Habit Creature 2: Obsessed
On OCD, by way of Instagram comments?
little author’s note: if you have ocd and find it hard to read about other people’s obsessions, this could be a good essay to skip:) if you find it helpful to relate, though, then please have a field day! much love <3
Obsessed is an eight-letter word.
Eight is my lucky number; I find everything connected; so, my sickness is my own concoction.
This is an essay about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, one that is far from perfect, and one that in, yes - an obsessive way, never could have been.
Obsessed is an eight-letter word, eight is my lucky number, I find everything connected, my sickness is my own concoction, please get used to my repetition, my mind tells me there is a “right” number of times to say something, and it is never just once.
This all is impossible to explain — maybe you will understand. My life happens in the place between coincidence and pattern; read: I am bound to cycles I’ve tried for years to escape — light switches, kitchen sinks, outside clothes, squeezing my eyes tight so the bad thoughts go away, guilt, responsibility, guilt, responsibility. I comment “obsessed” on your Instagram post; I turn around and count the space between my teeth.
It’s a precarious way of being: repeating and collecting evidence. I mean, then, I know what happens next; I thought it through a thousand times, I imagined every possible outcome, and in each one, I wasn’t safe (safety: hold onto this, this is where it all begins). I can predict the future, and in every single one I die. That’s to say I understand my life is temporal; I want to be protected in places like spas and dance studios and my house.
Obsessed is an eight-letter word, of course, eight: my lucky number, luck mocks me; eight, ate, eat, eaten. Our habits only fail us when we want them to — no, our habits only fail us when we let them, I’m a habit creature, craving safety safety safety safety safety. Five times means it worked. Three times means I’m lucky. None of this means anything, I know this but I won’t believe it. The most contradictory thing about compulsion is that it is arbitrary, certain, and inescapable; I’m sorry.
I’ve always thought I liked repetition as a tool in writing, it turned out I liked repetition as a tool in teaching my brain to cope. I liked repetition as a means of control, I came to believe that if I said something the right amount of times, it’d be true. It turns out, then, that I’m just making you read the same thing over and over so I feel I’ve done my due diligence. My hands are clean. I haven’t touched the outside world, I’ve only touched the words that you will read. Writing is like a rubber glove, it feels sticky to you, and there is dust on my hands from all this waiting waiting waiting to feel clean.
In my life, cleanliness became a synonym for safety, and safety became an empty word; I became obsessed with a state of being that is impossible to attain: the things that are meant to protect me most often keep me trapped in a cycle of my own fixation. It’s a cruel life, constructed by fear: of others, of self, of the world. It’s a beautiful life, one where sometimes the sun shines in the winter, my mom exists, and I still want to be here even though all I hear in my head day in and day out is that it’d be easier if I wasn’t. I explain this on the phone every time I’m re-prescribed medications I will soon after refuse to take: to be a habit creature is to learn only later in life that your mind can feed you things you don’t believe; your mind will feed you things you won’t believe; sometimes you have to give up on believing in order to stop your organs from eating themselves. I went three years in a row having thoughts I was going to jump into the road every day, and I didn’t learn until three years after that this was a symptom of my brain’s intrusive thoughts, not of my depression. My mind runs at a speed I can’t control — fixated on the tiniest details of my world (the way a door sounds when it closes, the way it feels to sit on a chair at a restaurant) — and I don’t know when to believe it or when to stop it or even how to do either of those things anyway.
I don’t write [live] pretty (see, those have become one and the same now), I write about slowly and precisely peeling my corneas off and using the sockets as pockets to keep hold of the things I don’t want to think about. Out of sight, in of mind, I write about standing alone at the bottom of a well screaming a note that sounds almost like a B flat. I write about flat chests and Asian pears. About my gums around the wrist of the hand that feeds me. I write about what I want you to know about me: I write about the epidermis, I skip the dermis, I squeeze forced metaphors below my subcutaneous tissue. I picture my skin falling off any time I touch something outside of my bedroom. I say the same things over and over and over and over and over. I do it all to protect myself. I’m selfish in that way. I’ve fit that line into every piece I’ve written lately. Obsessed is an eight-letter word, life is made of an average of 3,963 weeks, I write about shit I know nothing about, my mother’s epidural, I pass off two generations of pain as my own.
. . .
Slow down, Julia, they don’t want you to be perfect — they want you to be a stranger.
. . .
My therapist once wanted me to sit on a bus stop bench and think of everyone who sat there before me and everywhere they’d gone before that.
I wasn’t practicing empathy. I was practicing being able to go outside.
According to the American Psychiatric Association, common symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder are: fear of contamination, difficulty tolerating uncertainty, unwanted thoughts, an aversion to risk, a fixation on neutralizing and repetition and ritual, a need a need a need for symmetry.
