THE HORROR OF HUMANITY: OCD - MAKING A MONSTER BY J. ASKEW

 
Stop saying you have OCD if you’re just a tidy person. It’s more than that. It’s not a joke or a way of showing off how organised you are in a job interview. Society needs to stop making light of this condition, because you never know who you’re talking to, who is suffering right in front of your eyes. You don’t know how much it hurts to fight OCD, to try to ignore those obsessions and compulsions, the ferociousness of the OCD monster pulling at your chest making you do things over and over, thinking the same dangerous thoughts over and over...
 
The different species of the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder monster

Variations of OCD are pretty much infinite, different symptoms all from the same obsessive compulsive monster. There are four main forms, called different names by various institutions. Most OCD sufferers have a combination of the above.

Contamination OCD: We all know the typically portrayed clean-freak of OCD, but it’s more than that. It’s an obsession over the feeling of disgust. In this form, your disgust becomes an unnatural trigger meaning you obsess over germs, worry about dirt, those tiny microscopic beings that exist on every surface we touch. It can often be illogical like fear of the sink but not the bath.

Intrusive thinking OCD: These are often dangerous thoughts of harm, violence, guilt. A common intrusive thought is pushing a pedestrian into oncoming traffic, or mowing down pedestrians as you drive. You don’t actually want to do this, but your OCD monster dictates your thoughts, makes you think you might, might become a killer, give in to a monster moment. You’ll never really do this, but your mind then dedicates a lot of energy to suppressing these urges because you believe that if you don’t obsess over it, you could do these dangerous things. There is a large variety of intrusive thoughts, including thoughts of sexual violence, murder, self-harm, but usually the intrusions reflect our core morals and beliefs. For instance, I’m a vegetarian. I obsess over accidentally eating meat, or killing an animal myself.

Patterned OCD: We as humans like to find patterns in everything, but when OCD takes the form of pattern watching, it causes intense traumatic discomfort. Patterns can take the form of arranging items on your desk, symmetry, rituals and counting. As a child, I counted to three over and over again, now I only do this when I’m anxious. As an adult, I have rituals that must be abided by, or the monster stirs inside my chest until everything is done correctly. Those with pattern watching symptoms of OCD often associate failure to perform these rituals with something bad happening, like the world ending, or being in a car crash.

Repetitive Checking OCD: In a nutshell, this form of OCD makes your monster doubt your own safety, causing you to repeatedly lock doors, check the stove is off, check your bank balance, weight etc. Often referred to as ‘checkers’, this behaviour comes from a belief that the resulting events, if you don’t check things, will be unimaginably terrible. For example, if you don’t check your front door at least three times, then someone will break in and kill your family during the night, and then, it will be all your fault.
 
My OCD

I sit in the GP’s surgery explaining to the doctor how my OCD is only mild. I glance at the time on my watch. I tell him it doesn’t get in the way of my life. I glance at the time on my watch. I tell him I’m fine with my little quirks. I glance at the time on my watch. He tells me to stop checking my watch. I start to count to three over and over and over again in my mind. He prescribes me Prozac.
 
My OCD falls into the categories of patterns and intrusive thoughts. I have a pattern to everything I do in life, if I fail to stick to that pattern, my OCD monster nags at me until I start and complete my sequence correctly. For example, the night-time routine is often a sore subject for OCD sufferers. I brush my teeth, use the loo, take my medications, apply lip balm, take one, and only one, sip of water, before I can even relax and sleep. If I fail to do it in that order, I won’t sleep until I get up and repeat the entire night-time process again, and correctly (according to my OCD monster). I also have touch ticks, as I call them. They involve my mind making me touch certain things in a certain order, or else something bad will happen. It’s not like I consciously know that the world will end if I don’t complete my touch patterns, but the feeling pulling at my chest begs to be sated, begs to be fed in the right order, the right way.

My intrusive thoughts are more dangerous. It’s things like worrying I’ll turn into a serial killer, or that I’ll run off with another woman on the day of my upcoming wedding. It’ll never happen, but my mind lives in this odd plain of existence where these fears are replayed over and over again like they’re happening to me in real time.

