walk around the
block can be fraught with fear and danger.
I will get out and about again. My desire to lead a normal
life is hopefully stronger than the torturous thoughts in my head so I’m
starting small and from the start. I may not be able to sit in a pub with my
friends just yet or enjoy the cinema with my husband but I won’t let the fear
get me. I may have a way to go but I choose life...and not in the box.
Tuesday, 13 August 2013
A day like today
Today has not been a good day.
I'm a constant burden to my poor put upon husband but with little movement in my progress I need so much help that it affects our relationship. I want him to see me as a strong sexy beautiful wife but all he probably sees is someone struggling, ugly and contorted in pain and suffering - not exactly attractive eh?
I’m actually writing this on the back of a giant panic
attack so I can really describe how I feel at the current time. My OCD has been
seething and simmering since the day began and reached boiling point just an
hour ago. Even as I’m writing this I am going back to the start of the
sentence to make sure that what I have written is correct and I have now done
it so many times that I am exhausted after writing a mere three sentences.
These are the days where I don’t so much as want to cry for help but bellow
into cyberspace; one loud guttural cry of pain and anguish to get it all out of
my system. But of course, even crying about my OCD is pointless sometimes.
There are days like this where I find myself reading the
label of a bottle of juice one hundred times before I take a sip, where washing
my hands turns into a one hour task and where I just don’t know where I want to
be. I’m perfectly lucid and to be honest that disappoints me in a way,
sometimes I would much rather not be conscious of my OCD but then again, if
that were the case I would perhaps be more of a burden on my poor husband.
Physically I’m in very bad shape; the pain from the trapped
nerve in my neck is thrumming and groaning, sending shooting pains through
my shoulder and arm. Given the level of my anxiety today, the acid in my
stomach is churning so badly that I feel like I’m going to vomit. Its days like
these when another force in my head comes into play. As well as the benevolent
Brian in my head, logical and calm, fighting against Fred, my brain’s OCD
health and safety officer – there is also another force that only really comes
into power when I’m feeling really down.
This third force makes Malcolm Tucker from The Thick Of It
seem like Kermit the Frog. When I’m trying desperately to drink something or to
do anything and I get into a loop I have this voice in my head raging with
anger at me and how weak I am that I can’t even sit down without leaping up to
make sure that I am sitting on a chair or that I can’t drink some juice without
reading the label over and over. “You’re useless!” yells this voice in my head “You’re
never going to get better! You’re just a burden and a waste!” and even Fred and
Brian cower in my head making Fred even more fastidious, worried that he may
lose his imaginary job and Brian just disappears so my brain is filled with
self loathing mixed with anxiety and a heightened sense of self awareness. I
find it difficult to breathe. All at once I can feel every molecule of my body
and yet when I look at things or touch things I feel unreal and that I have no
sensation at all. Everything I have tried to do today has ended up with me
getting into a continuous OCD loop.
I watch my life as if it were a movie, watching but not
really participating while the more substantial part of my personality is dragged
to the far recesses of myself, forced to view terrible traumas with lid locked
eyes while asleep and mentally poked, prodded and taunted by day. I do
everything right; I do my mental exercises, try to resist my compulsions and
keep calm but while I look outwardly normal as people pass me on the street, my
mind is a seething cauldron of anxiety, neuroses and brutal horrible fears.
Suppressing the thoughts just serves to make them worse, more visceral and
often more visual.
While my body is participating in the movie of the day in a
calm as watching paint dry way it seems so odd that my brain is so frantic. I
crave peace, I crave silence for just a short while at least, I crave oblivion
but know that is not the answer.
You see OCD patients on the TV and of course they are racked with anxiety,
cleaning and straightening but what you rarely see is the crippling
debilitating chain of thoughts that lead to hysteria. You never see the
harrowing visual mock hallucinations manifested by one thought generating from
another until fear and anxiety collide in your head and all you can do is hide.
Nowhere feels safe, even your safe place feels polluted and
dirty but it is the best your degrading mind can offer given the terrifying
circumstances. Nothing feels safe, you feel like you may never feel normal
again and perhaps I won't? Everything is a constant struggle. When I eat I
examine every morsel that is to pass my lips, I feel simply awful in
restaurants if I have to leave food as I don't remember the staff handing it to
me (or rather my brain does remember but constantly hassles me to tell me that
I'm wrong). Any food in a packet, bottle, packaging etc has to be examined in
minute detail to ensure it is sealed and it almost feels as if I have forgotten
how to read as I try desperately to read and reread the labels on food and the words dance around before my eyes. My life
is exhausting even when I do nothing.
I'm a constant burden to my poor put upon husband but with little movement in my progress I need so much help that it affects our relationship. I want him to see me as a strong sexy beautiful wife but all he probably sees is someone struggling, ugly and contorted in pain and suffering - not exactly attractive eh?
