How to Hide in Plain Sight

by Emma Noyes

To my brain— You crazy motherfucker, this one’s for you.

as soon as I finish that thought, I circle back. Tell myself not to be ridiculous. But then, as soon as I finish that thought, I circle back again, even though I don’t want to.

whether I cried at Henry’s funeral anymore. Soon, I’m just worrying about how much I’m worrying. Then I start worrying about the fact that I’m worrying about worrying.

The result of all of this thinking? Chaos.

Class starts, but I can’t pay attention to anything Ms. Collins is saying. I open the lid of my desk and pull out a notebook. It’s massive, a lined eight-by-twelve spiral with over two hundred empty pages. And so, as Ms. Collins talks about multiplication charts, I write out my Worries. That’s the name I’ve given them: Worries. On my bookshelf at home are other, more sensible journals—palm sized, featuring flowers or puppies on the front, but this is the only option on hand.

For a fifth grader you’re so smart wth

But this isn’t an illness. This can’t be cured with a few hugs and a capful of pink goo. This is me. Every thought, no matter how bizarre, no matter how disturbing—I create it. It comes from me. It’s made of me. Your thoughts are the mental manifestation of what you look like inside. Rotten thoughts? Rotten insides.

Happiness, to me, isn’t a presence. It’s an absence. The absence of Worry. Of fear. Of sadness. Of the thoughts and compulsions that directed my life for so long.

“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.”

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.

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.