I’ve lost many jobs due to OCD. Before I truly understood my condition, I thought I was just not great at focusing, but really it was this external force barging its way in to take over my mind, make it run down a path I had travelled over and over and over again. A pattern I followed, a road so worn down in my mind that it seemed the only way to go. All other passages in my brain were deserted and overgrown, taking those paths required me to cut down the weeds and trees that grew over the route. My brain found it easier to revisit the well-worn paths constructed by obsessive thoughts and compulsions.

I developed anorexia due to OCD. I was a healthy weight in my mid-twenties, but decided to get fit, eat well and go to the gym. What came after was two years of therapy to save my life. I went from a healthy nine and a half stone, to seven stone. My ribs, my spine, my collar bones stuck out. My OCD had taken me too far, and insisted I feed the obsession of not eating. I couldn’t go to work, because my body wanted to reject food, wanted to stop me from leaving my London flat, because I couldn’t face the comments about how jealous other women were about my impressive weight loss. I developed a sensitive gag reflex which was triggered by just thinking about it, leading to hours in bathrooms, constant aching throat muscles from the purge. The CBT helped, cognitive behavioural therapy, and my therapist helped me to spot and avoid my triggers. Women are disproportionately affected by eating disorders, and I can only blame the society we live in, and the OCD monster who preys on my insecurities.
 
Past trauma also fuels my OCD. I hide when I hear a man shout, it echoes round my mind for hours after. I go over it. It makes my heart race. I get anxious in the workplace that my compulsions will affect my work. Every time my boss wants a chat, I assume it’s because my work is rubbish because my mind was intrusively stuck on something else. I have nightmares about dead kittens almost every night. All of these obsessions came from trauma. I have taken in many strays and rehomed around fifty kittens and cats. Two of these died, two out of the fifty I saved, yet my dreams are full of death, of helpless creatures calling out for help, of me not being able to save them. OCD finds a weakness in your mind, your conscience, and makes you go over it, over and over again for the rest of your life.
 
My OCD and writing

I get a lot of compliments about how prolific I am at churning out my horror sci-fi works. I write at least one short story a week, sometimes four or five, I’ve also written two novels and a novella in eighteen months, because my OCD monster tells me that if I stop, I won’t become the author I want to be. I won’t be able to have a little library with a desk where I write all day and take care of the animals I rescued. I won’t see my name on the shelves in Waterstones. I won’t be able to dedicate a work of passion to the incredible horror and sci-fi community I’ve found. These fears crawl inside my head, build up until they can form a beast; my OCD monster.
 
I recently spoke to Thriller writer, Nina Manning, about OCD. Nina is writing her third book, Influenced (working title), out in November 2020, which features a protagonist with OCD. We connected so she could learn how to best portray the obsessions and compulsions of her character whilst also using her degree in Psychology. Together we discussed the common misconceptions of OCD, and how it would affect a heroine’s narrative. More writers and creatives should take Nina’s example and speak to people who suffer with mental health conditions in order to cut through the stereotypes and really get to grips with the reality of mental health.
 
Taming the monster

Despite the struggles, the monster, the pull at my chest to feed it, I am grateful for my OCD. Not for the nightmares or the counting, but because it’s a form of self-punishment and as a new writer, my OCD fuels my determination to become a successful author. It keeps me thinking about my stories, keeps me in a regular rhythm with it. My doctor would disagree, but once I started to see my OCD as a superpower, it began to help me, rather than hinder me. I made friends with my monster. Sometimes the monster can be unhelpful, all consuming, but it’s a toddler, it needs to be taught, to be nurtured, to be moulded into a power that benefits my dreams, not my nightmares.

If you want to learn more about OCD, I’d suggest watching Netflix’s The Mind, Explained, a show that presents the facts of OCD in a way that helps people understand themselves much better and empowers those who have suffered with a variety of mental health conditions.
 

J. Askew is an LGBTQIA+ writer from the UK. She explores mental health, sexual identity, neurodiversity and disability through sci-fi and horror. She writes space operas, dystopian dramas and weird fiction, all steeped in plot twists and stand-out characters. She often shows weaknesses as strengths at the end of the world, and hopes that when the apocalypse comes, she isn’t one of the first to die.