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Thoughts are disposable, yes? The brain spits out garbage all day long. Strange impulses. Bizarre fantasies. Gross images you don’t go looking for but pop into your mind anyway. Yes?” Speedy chuckles. “Right. It’s completely normal. People with healthy brains just brush the thoughts away. OCD is, essentially, a rupture in that sweeping mechanism. If you suffer from OCD, you can’t brush them away. Your mind gets stuck on them. It obsesses over them.”
The spiral. Huh. I suppose my thoughts do look like spirals. They don’t feel like it, though. If anything, they feel more like tunnels. Like digging deeper and deeper into a place you never wanted to go in the first place.
“My compulsions—for the most part, they were internal. Like checking, for example, or seeking reassurance, whether from someone else, like Dr. Droo—like Dr. Drier, or from myself, from what I found in my body.” “What’s checking?”
“Imagine this: Your head hurts. But instead of thinking, ‘Oh, my head hurts—I have a headache,’ you think, ‘Oh my God, my head hurts—I have brain cancer.’ ” “Ha!” said Clarence. “Sounds like my WebMD search history.” “Right,” I said. “But this goes beyond that. You go to a neurologist. They scan your head. They say, ‘Nope, nothing there. Take two Advil and drink lots of water.’ But instead of listening, you think, ‘No, no, that can’t be right,’ and you seek a second opinion. Another doctor. And this one says, ‘You definitely don’t have brain cancer. Take two Advil and drink lots of water,’ and
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Me, I’ve never had a boyfriend before. Not even one of those preschool boyfriends, the ones you hold hands with one week and break up with the next.
Honestly, I probably shouldn’t be drinking. Alcohol lowers your inhibitions, right? If I had to guess, that also means that it loosens the locks that we keep on the boxes within ourselves. Very important boxes, in my case, such as the one that I chained up on the day my best friend returned from Colombia.
You can’t let yourself go down that road.
I always prefer his words to his silence, even when those words carry the weight of fury.
“Do you think,” I say, peeling off a pepperoni with two fingers, “that in life, you need true love to be happy?”
A Person. A go-to. For example: You, Manuel, are my Person. For better or for worse. If I need advice, I go to you. If I’m sad, I call you and cry like a little baby. I tell you everything. You know all my secrets.”
“You know what I mean. You’re my Person. I could spend a thousand hours with you and never get bored. And I flatter myself to think I’m the same, that I’m your Person, too.”
We often make the mistake of believing humans are predictable. That they live by patterns. Especially if it’s someone you trust. But when Manuel stops speaking, I’m reminded that I don’t know his brain, not really, and it terrifies me. It terrifies me to lose the only bridge I have to his mind. To feel deprived of his words, the ones he chooses so carefully—the ones that float to my ears like small vivid rings of smoke.
What does OCD do? OCD ruins things. Parties. Conversations. Relationships. Dinners. Plane rides. Walks down the street. It can ruin anything. It will, if you give it the power to do so.
Why is OCD hard to identify? It’s not a regular illness. There’s no well-known path forward. You don’t know what you’re fighting against. You throw flames on a piece of you that looks like it needs burning only to find that it was the wrong piece, that you’re not actually in love with your brother, that the problem is elsewhere, is elsewhat, is tens of thousands of things.
What does OCD feel like? Well, that’s the trick. After a certain point, OCD isn’t a feeling; it’s just your life.
I know how work culture is in New York. And I know that OCD and work obsession, they…they go hand in hand, two passengers on one bus. That’s how my psych professor described it,
I feel awful. I don’t know why I keep going to him when the Worries get bad. I don’t want to burden him. But he always claims that it’s no burden at all, that he loves being here for me.
Still, I can’t help but worry that he’s lying. That I am a burden. That my stress is bringing him down, too. It’s exhausting.
It doesn’t take long for fascination to turn to obsession.
Kept a running list of things that needed to be done, both in my head and on paper. Became addicted to the feeling of finishing a task, whether that be editing or formatting or leading a successful meeting—to that little burst of endorphins that came from ticking a little box. It felt wonderful, like for the first time in a long time, I was working toward something, even if I wasn’t quite sure what that something was yet.
The more I think about what I can achieve, the less I obsess over the other things.
See, there are two kinds of cravings: safe and not safe.
We give in. We give in and it feels so good, and now we’re riding those good feelings as far as we can. Because laughter is finite. Even at peak hilarity, when you lose control of your body and your anxieties and all those other horrible details that make you human, in the back of your mind you know that it cannot last. None of it. This beautiful terror will end, same as a heartbreaking movie or an outburst of anger or a particularly delicious bowl of ice cream. Everything ends. So our laughter shrinks within our bellies, turning from great cascading waves to nothing more than a ripple.
Nothing is not nothing. Nothing is something. Nothing is the culmination of a decade of friendship. Its logical conclusion. Or maybe its destruction. I don’t know.
But as soon as I think it, it can’t be unthought.
“No, no,” I say. “No, it’s not that. It’s…” Tears flood my face. I know I’m scaring him. I don’t mean to. I try to explain. “It’s…it’s the thoughts. They’re just…”
Don’t you ever apologize for something that’s not your fault.”
“I love you,” I whisper into this third silence. “And not in the way I usually mean it.” Manuel’s arms tighten. “I’ve never meant it any other way.”
YOU DO NOT DESERVE TO BE LOVED.
I hate this body, the thought says. I hate it. I would burn this body alive.
DID YOU KNOW YOU CAN be addicted to nothing? To the sensation of nothing? You can crave the ability to look inside yourself and find nothing, no guilt, no sadness. No anxiety or terror or unfounded doom. No memories threatening to eat you alive from the inside out.
All addicts are liars.
OCD isn’t about washing your hands. It’s about living in constant fear of the outside world or, in many cases, of yourself. It’s a mind that attaches itself to whatever obsession it can find. One stuck in permanent fight-or-flight. One that can’t stop looking for tigers, even though it left the jungle millennia ago.
“But then…if things were so bad, why did you stay with her?” “Oh, well, that’s easy.” Taz shrugged. “She’s my Person. When you find your Person, you don’t let them get away.”
Where logic talks, OCD screams. And by then, you’ve bought so fully into its hollering that you can’t tell which one was the truth and which one was the worry. And you think in circles, and the circles are endless, and they consume you, and you forget that you used to have a personality outside those circles.
“I don’t understand…why my brain won’t just l-leave…leave me alone.”
who radiated sunshine so bright it was sometimes hard for me to look at.
sometimes, people do things that don’t make sense. Sometimes it’s for the wrong reasons, and sometimes it’s for the right reasons. Sometimes it’s just to make the other person feel safe. To show them they have nothing to fear or, if that’s not possible, to cling to them while you both cry together.