I tell myself that I will get better, that this shouty force
(that I am going to call M after the sweary spin doctor Malcolm Tucker) will
get tired at some point and I will be mercifully free from it for a while. And
I will. I have been better in the past and I am sure that I will again but it
is just days like this that are somewhat hard to cope with.
I wanted to write this while I felt the emotions to try and
show what it can be like on the bad days. While this post may not be amusing or
entertaining I believe that it is important to write even on the bad days. I’m
down at the moment and thankfully not depressed. If I were depressed I’m almost
certain that I would not be able to write this at all.
I will improve, I will. It’s just that some days are a lot
harder than others and sometimes for little reason. I tell myself it is
hormones, time of the month or the fact that it is my birthday at the end of
the week and I’ll be veering towards 40 rather than being closer to 30. The
truth is that there is no reason for my mood today. Some days are just hard and
hopefully tomorrow will be better. Until then, I will fight through my OCD
today and hope with all my heart for a brighter tomorrow. Keep fighting, I know
I will.
Monday, 12 August 2013
...and Relax!
I’m often told that I should relax more, to chill out and
not to worry about things so much. “Really? Oh well, yeah, that’s what I should
do then” I often say slightly sarcastically “I’d never thought of that! Thank
you, really, thank you!” I know that I should perhaps not be so sarcastic but
in all truth it actually makes me tenser when people suggest that I should stop
worrying. “Thay have no idea what it is like to have these worries going
through my mind every second of every day!” I think grumpily but by the same
token, I don’t know what it is like to be a relaxed and laid back soul so
perhaps I should be a little more understanding in return.
If someone gave me a machine that would give me the option
of allowing someone to feel exactly the way I feel, would I use it freely to
prove my point? The answer is no, I wouldn’t subject anyone to the tirade of
terror inflicted upon me by my barrel of laughs OCD companion Fred as it would
be inhumane. So why do I have to put up with it? I decided to try out some
relaxation techniques.
Now, before I start, some things haven’t worked for me but
that doesn’t mean they are not worth trying so don’t take my experiences as
recommendations or advice not to try. I am just a cynical old bugger these days
and I have tried things that I have thought might even be ludicrous but have
perhaps helped a little. In saying that, I would avoid activities that may want
to take vast amounts of cash from you while offering little in return. So,
common sense should be applied as always.
The first time I ever really decided with any determination
to try a relaxation technique was over a decade ago. I was undergoing therapy
and, as I had raging insomnia at the time, I was given a relation tape to try.
Now, not realising at the time, my OCD as pretty bad and I felt that despite
trusting my counsellor I still wanted to hear what the tape had to say before
undergoing sleepy therapy. I mean, what if it told me to take off my clothes
and run down the street clucking like a chicken? Would I be hypnotised to sing “Have
a banana!” when people mentioned not getting their 5 a day? With a healthy dose
of fear I listened to the relaxation tape for the first time on both sides
(That’s an hour I would never get back as I was tensely listening to every word
to make sure that no hypnotism was involved) and satisfied myself that there
was no skulduggery going on, I lay gently on a comfy bed in a warm room and
played the tape through my cassette walkman (yep, it was that long ago).
I performed each action that the tape outlined and felt the
difference in the feeling of my tensed muscles and relaxed muscles, it was all
very soothing. Feeling that I was getting somewhere with this relaxation lark I
laid my head back a little too sharply and the curtain behind me, whose pole
was attached by blue tack or something similar, fell onto my head! All manner
of relaxation wasn’t going to take the pain out of my now bruised head! I
groaned (a bit) and swore (a lot) and all the while the lady on the tape is
telling me that I am surrounded by comforting warmth and that I am safe. I
suppose I was other than the glancing blow from the curtain pole. I sadly took
this to be a bad sign and didn’t partake in relaxation for a number of years
after that.
Coming to my senses later in life I was advised to learn an
instrument as it is a peaceful and wonderful pastime. I agree but it is not so
peaceful for flatmates, partners etc so I had to curb that one a little. ‘Yoga’
I was told while at work ‘Yoga works wonders to relax you’ so I tried that.
At this moment I am sadly significantly overweight but at
the time I was fairly bendy – I dread to think how I would even attempt yoga
these days. Anyhoo, several years ago I booked myself into a yoga class and,
not wanting to humiliate myself in front of friends and well as the strangers
in front of which I would be invariably embarrassing myself, I went alone. I
was so confused at one point on how to do a particular move that the instructor
came along and tried to explain to me how to breathe correctly. I tried not to
be cynical but Brian in my head was saying “I’ve been breathing all this time,
surely I’m doing it right?” whereas Fred in my head was in an all out panic
yelling “Have we been breathing wrong all our life??? Have we been doing it
wrong? Oh no, it’s going to take ages to find out how to do it right!” and part
of me started thinking that perhaps my breathing was really bad and that everyone
else was better at it than me which served to make me panic more. I tried the
breathing techniques but I became so aware of my breathing that I either
stopped and then gasped for breath or I forgot what to do altogether. My mind
and body are not designed for concentrating on something I do naturally and
trying to pull my body into a complex position. I can reassure you now that,
you are breathing fine but with yoga there are specific ways to breathe in
order to get the maximum out of the relaxation.
