Meltdown

This is a terribly hard entry to write in a blog and I am doing it in the main as a cathartic exercise. I want to describe what happened to me late last year when I went into meltdown with my OCD and depression and everything started to collapse around me.

In hindsight, I had been bubbling along on a rolling simmer for some time, certainly several months and probably more like 3 or 4 years. I started to feel ill with what I thought was a stomach bug as I couldn't eat without getting pains and couldn't digest anything properly so I took some time off work to recuperate, but the stomach was getting no better. In the end, I was off for the full week and by the next Monday I returned but I still felt odd and deep down I was starting to realise something was wrong. As I now recall, the OCD had been flaring up more and more, on occasion I found myself unable to leave at the end of my shift - staring at my phone to check it was logged out, I couldn't make myself believe I had turned it off. I would check my drawer was locked again and again and by the time I returned, I was starting to injure my hand in pulling at the locked drawer in fervent checking. Leaving the house in the morning was becoming more and more difficult, strange new routines were starting to imbed themselves in my morning checks for locked doors and on several occasions recent to this I had got to the car and onto the road only to stop, return home and repeat the checks.

Worse was to come in that week. I found that even night was no respite as I found it impossible to swtich off at the end of the day. I couldn't get to sleep and was reliving events from the recent and distant past over and over. I believe it is similar to the PTSD experience, the flashbacks were not just 'thinking' about events or situations, the taste and feeling of them was as raw as the event themselves - like a home video of your past as your reality with no way of switching it off. The noise, the fear, the confusion and the tiredness were overwhelming and I was desperate for some peace from it. The dam burst on the Thursday. I went to set out earlier than normal, much earlier and yet spent perhaps 25 minutes unable to settle upon a routine of checking the door was locked that would allow me to go. I was angry, afraid and tired and I pulled the door handle so hard I thought I had broken my hand on it. Then I burst into tears. Not frustrated tears or angry tears but a total and uncontrollable sobbing, tears of complete and crushing defeat.

I managed to reach the car and drive to work. The journey seemed to take forever and the whole way I was panicked inside, I thought I was losing my mind, losing myself. I was wracked with waves of shame and revulsion of myself, the depression had such a hold now that even thinking of loved ones, of family led me to more distraught as I thought they would be ashamed of my insanity (as I saw it). There were several episodes of tears at work and I was, by now, totally out of my own control and at the mercy of the OCD and the depression. I booked an appointment at the GPs and I really don't remember much about going there other than the constant tears, the fear and the growing sense of losing myself.

My collpase into depression was complete at the surgery - I was barely able to get the words out, the walls were closing in around me I was literally terrified that I would never regain control of my own mind, it felt as if I was being choked, strangled. That was the lowest point, that afternoon and evening - so tired I could barely focus, so frightened I didn't want to do anything, so locked into patterns I couldn't enjoy, couldn't taste, couldn't really think, petrified of letting anyone in as I couldn't bear them to see me like that and yet completely and utterly alone whilst the world screeched in my ear in total discord.

This really doesn't describe it properly to be honest, but it is a start. it has been an awfully long road back, and an adjustment to accept that my OCD is a disability like any other disability and that my focus is not 'curing' it but learning to adapt and to accept and to cope with it without damaging the rest of me, without letting the depression back in. Mental disability really is misunderstood and it wasn't until I sought help for mine that I realised the difficulty describing, dealing with and making people understand a disability with no scars or outer markings.

It does feel like I have turned a corner though. It is a good feeling.