Oblivion

Having two separate forces arguing in your head is no picnic, believe me. Every single action I take in life is followed by Fred yelling “Don’t touch that!!! It’s poisonous!” or “That manhole 500 metres away is dangerous, you are right near it!!” (as well as being irrational, Fred has no concept of distance I might add). All the while Brian is sitting there saying “You can’t even talk to this guy! He’s a complete moron, you are nowhere near any danger, chill out” which, as you can imagine is pretty much what everyone else is saying to me in real life. The understanding of other people when in situations of high anxiety is crucial as people saying “You’re mental, that manhole cover is miles away, why the hell are you even worrying about it???” is really not particularly helpful. My husband has the patience of a saint and is likely to ignore these people and gently but firmly reassure me once then try to coax me far away from the manhole. My husband is truly wonderful and I will devote an entire post soon with what he has to put up with while somehow still continuing to love me and how he frankly deserves a medal.

Anyway, in the past when I didn’t know what was wrong with my mind I tried running away from it which is more or less pointless as it was my mind so I sought other ways to quieten down the voices of Brian and Fred. The one way to do that seemed to be alcohol. Big mistake.

When I see alcoholics I tend to think, there but for the grace of God go I because, to be honest, without my husband I may not have sought medical and psychiatric help for my OCD and I may well have considered drinking myself into a stupor every day just to get away from the anxiety. I know that sounds quite dramatic but I assure you that things were so bad at one point that I just drank and drank and drank, hoping and praying for oblivion. The thing is that you do achieve it, for a while, but at a price. OCD is particularly fond of alcohol because, as much as it knows that you are going to dampen it down for a short while, it is going to spring back to life at the nearest opportunity and bounce all over your head for at least 2 days afterwards. Oh the joys of rebound OCD(!) 

You see, when I’m drunk, I don’t think, not really. I mean, I have the voice in my head that keeps on yelling “Wahey! Look at how the lights...shine...no, they...they really like...shine!” etc but Fred and Brian are coerced into some sort of catatonic state where neither can be bothered arguing. In all truth, for a short while, it is fantastic. I can completely understand why some people drink to excess. When I read news articles about Paul Gascoigne, who has OCD too, in a way I can see what he may be trying to battle. Alcohol is often not the problem, it is a way of trying to find a solution and unfortunately it is a pretty bad one. I don’t know whether Paul Gascoigne is drinking to quieten down the forces in his head but chances are, as he has OCD, it may well be what he is trying to do. To a certain point I completely understand; there have been times where I would have gladly swapped my angst ridden life for a bottle of something potent enough for me to, if not enjoy myself without worry, but to pass out and not have to cope with anything.

The funny thing is that I hate being drunk, OCD likes control and fears uncertainty so when you are drunk and have little sense of control it is both euphoric and terrifying – like standing at the top of a huge cliff, teetering over the brink.

I chose to take the route of psychiatric help and medication and due to the medication I’m on, no drinking alcohol for me. Plus it is a depressant which makes me laugh and joke with people for one night but then roll up in a ball on the floor and cry for two days afterwards as Fred and Brian head to the boxing ring to slug it out (yep, they have a boxing ring in my brain, never say I don’t treat my non-physical invented mind dwelling entities well!).

The first medication I took for my OCD was, as expected, good old SSRIs (Selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors – anti depressants). It is thought that SSRIs help as it is postulated (there are a lot of theories in OCD but it is difficult to pin down exactly what causes/helps OCD. Another post darling, another post) that lack of serotonin has something to do with OCD. Serotonin is a lovely little neurotransmitter that is thought to be linked to feelings of happiness. If your brain chemistry goes awry and depression occurs, SSRIs help your brain to retain more serotonin and theoretically make you a happy bunny. Not at first, you don’t take them and they make you feel high as a kite, they build up over time. 

The first time I took SSRIs, I’m not going to lie to you, I felt like I had been rolled in cotton wool then someone had put bubble wrap around it and rolled me down a slight incline. Everything did feel a little fuzzy, not in a euphoric way, just in the way that I felt like I was in a bubble for a while. Many people say “Oh no, I don’t want to take tablets and feel like a zombie!” and the truth is that I didn’t feel like that but for a while it was sort of nice not to have Fred and Brian screaming in my head. Then, after a while of feeling calm and serene, I genuinely started to miss them. I spoke to one of the psychiatrists dedicated to my case and explained that I didn’t feel happy or sad, just ‘meh’ and he replied “How do you think most people feel?” and I was sort of offended to be honest. Then I went for a walk with my husband and we discussed it and I thought it over and came to the conclusion that perhaps that is how most people feel a lot of the time.

Anyway, SSRIs gave way to Tricyclic antidepressants (which helped for a while but made me have scary but vaguely cool auditory hallucinations) and then back to SSRIs and a heady mix of surprisingly effective anti-psychotics (I’m not psychotic, don’t worry but the medication is designed to calm down the voices in the mind when psychotic episodes occur therefore when you have chatter in your head they do help to calm them down). At many points along the way I refused to take medication, fearing liver damage, mental damage and some of the side effects sound terrifying but then after years of the constant haggling in my head and after becoming agoraphobic and then bedbound with the OCD, I more or less offered to take anything anyone would give me to have a life.

And that’s the stark truth. OCD robs you of life. It stops you from doing things that you want to do because you are too scared to even think about them. You get to a point where you are sitting in a room that you have spent the last three months in, crying, lonely and knowing that you are hurting people close to you by shying away from the world and their help because it is just too hard worrying even more that you are not living any semblance of life. You find yourself utterly terrified of dying, but in some ways not wanting to live and oblivion is never the answer. 

The definition of oblivion is as follows:

    “The state of being unaware or unconscious of what is happening or the state of being forgotten, esp. by the public.”

This is not life, it’s not the life anyone should ever want to live.

Short term oblivion may sound wonderful but in truth, it doesn’t take away any of the problems in life and the only way to do that is to fight. So I fight, every day, Fred is constantly on alert and posting photographs to the social media site of my mind telling me what I have and haven’t done to try and bring me down and I jump on Brian’s back and we carry on beating down the wall of Fred’s office, leaving post it notes all over his computer that he’ll have a terror of a time trying to remove. We use all his staples and carve offensive words into his desk. Fred will not win and while I often crave oblivion there is no life in it.

There is no cure for OCD at the moment and perhaps there never will be but there is treatment, some that works and others that are not so effective depending on your situation but worth trying with advice from your doctor or psychiatrist. Life is worth it, I may have had the past few years of my life frittered away in misery and suffering but I have a husband who cares about me who wants me to be happy. 

The treatment for OCD can be hard to go through but believe me that the alternative, not living your life, is much worse.