Читать книгу Jog On - Bella Mackie - Страница 11

It’s important for me to start by saying that OCD is NOT ABOUT TIDYING YOUR CUPBOARDS. If I have to hear one more person airily tell me that they are really OCD about which direction their towels line up in, I will personally go over to their house and fold all their towels into horribly elaborate swan sculptures like they do in fancy hotels.

Despite the common misuse, OCD is a thoroughly nasty affliction, from which 1.2 people out of every 100 in the UK are thought to suffer.[25] It presents itself mainly in two ways: obsessions and compulsions. Both involve intrusive, unwelcome and terrifying thoughts. These are not simply the weird ideas your mind entertains at 2 a.m. on a Sunday night where you suddenly think about your parents doing it and hate your brain for traumatising you (though you do have my sympathy). No, these intrusive thoughts ‘stick’ in your head. One ordinary Tuesday afternoon you might suddenly imagine killing your child, or jumping in front of a train, but instead of chalking that odd idea up to a funny mind tic, you fixate on it. You are filled with panic and revulsion that you could think such a terrible thing – are you a murderer? Do you want to kill your baby? The terror consumes you, and the thought takes hold ever more firmly. In some instances, you ruminate, falling into ever more tangled thought patterns to try and ‘neutralise’ the thought. Try arguing with your exhausted and panicked brain about whether or not you might be a paedophile for twelve hours straight and then tell me if you think your need to line up shoes neatly is a bit OCD.

In Mad Girl, her memoir about mental illness, the writer Bryony Gordon describes how these obsessions took hold in painful detail. A fear of germs meant that ‘I was so scared of blood on my hands that I began to wash my hands as much as possible, the irony being that they soon began to crack and bleed.’[26] Later, she began to think she might have murdered someone. That’s how far the brain can travel with OCD. I once drove around a roundabout several times thinking I’d run someone over. There was nobody there. My brain still wasn’t convinced.

If you’re not falling down a mental rabbit hole to try and stop the horrible thoughts, then you might be acting out compulsions. This pattern might go something like this: you imagine your family dying in a horrible accident. You panic about this horrible thought, and desperately need to figure out a way to stop it. So your mind makes bargains with itself. Just turn that light switch on and off twenty-five times when you enter the room and they won’t die. But don’t forget! Oh you think you missed a go? Well, do it five extra times to be completely sure. And maybe add in a back-up – just to be sure. Wash your hands until they are raw and bleeding and cracked. Something still not feeling right? Do it again – if you fuck it up, your family might die. Aged nine, I worried that my mum might die while she was out if I didn’t turn off the light switch correctly. And I didn’t really know what correctly looked like, only that I’d ‘feel’ it when it was. That meant turning the light on and off for hours. Yes, it sounds stupid, but I was nine and thought my mum would die. That’s not something you can argue with rationally when you have OCD. That’s the illness. That’s the impossible mind maze that you find yourself in. There’s a good reason it’s called the doubting disease.

On a lighter note, I do appreciate a well-hung towel too.

For people who have OCD without physical compulsions, there is just a cycle of irrational thoughts which whirr around the brain. Maz (not his real name) is divorced, and his ex-wife has primary custody of their children. Maz told me that he’s engulfed by relentless thoughts that his kids have come to serious harm. ‘I have images of accidents, my kids crying, of close calls with cars or balconies or whatever the fuck.’ He imagines that they have died if he can’t get hold of his ex. He will start to physically panic, which just leads to more intrusive thoughts. Sometimes Maz will convince himself that the thoughts are premonitions, or have come true, and he’ll rush over to check on the children. Relief is always fleeting, as reassurance can only go so far (I used to spend hours googling OCD to try and calm myself down, but it worked briefly, if at all, and would actually prompt new fears, because I was giving them credence). Even without compulsions, you are always trying to counterbalance the terrible thoughts, and this can cause exhaustion and immense distress. Maz feels like he becomes a shell of himself when he’s in the grip of obsessive thoughts: ‘I can barely express myself or breathe, the morning light and air hurts, and I become convinced nothing will end well.’

I know this distress. Sometimes the ruminations get so bad that your mind starts skipping – like an old vinyl player getting stuck. You’re so mentally exhausted that you start repeating words, phrases and sayings in your mind. You can’t work your way out of the loop, and you feel hopeless. This, in turn, provokes fear, and then physical symptoms, and then back to obsessive thoughts. Do I sound overdramatic? I assure you, if anything, I’m downplaying it slightly for space reasons.