Where to begin! I am writing this as I simply cannot bear the life that I live in the tyranny that is my OCD. I don’t want to complain (although I fear that I might, quite a lot) but I do want to show others what life is like living with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This cruel disorder has robbed me of the last few years of my life and in revenge I’m going to do it – I’m going to write a tell-all feature on this nasty little entity that lives in my head! Although, to be fair, this little horrifying creature is actually constantly terrorising me because it is a scared, frightened wee thing that merely wants to keep me safe. I need to look behind the curtain Let me explain...
Your brain (yes, your brain and pretty much everyone else’s) has a great little feature. It is postulated that the brain stem helps you deal with fear. This is handy when crossing roads, watching out for tigers in undergrowth and ensuring that you run, fight or freeze when danger is nearby. The brain stem says “Oh no! Something is terribly wrong, need more information!” and sends out signals to other parts of the brain which checks to confirm danger and then to another part of the brain to decide what to do. Once a decision is made the brain stem is either given the “All clear! Go back to your duties” or “Everything is going wrong!!!! Take action!!” at which point the brain stem helps to send out a cocktail of chemicals in order to help you cope with the aforementioned danger. This all happens quite instantaneously and all you may know about it is that you may think ‘Is that tree going to fall? No? Ok’. Interesting huh?
Well, my brain does all that right up to the point where it makes a decision. It can’t. Something happens and my brain doesn’t send back information to the brainstem to tell it to stand down and everything is ok. Therefore, my poor little brainstem thinks that there is something wrong – All. The. Time. As I described earlier, without confirmation that everything is okay, my brain stem throws its toys out of the pram and pumps lovely chemicals into my bloodstream telling me that I need to run, or fight or simply stay in one place and sob my heart out. Obviously in a really dangerous situation this is all very well and good but when I am trying to wash my hands and my brain is saying that something is wrong I just end up continuously washing my hands until it feels ‘right’ (which sadly it rarely does so I settle for just about ok). This is just the chemical bit but as you can imagine, with those chemicals soaring around my body on a fairly regular basis I feel generally highly anxious then enormously tired from reacting. See, I’ll bet it makes more sense to you now.
You see, everybody has odd thoughts, everybody thinks things such as ‘did I leave the gas on?’ or ‘I could just kick that person up the bum!’ or ‘I could just jump on that car bonnet for a laugh’ etc and most people shrug them off. Many people with OCD can see those thoughts as somehow meaning they are a bad person or that because they have thought it, they must have done it. For me, it is constant, every thought I have is analysed by my brain, and every time I go out I am scanning for danger and staring at people in the street terrified that they may suddenly attack me – despite the risk of being punched or mugged in broad daylight on a high street being fairly slim.
Suddenly while trying to get off a bus I may accidentally knock into someone and apologies will be made and all should be well. But it isn’t. I then get intrusive thoughts telling me that I have punched the person and that I am evil. So I think about the situation rationally and I replay it in my head – accidentally bumped into person, apologised, got off the bus. All fine. Then my brain tells me that I am just telling myself that to cover the horrible person that I am and this is when the anxiety really ramps up. An image pops into my head of me punching the person. It’s an awful image and it causes me immense distress. I would never want to harm anyone and i tell myself that firmly; what possible reason would I have to punch an innocent person? By this point my OCD has me in its grip and tells me I have definitely caused harm and the image in my head reaches a frankly horrifying crescendo by which point I am more or less convinced that I have hurt the person. Even if I can see them chatting away on the bus, perfectly fine, the image in my head tells me otherwise.
With all this going on I eventually stopped going out. That’ll teach it thought I. But no. Avoidance is possibly the worst thing as it confirms to the old brain stem that there is danger out there lurking away in the darkness so everything escalates. I ask for reassurance from my husband and he, having witnessed said collision on the bus, assures me that my rational picture of what happened is true but still my brain eats away at me, telling me that the police are going to come and get me because of me punching the person. I literally can’t get it out of my head. To be honest, this is one of the milder incidents.
I am a gestalt entity really; I always have been to a certain extent. The way I thought about things always felt a little weird. For a while as a child I thought that somehow because my brain worked in an odd way that somehow I was special. Not in a “You’re a wizard Harry” sort of way but I always had two strands of thinking in my head. Over the years I realised that I don’t have multiple personalities, but I do have two controlling forces in my head.
OCD is peculiar as you know full well that doing certain things is not risky but the OCD part of my brain likes to constantly tell me that doing just about anything will cause me harm. I end up arguing with my own mind. I have almost personified the two parts of my brain; strangely I have made them both male for some reason despite being a female myself. Odd but just go with it.
One controlling force in my head is my OCD, I call him Fred. Fred is a health and safety officer. He wears a yellow hard hat at all times and for some reason has a bushy moustache. Fred is constantly on the lookout for danger and he sees danger everywhere. Like the hard worker that he is, he reports his findings promptly and sounds the alarm when he thinks there is any danger. Which is always. He makes Arnold Rimmer look easy going.
The other force in my head is a more rational entity. I call him Brian; not only because it is a slight anagram of brain but because this part of my mind works a little bit like Professor Brian Cox - (certainly not intelligence wise as Brian Cox is far more intelligent than I will ever be but because of his cool rationality and curiosity). This non-OCD rational part of my brain, Brian, is the thing that steps in to tell me that the Fred is being irrational and that I should not believe Fred. Essentially this part of my brain in theory allows me to realise that like the goblin king in Labyrinth “You have no power over me” (mind you, David Bowie can have power over me any time he likes...however, I digress).
So, Brian and Fred live in my head, constantly arguing until it is honestly difficult to know what to think and frankly it is exhausting. From the moment I get out of bed in the morning, Fred is telling me not to touch anything in the room in case it is poisoned whereas Brian is soothing me and saying that everything is fine. In the way that some people have their morning cigarette, I get a good old dose of adrenaline and cortisol and a whole load of other chemicals that will just screw up my digestion and make me feel like I should run around the block, if I weren’t scared of being attacked or shouting at someone in the street or running in front of a car.
OCD is different for everyone I’m sure but I think I need to try and express how it feels to raise awareness of this really miserable disorder. I’ll try and be entertaining and I may use visual aids to explain my plight but people need to see that OCD isn’t just about someone washing their hands or arranging things in a particular way (a part of OCD that I actually don’t have but my lovely husband is prone to). The thoughts that appear in the head of someone with OCD are often so terrifying and frightening such as that someone close might die or that having something on your hands could cause harm to others and the handwashing or arranging things is a frail attempt to exact some sort of order on the world.
My house isn’t nice and clean, I don’t arrange my sock drawer in order of colours and if you knock a picture frame to one side and ask me if it bothers me I can tell you that it doesn’t. My OCD focuses on whether things are off/locked, worries of harm and fears that things are poisoned. The things I have written about today are my understanding of my disorder from what I have learned through researching it and these are my experiences and opinions, not medical facts but information gleaned from several sources through the course of my illness.
OCD can manifest itself in different ways – it depends on your experiences, possibly genetics and how you live your life.
Lastly, the fact that my thoughts often distress me is, I’m told, a good thing as enjoying them would frankly mean that I had much bigger problems to deal with. I’m not a danger to myself or anyone. I live with a constant conflict in my mind and the one person that suffers the most because of it is me. You can’t run away from your own mind.
So there. That is my introduction to the contents of my mind and my unbearable feeling of fear. I hope that helps you to understand that OCD is more complex than it is often portrayed.
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