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Because when you want ice cream or crispy, hot buttered bread, the feeling pools right atop your tongue, but when you want a place, it calls to you with every sense, sight and smell and touch and sound and, yes, even taste.
And I was afraid that if it did, this time it would be for good. That if my family discovered just how broken I was, there would be no putting me back together.
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.
Memory of pain is often worse than the pain itself. It drives us. What we do or don’t do, embrace or fear, repeat or avoid at all costs—all of that is dictated by our memory of pain.
At every moment, I live half in this world and half in another. One world is physical, the other invisible. I’m perfectly capable of remaining engaged in the physical one—the “real” world, the one with action and dialogue and the ever-present passage of time—while silently running through my standard list of Worries, one leading right into the next, like the endless all-caps ticker that sprints across the bottom of a newscast.
I’m doing it again—stuffing my confession with as many irrelevant details as I can. Padding the cushion I hope will soften the fall when I finally jump.
“It’s okay, Eliot.” The words sound out of place in his voice. They’re adult words, and we’re still just kids. “You’re going to be okay.”
As I lay on that rock, I couldn’t help but come back to a question I had pondered a thousand times in my life: How do you form meaningful relationships with a family you didn’t grow up with?
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.”
“Wrong. To OCD, no amount of evidence is enough. OCD says, ‘Nope. I know more than either of these board-certified experts, and I’m telling you that there’s still a chance that you might have brain cancer.’
I’m not invited to the mental illness party. Too young, I guess. Or maybe I have the wrong disease. Maybe they won’t invite what they can’t understand.
Imagine knowing that jail is the only logical future for you. Imagine knowing that since you were fifteen.
“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.”
How could I ever know if I was a good person, a normal person, or someone royally, disgustingly messed up?
And then, from some ugly pit of my mind—that same place that cracks open in the seconds just before you slip into the safety of sleep, that brief glimpse of the black unconscious shielded from you by your waking mind—a thought creeps to the surface. I hate this body, the thought says. I hate it. I would burn this body alive.
We addicts don’t just lie; we believe, too. If you aim to deceive others, the first person you convince is yourself.
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.
At the time, I don’t understand why this boy put a spider in his mouth. I don’t yet know that, 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.
