Because I have no filter and can’t seem to keep anything to myself, I’ve been open in the past about living with anxiety and OCD. But also because I am a chronic smart alec, all my joking may have come across as “I hate getting dirty. I totally have, like, OCD or something.”
Just to be clear, I don’t have “like OCD,” where people think it’s necessary to apologize for liking to be clean. I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder where I have panic attacks when the garbage can is full, I avoid leaving the house because the world is so scary, my hands feel dirty after I touch doorknobs and I’ve spent literal hours on the computer bouncing between email accounts and my favorite news sites to see if anything new has been posted in the three seconds since I last refreshed.
When I was a teenager I had a really bad experience with medication, so in the years since then I’ve done everything possible to avoid it. I have a ton of coping mechanisms that help me deal, arranging my schedule to allow me as much time at home as I can without being a total shut in, lots of counted crosstitch to ease those counting urges, soothing behaviors that make no sense to a non-obsessive mind but ease my nerves, and skills learned in therapy that help me power through thinking I recognize as irrational.
But as I’ve written and written, this year has been a doozy. With each disappointment that came along I felt less and less on top of my emotions. Unwanted thoughts and fears would stay with me and were starting to affect how I lived. One of the reoccurring thoughts that I have been obsessing over is that I’m going to lose control of myself and hurt Atti. It’s not a desire to hurt him, it’s a script that plays in my head over and over again that some force I can’t control is going to come over me and make me hurt him. As I saw this happening over and over again in my head, I started to be so afraid of this I wanted to limit my interactions with him. Which got me to recognize that this disease had progressed past the point where I could handle it by myself.
Over the last month I’ve seen a psychologist and a psychiatrist and taken tests and borne my soul and I’ve started taking Zoloft. The first couple of days were super rough. I felt like I was on a bad speed trip. My skin felt like it was vibrating. Then I started to settle in as we slowly ramped up the dosage, but once I started taking the full amount my doctor prescribed I got horribly depressed.
When I’ve had friends who have gone off their meds and had a hard time, part of me always marveled at the stupidity. A diabetic doesn’t decide to see if they can get by without insulin, why would someone with a mental illness stop taking their medicine? I get it now. Oh boy do I ever. I always knew that getting the dosage right was an artform and can be difficult to get through, but now that I’ve lived it I understand the temptation to go off so much better. The physical symptoms were troubling, but that was nothing compared to what was going through my mind. I no longer feared losing control, now the script I was hearing incessantly was, “You’re not talented. You’re not special. You’ll never be as creative or successful as the people you admire, so give it all up. You’re not special.”
This is really unhelpful thinking for a writer. If I’m going to share my thoughts with the world, I have to think that somebody out there wants to read them. I wanted that sense of urgency that makes me unable to sit down to abate a little, but I didn’t want to sacrifice my whole sense of self-worth in order to get it.
I went back to my doctor and we scaled back the dosage and I’m doing much better. I’m through the worst of it now. I can’t say I’m quite feeling better yet, but I’m no longer feeling much worse. I’m completely unmotivated to do much of anything, I’ve been spending a whole lot of time watching old episodes of Kids In The Hall while I crosstitch on the couch, but I think that I’ll get better at that as I settle in. Another benefit of having friends walk this road before me is that I know I need to be patient and take care of myself, and one day I’ll look around and realize that I’m feeling pretty good.
For years I’ve joked, in my typical dark humor, that I don’t think of OCD as a disorder, I think of it as a superpower. Every time someone asks me how I do so much in a day that’s always the answer I give them – OCD. But I’ve finally crossed over to where it’s causing me more harm than it’s worth. I’ve spent hours of phone calls and late nights telling my depressed friends to treat their disease like the physical ailment it is, it’s time I take my own advice.