For as long as I can remember, there had always been a constant anxiety in the back of my mind, a nagging fear that crept everywhere I went. Imagine thinking about your greatest fear. Now imagine that greatest fear repeating in your mind over and over again like a broken record, very visually. That was how I constantly felt.
I remember my childhood when I believed that a stranger would enter the house in the middle of the night and endanger all of my family– and as soon as night arrived, this was the only thought that would take over my mind. I counted the number of steps I took, skipped alternate stairs, skipped certain tiles, and always made sure stuck to the sides. Why? I don’t know. There was a firm belief that doing this would somehow save my family from getting killed, and doing those things was the only thing I could do to temporarily stop those fearful thoughts, easing my anxieties. But it didn’t mean that the nagging anxiety didn’t come back– it always came back after some time, now bringing newer tasks for me to repeatedly engage in for me to get rid of the intrusive thoughts. I was stuck in a never-ending loop.
Those thoughts would follow me even after I went inside the safety of my room. I was then convinced that my door wasn’t locked and my windows were open, and that would be the opening for the stranger to enter our house, rob us and end us. I would spend a lot of time checking the locks of my bedroom and windows, twisting the bedroom door’s handle six times to make sure it was locked, moving onto the windows and tugging them six times to ensure they were closed, levitating back to the door again. What if I didn’t check properly before? Let’s just do it one more time. That one more time turned into two more, then ten more. I was convinced that something bad would happen if I didn’t secure my locks. This was just the beginning of my doom.
A year later, my younger sister fell very sick. I was plagued by the fear that she could die in her sleep, and I would cross the hallway repeatedly, get inside her room, and make sure that she was breathing. Only the sound of her shallow breaths would ease the coiling serpent inside my head, but it wasn’t too long till the serpent flicked its head up, the poison it spat from its treacherous mouth coating my thoughts and making my fear return, repeatedly making me check on my younger sister. I would keep doing it until it felt right, praying for her the entire night.
I started to feel overwhelmed by the fact that I might do something wrong, something bad to someone. It wasn’t a tiny flickering thought, but a large neon sign that blinked repeatedly, bringing your attention to it every time in a way you can’t escape from it. Whenever I glanced at the pen lying idly on my bench during my classes, I was afraid I would stab it into someone. I never did, and I had no intention to, but that thought would repeat itself so many times in my mind until I tapped my shoe a specific number of times in a specific pattern or touched my left elbow to the back of the chair again and again. I believed that I could crash my cycle into someone on the road, and that would constantly occupy my mind every time I rode a cycle. I was afraid I would cause an accident, or hurt or kill someone in some way. These played out very visually in the back of my head and my only savior was repeating certain actions again and again.
I couldn’t follow most of the classes at school– I was never satisfied with how the letters looked on my notebook and ended up rewriting it again and again until it looked ‘right.’ I would reread things over and over again to make sure what I read was right, and this was especially frustrating during exams where most of my time would be eaten up by excessive rereading. When I sat beside my mom while she was cooking and accidentally touched something, I started wondering if the food would get poisoned. I would ask my mom if it was okay, and she would say that it was fine. I constantly needed that reassurance.
And when I was given the job of turning the stove off after some dish was made, I kept checking the stove knob continuously. I turned the knob until it was close to breaking, would go out of the kitchen only to come back again and examine the knob with my eyes and my hands, making sure it was off. If I didn’t turn it off properly, then the gas would leak, if the gas leaked, then the entire house would blast and catch on fire, killing my entire family. I would be responsible for their deaths. Checking the gas knob reassured me that it was okay, that my family wouldn’t die.
I was obsessed with numbers— in my mind, every number had something associated with it. There were lucky numbers, there were unlucky numbers, some numbers meant death in my head; and I would ritualistically repeat some things I would do a certain number of times: like spraying perfume twice to my left, and twice to my right. If I didn’t do this, something unfathomably bad would happen– to me, my family, or my friends.
I also had an overwhelming fear of contamination– it wasn’t as simple as most people would paint it to be– just excessive washing of hands. It was more than that. There was a lot of mental exhaustion and torture behind those actions because there was a constant stream of running commentary in my mind about what I was touching, what was dirty, how those filthy bacteria were crawling all over my skin, reveling in the feeling of human flesh, constantly calculating the bacteria that potentially could have gone inside me and freaking out about it though I can’t do anything about it; not able to enjoy one single thing because of this. My childhood had been consumed by this haunting force, inhibiting me from playing in puddles and enjoying the rain, eating street food, painting, and a lot more. I was repeatedly struck by this feeling that if I didn’t wash properly right now, I would fall victim to a deadly disease and spread it to the people around me, painting myself as the reason for a dozen of murders that hadn’t even occurred yet, feeling the weight and the texture of invisible blood coating my hands.
And it wasn’t just about staying clean or organized for me, it was the thought processes that ran behind them. My urge was to check over and over again if I left the taps on, the lights on, and make sure everything was symmetrical and in place felt right. One could think of it like a persistent itch, but the truth was, it was a lot more than just an itch to make things right.
After I was diagnosed with OCD, everything made sense. It was relieving in a way, knowing that there wasn’t an inherent fault in me, but it was all because of the intrusive thoughts, anxieties, and compulsions that OCD brought along. I got to know that OCD was characterized by intrusive thoughts or obsessions and things started to fall in place for me– I could categorize everything into obsessions and compulsions. In the case of my fear of stranger coming into my house, it was an obsession– a repeated, persistent and unwanted thought, urge, or image that is intrusive and cause distress or anxiety. The compulsive behaviors would be the only things that would get rid of my intrusive thought., but this was temporary. It was only time before the fear crept back in.
This also explained why I felt stuck in a never-ending loop. Every day, the situations I encountered kept changing, changing the obsessions that would be with me during a particular situation, the compulsive behavior that would relieve it for that time; and after that when I got into the next thing, the next situation in my day, new intrusive thoughts would be followed by new behaviors.
And I hated the fact that people use OCD as an adjective. I hear people talking all day, saying things like ‘Oh, I’m so OCD about my car!’ or ‘Look at my bookshelf organized based on colors, it’s so OCD, I know.’ It isn’t an adjective. Everyone isn’t "a little bit OCD." And it doesn’t make you feel good, it’s called a disorder for some reason. When one thinks of OCD, they think of ‘Over-Cleaning Disorder’, or excessive washing of hands and organization, but it isn’t just that. There’s an entire terror story in the minds of people suffering from this disorder, and we are merely reduced to an adjective or a trendy word.
It’s heartbreaking to stay on this side of the battle, trying my best not to drown in this overwhelming current of waves while everyone downplays what I have, or has a cliche, stereotypical representation of it. Do we see people using ‘cancer’ as a trend? No. Then why is it that mental illnesses are treated differently than physical ones? If someone is slightly sad, they throw away the sentence ‘I’m depressed, man.’; if someone has slight mood swings, they’re immediately hit with this ‘Dude, stop being so bipolar’ dialogue. Being sad isn’t the same as having depression; having mood swings isn’t the same as having bipolar disorder.
It is the stigma around it that made it harder for me to reach out for help. I’ve always felt so alone because people do not understand how I exactly feel.
It’s time for people to understand what OCD, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder really is.
+++
This is a glimpse of someone suffering from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), which is one of the most misunderstood mental health conditions. As mentioned, it isn’t just about washing or cleaning, but it is a lot more, and people need to understand it.
+++
*Check out the other 'Living with' series that tackles other mental health disorders here: https://www.psychophilics.com/post/living-with-schizophrenia
– Chandana Bonagiri
Kommentarer