Another problem I had with yoga was that, at the end, the
instructor put on some music, switched off the lights and promptly left the
room. I lay, on my odd smelling foam mat, on my back on the floor with the
chanting music playing in a room full of around 20 people and my brain wouldn’t
shut up for a single second.
My first thought was “I’ll bet she has gone out
for a cigarette. Man, I’d love a cigarette right now” (I smoked at the time)
and then Fred piped up in my head in full volume “Where are your keys? Or your
phone? You know they are at the other side of the room. There’s a person over
there right next to them who could be stealing them right now? You do know that
don’t you????” whereas Brian was calm but pensive saying “What is this music?
Do you think that lady is going to come back? How long do we lay here for?”
Frankly the whole session became pointless due to my constant worries at the
end.
Try Pilates said friends. So I did. I went to a Pilates
class and immediately found that I was the least bendy person in the world. At
one point the instructor, who was a lovely lady but with very firm hands, came
around to me and started trying to edge me into the correct positions – one of
which I had to actually be physically helped out of. I’m sure that Pilates is
great for some people but, as I had to be manually twisted into some positions,
I don’t think it is for me.
When I was unemployed the company working with the Jobcentre
to provide courses and help you to get back into employment gave me the option of a
relaxation course. Basically it was using a relaxation CD in a large room with other people to help you imagine
being in a serene and beautiful setting and there were a group of us in similar
circumstances so that was quite helpful. However, the journey there and back,
despite it being a mere mile or so, was so stressful that it became difficult
for me to attend. When I was there it was very relaxing but then I found myself
worrying that I had shouted in the middle of the session or that on the way out
perhaps I had insulted someone and I couldn’t convince myself that I hadn’t
(even though I knew that I hadn’t) so I stopped going altogether.
OCD has this little trick where sometimes, while crossing a
road for example I might worry that I have been run over. Even though I know
that I haven’t I start thinking that perhaps I have been run over and that I am
a ghost. I’ve talked to a lot of psychologists, OCD sufferers and medical staff
who say that this is part of the anxiety – this depersonalisation can make you
feel very unreal. If I am on my own this can be particularly anxiety inducing
as I start thinking that maybe I am a ghost (even though I don’t actually
believe in ghosts) and that no one can see me. It doesn’t help in the modern
world where few people make eye contact and, as this would often occur on my
way home from the relaxation class, you can imagine that this somewhat cancelled
it out.
True relaxation can be hard to achieve and strangely one of
the only times that my shoulders sink down to a vaguely relaxed state is when I
am at the dentist. Odd I know but I think that all the cleanliness around me
and the fact that my dentist is really calming all culminates in some actual
periods of relaxation. Obviously when she gets the drill out and starts pummelling
away at my teeth it is a different story and it is not a long term solution for
me to pitch up at my dentist’s office each day and demand that she lull me into
calm.
One thing that I have found that gives me some sort of
relief is photography. Don’t get me wrong, I am nowhere near professional and
so even calling what I do ‘photography’ is possibly a vast insult to
photographers so I apologise but I really love taking photos of wild birds.
There is something that eases my mind when staring through the lens (or in my
case LCD screen) at a beautiful bird or a scampering animal that few other
activities really reach for me.
As well as natural relaxation techniques I have, of course,
over the years been driven to taking medical means to relax but to be honest I
haven’t found anything that made my muscles feel all gooey and nice but I have
found that anti-psychotics have improved the intrusive thoughts and often
knocked me out so have served as some way of getting a little release from OCD
but as my body gets used to them even they seem to lose their benefit.
With something as intense and constant as OCD it can be
difficult to relax I grant you but it is always worth trying some things to get
some relief. Whether it is massage that works for you (the last massage I had
made me want to shout at the person as it was a deep tissue massage for my
tense muscles due to a trapped nerve but obviously experiences will differ!) or
relaxation exercises or yoga or Pilates or sitting on a beach listening to the
waves; many things are worth a try to achieve that level of melty brain
goodness.
So I continue with my quest for relaxation, despite my
cynical mind, and while you probably won’t find me in the downward dog position
in a hurry, you may just find me behind a camera listening to the bird song and
attempting to take amazing pictures. Well, I can hope...
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