All the Way Down

 I've always had an issue with the term "mental illness."

To me, an illness is something that happens to you. An illness is merely an affliction that comes, and often goes, like a common cold or the chicken pox. Most illnesses walk through a door, cause problems as they are apt to do, and walk out, if you are lucky.

In my case, OCD has never walked through that door, and it certainly will never walk out. 

I know, my dissatisfaction with the word "illness" is insignificant, but in my experience, OCD is not something that happened to me. It is me. I have always been wired to have an obsessive brain, one that initially presented as a little girl who washed her hands too much and cried when one of her classmates threw up. 

I never knew any different. In fact, most of my OCD symptoms I never even knew were OCD symptoms until I read John Green's novel Turtles All the Way Down in high school, in which the protagonist suffers from OCD that presents symptoms eerily similar to my own. John Green himself has OCD, and wrote this character with thoughts that so much resembled mine that I broke down in tears reading it: reading about her, reading about myself. No one had ever before offered answers, or expressed a worldview so similar to my own. I felt what can only be described as relief, the kind you can only get from discovering that you aren't suffering alone.

I exhibit many, many symptoms of OCD, but the worst symptom of all is coincidentally one that I did not initially attribute to my OCD. It was not until John Green described, in detail, what he called "thought-spirals," that I realized that what I considered to be my own personal, internal hell was a symptom of OCD. 

These "thought-spirals" are persistent, often intrusive thoughts that don't let up until they tire themselves out, sometimes spanning days. They coil in my mind like a boa constrictor, circling it on itself and squeezing the rational parts of my brain until it gives in (I think John Green was onto something, describing it as a spiral. There is something cyclical about it). It's funny how mental suffering often falls to metaphors to communicate just how awful it is; and it still feels like it falls short.

And that's the thing with OCD, it is so irrational and hits out of nowhere. No one can see it happening and it is often impossible to describe. You are locked in your own mind, and you cannot get out despite your best efforts. 

Now, this is where I connect my blog post to something relevant. In "The Yellow Wallpaper," themes of mental illness, insanity, and loneliness closely resemble my experiences with OCD, and I can't help but recall my own life when reading the story. 

While the protagonist's loneliness causes her insanity, my OCD causes loneliness, in a sense. Because no one in my life has ever truly known what it is like to be inside my head. Well, except for John Green, if you qualify reading his book as him being "in my life." I think this is one of the reasons that, despite criticism against him, I will always have a fondness for him and his writing; because mental illness is so violently isolating, much like the experience of the protagonist of "The Yellow Wallpaper." I may not see women in wallpaper, but I see imminent danger in using a public restroom. Is one any more rational than the other? 

…depends on the restroom. 

Of course, time and experience have rendered my symptoms much more manageable than they were in early adolescence, but they're still there, and they always will be. 

The door never closes, perhaps because it was never opened. I will forever be trapped in my little room, clawing at the wallpaper... well. I don't really know where to go with that comparison. I like to think that my brain isn't so tacky as to have yellow wallpaper.

Blarney Castle, where, yes, I kissed the Blarney Stone (pre-pandemic), even though everyone told me I couldn't possibly do it, citing my severe OCD.  The "gift of eloquence" it promised was too good to pass up :)