THE SOLARIUM

What if I slide

into death this

blurry way?

I wouldn’t mind, but a part of me keeps thinking

about that line from Crime and Punishment:

“You have betrayed yourself for nothing.”

I loosened

the strings that held me together for too long

and now I’ve forgotten how

to bind myself and everything’s coming

apart,

unraveling,

and this isn’t a suicide note, it’s just something

I’m writing because I’m scared

I might die.

I’m scared, but there’s no comfort

in the thought that I might

live. 

–Untitled Poem written at 6 a.m. in my Notes app, 1/8/2024

OCD sucks.

That’s not exactly a profound insight. Even people who have no idea what OCD is could reach that conclusion.

Think about the kind of people who get labeled “OCD” in casual conversation: uptight, Type A germaphobes with color-coordinated everything, rigid schedules, and what seems like a chronic inability to chill out.

I don’t exactly fight the stereotypes.

I wear Ziplock bags over my hands when touching raw meat because I’m terrified of salmonella. One day, I had to prepare ground beef with a shallow cut on one finger, and fear of contamination brought me, hyperventilating, to the verge of tears.

I create weekly schedules for myself, breaking every day into 15-minute intervals.

Proofreading assignments that should take an hour end up taking me six. Why? Because even when I know the answer, I can’t fight the compulsion to check anyway, and then check, again, and again, and again.

When stressed, I fantasize about elaborate face-washing sessions, hours spent on my knees, scouring the baseboards in my room.

I tell myself things that I know don’t make any sense, grasping at brief snatches of illusory comfort.

If I replace the broken bulb in my Turkish lamp, I’ll be blessed with light and clarity.

If I pull my scarf a little tighter every time I’m upset, the invisible strings holding me together will be strong enough to keep me from falling apart.

People see the outward signs of OCD and fail to recognize the desperation that fuels them.

OCD sufferers don’t want to wash their face every hour on the hour just because. We’re trying to cleanse a deeply rooted sense of impurity. We are convinced if we touch raw meat, we’ll contract a horrible illness and die painfully. In a reality ruled by the irrational, fear is the only rational response.

Compulsions are our way of bargaining with the universe.

The diluted-by-pop-culture perspective most people have of OCD is harmful, not only because it misleads people who don’t have the condition about what it’s like, but because it makes it harder for people with OCD to recognize their condition and seek help.

My only familiarity with the phrase “intrusive thoughts” was the popular misuse of it on social media. Tumblr users and TikTokkers often refer to benign, if goofy, urges to bite crunchy-looking leaves or spontaneously dye their hair in this fashion.

When I began to be persistently tormented by gruesome images of my own suicide or acts of violence perpetrated against others, I had no frame of reference for it.

The closest I could come to understanding what was happening was to decide that I was having visions of the future. In these imagined ribbons of blood, I saw the red string of fate, tightening around me like a noose.

My self-destruction was inevitable. I was destined to hurt people.

In the absence of understanding, intrusive thoughts can feel a lot like prophecies.

After a breakdown that resulted in a mental health hospitalization in 2021, I was diagnosed with OCD. Understanding my condition hasn’t made it go away, but it makes it a little easier to fight back the awful sense of inevitability that haunted me in my worst moments.

In the past month, however, in the midst of one of the worst eating disorder relapses of my life¹, I’ve been seeing strings everywhere.

The red strings of fate caress my throat like a lover. They pull me by bleeding wrists like a marionette. Everywhere I turn, I see a crimson cat’s cradle blocking out blue skies. I suffocate in scarlet spiderwebs.

I know they’re just intrusive thoughts, but that doesn’t stop them from intruding.

I wish I could say something pithy about writing being the scissors that help me cut through the strings, but I’m not going to lie to you. OCD makes it damn hard to write sometimes. It makes it hard to do anything but obsess.

To tell the truth, even the phrase “cut through the strings” sends a thrill of fear through me. All I want to do is draw them around myself tighter and tighter, as if they’re the only thing holding me together.

Writing is perhaps the only thing I want more.

***

I don’t want to be overly ambitious with scheduling given my current circumstances, but I can make a couple tentative promises.

I’m going to get back into posting book reviews every Wednesday, so you can look forward to my review of The Lost Colony, my favorite Artemis Fowl book, on the 24th.

I hope to finish the script for my next YouTube video (check out the first one here if you haven’t already!) this week and post it on the first Sunday of February.

This video is tentatively titled Did John Green Deserve To Suffer? The Punitive Politics of the Internet (releasing 2/4/2024.)

John Green famously suffers from OCD as well, which gives the subject particular poignancy for me at the moment.

1. Something I’ve learned recently is that comorbid OCD tends to make the prognosis for anorexia nervosa (which is already pretty dismal) even worse. It makes sense to me. Starving is one of the strings that keep me from unraveling. ↩︎