When I was in sixth grade, I stood in my parents’ bathroom mirror and picked a mole off my face until it bled, until I thought I’d torn it out of my skin forever, and then it grew back bigger and I haven’t been symmetrical since, never was, and never would be.
My freckles became like my OCD: they tortured me until I couldn’t stand to look — I couldn’t look away, things can always be more even — except my face, which never learned the rules of my obsession, I can’t make compulsions like this any more palatable than they are private, puss-filled, and permanent.
I tore my skin apart for years trying to create reason on my body — trying to create reason for my body. The enemy to my obsession — I learned and am learning — is that not everything happens for a reason. Some things just happen. And I can’t wish, or knock, or peel that away.
My freckles are like my OCD, I say because I like to draw easy conclusions about things that have nothing to do with each other, nothing to do with me. Forks going back in the drawer before spoons means someone I don’t know will be in danger, flicking a light switch only once means the light is still on I just can’t see it (three times is better, but five is too many), and taking one wrong step is just as good as wishing my mom was dead.
Though all of these things became like breathing to me (the knocking, the checking, the ritualizing, the fear of my own mind), it took a long time for me to be diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I had no concept of a way of life that didn’t revolve around a fear of being followed at all times, an aching guilt associated with every decision, the worry that my parents’ lives depended on my every move.
This is all prickly. And shared too quickly (you don’t know me, do you?). And not neatly ordered — not written in a way that makes much sense, or even enough, or even any. I must keep going.
. . .
When it comes to my obsession, the only way to prevent the inevitable harm I fear I will cause — the only way to undo my secret, inherent evilness (the story of myself I have inherited from society and my disorder) — is to shrink my existence to fit inside very calculated lines, to touch as few elements of the world as possible, to never be touched. I wash my hands a lot, I clean my conscience even more.
OCD is, of course, as personal as it is scientific and societal.
My OCD, for example, is magnified by society —reflected, really— and I know this to be fact. I know this to be the curse of a system that lets twelve-year-old girls develop cognitive disorders because they’re afraid they’re going to get shot at school, and they know they have a better chance of saving themself by knocking on wood as many times as their little hands can than any politician or system or lock and key ever will. They believe that if they so much as think about the fact that this could happen to them any day or any time, they’ve invited that danger into their life. That’s what OCD does: it makes you think you have power that you don’t want. And in that way, it strips you of any sliver of control you ever did have. It teaches you to lose. I learned that safety is an antiquated word in a time where bad things happen every day, and good things happen too, but no one talks about that anymore. I learned that no matter how many times I wished nobody would ever be killed again, I could never save anyone from anything. People are dying constantly and consistently, and my brain tells me at every minute of every day that somehow it is all my fault. Finding out I had OCD was a way of finding out that the way I operate in the world is not a fluke, it’s my most reasonable means of survival.
A survival technique is an interesting way to describe a behavioral disorder. But for something that can be equal mixture family pattern and environmental influence, it makes some sense. OCD, it turns out, has not been conclusively located on any specific gene — yet (I started this essay in college, please forgive me if the information has changed). It seems to pass through families, frequently. An uncle of mine walked the same exact steps to work every day inescapably his whole career; my own mother spent four years sending me every article she read about a freak accident, overdose, or natural disaster to prove to herself that if I died tomorrow, it wouldn’t be because she didn’t try to save me. Isn’t that the danger or beauty of obsession? That you can never quite tell when it stems from love or control?
Mom wants me to be safe.
. . .
I can’t wrap myself in bubble wrap, it’s no way to go about walking through the world. And this I learned from crawling out of the plastic of my home. I can’t wrap myself in bubble wrap, it squeaks a little, and I’m still learning to be heard, still learning not to close my eyes to shield myself from the scariness and shininess of all of this.
Mom forgot to say have a good day and her mom got in a car accident that afternoon. Don’t forget to check beneath your car for knives. Mom asked for a daughter and got a lump in her throat. Mom got blamed, and I got better, and I will tell you this: it has been a fight to feel any sense of home in my body. And, of course, this means my OCD is some sort of metaphor for what it means to be a person who does not feel at home in this country, for most of my obsessions and compulsions stem from fears directly related to what I know about how women, Asian people, or random anyones at the grocery store are treated in a reality where safety is an unattainable privilege. This is sticky — two palms drenched in glue, left to dry, then peel off. Left with fingerprints.
. . .
My therapist once wanted me to sit on a bus stop bench and think of everyone who sat there before me and everywhere they’d gone before that. It felt like an impossible task.
Someday (this is a lie, or this is doubtful): I sit comfortably at restaurants and wait at train stations without spiraling and hug strangers with the reckless abandon of someone not terrified of touch. I lick the handles of shopping carts and I use the covers of books at the library as blankets and my fingerprints have gone and disappeared completely off my hands from all of the chairs and rails and outside world I have dragged my palms across.
Now: I rubbed lotion into my roommate’s back the other week; I’ve thought about it every day since.