Unfortuantely, the doctor has signed me off work again due to a renewed bout of my OCD flaring up. It is incredibly frustrating to feel like some really good progress is being made only to find myself locked into another cycle of pressure and reaction whilst the OCD fires up on all cylinders and catches me at my weakest.
It's not that I can't beat it, I know I can. No, scratch that, I know I will. It's not the fight at all, it is the knowledge that this impacts so much on all the other boxes that make up my life. I find myself wondering if the way to beat it longer term is not to feed it - take myself out of situations that might precipitate a decline. But why should I?! Am I really reaching a position where I write off types of career as inappropriate to my condition? Is that where it all leads - postponing or cancelling my aspirations for the good of the outcome of the fight? It seems wrong to be thinking this way, and yet... how to put it? And yet I cannot be someone I am not, anymore than the slowest can run the fastet or the youngest have the most memories. Perhaps winning the war long term means thinking laterally - make a strength of weakness, earn my crust a different way. Clearly I cannot go on the way I am.
Then there is the effect of this on my life goals and hopes. This gets in the way, forms a giant roadblock I can't detour around. Fighting this illness full time only serves to make everything else seem unimportant and bleak. There are times I feel terribly lonely, and I have realised (as I have said here before) that I want to share my little life with someone, but how can I possibly hope to do that when all my energies are focussed on this? More to the point, once I beat this outbreak, I meet someone and two weeks in the wheels come off again. I am already feeling guilty about letting someone down that I haven't even met yet. This is what it does to you, it yanks away the certainties you rely on, it weakens everything you are and forces you to spend your energy 'winning'.
I just wonder at the cost of victory. I don't want this being my everything, there are other fights I want to fight. I want to be giving of my energy to someone really special to me and I want my hopes to be for them, and not just my own medicine. I want my shoulder to be there for my family and friends, for everyone that I love. I want the decks cleared and the diary empty ready to be filled with someone who makes my jaw drop just by her smile. I want all these things, all these normal, credible, reasonable and laudable things. Yet they are on hiatus, once again, as I wearily go into battle one more time.
OCD is wicked. OCD stands no chance against me, but it is the price of my victory that makes me hate it the most. It is robbing me of time, and energy, and of someone's adorable smile.
Showing posts with label OCD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OCD. Show all posts
Monday, 9 May 2011
Sunday, 9 January 2011
Through the decades
I might as well say, before I start, today's entry isn't going to be light reading. I have hit the buffers somewhat, as I often do just after Christmas. Maybe its the inevitable comedown after the highs of the festive season, but it is what it is, and I feel how I feel.
I've been watching Every Number One Of The Eighties on MTV classic, and it made me wistful for that decade, as if transporting myself there would be the solution to all of life's problems - a decade when my memory would have it that I had no responsibilities (or responsibility) and everything was relaxed and fun. Of course, being who I am, and having the reflective nature I do, I couldn't let it lie there, and now find myself disecting the past and reflecting that it wasn't all I crack it up to be.
I look at things through the prism of what I shall charitably call 'my mental issues'. In truth, they are not some recent phenomenon (indeed I don't think I ever thought they were) - but of course, back there in the past they had no name. I was just Dave, not understanding why my mind worked the way it did.
I've spent a great deal of my life trying to hide parts of myself away. Always terrified of being questioned or probed about why I am doing something or what I feel the need to say. As a teenager it is not east to explain why you have to walk the same way to a location, and it was torture trying to undertake one of my little rituals without being seen and mocked. Looking back I cannot begin to really recall how much stress I was under, but there was always that numb sensation at the back of the mind that the floodgates will not hold out forever, at some point the world will burst into my bubble and I would be lost in it, unable to cope amidst the noise and the chaos when all I ever wanted then was peace and order. That's the thing with OCD, everything needs to be in order, just so. I used to physically recoil at, for example, a car backfiring. I was so wound into stress at coping that I was a ticking timebomb. It amazes me to this day that I held out so long before everything disintegrated.
As a young adult in the late eighties and through the nineties, again I suppose life was not as rosy as daydreaming about it suggests. Perhaps this was when I was first truly aware that everything was wrong. I've never been good at sharing pain, especially so to people I feel closest to. How do you tell someone you love that everything is wrong? How can you face up to them when you are blue and explain that it is not them, it really is not them, but that you cannot be anything but blue? Then of course I was still hiding rituals away to get me through. I must have appeared so distant at times as I tried to cope with it all in secret.
I tried different ways around the problems back then. Drink was one way, something I relied on very heavily until I was about 30. Drink suppressed the immediate feelings, and offered temporary reprieve, as well as being a handy cover for my occasionally bizarre behaviour, but of course it is a depressant itself and only served to add to the spiral. It also has the side effect of making you act like an arse to the people you love the most sometimes. If that's you, just know that I am sorry now and I was back then too. It wasn't jsut drink though, I detested myself, or rather, I detested being ill and being permanently stressed and I tried so many ways to numb the feelings. There were so many ways I tried to be different so that I was no longer ashamed of being different, so that 'different' became my norm. What do you do when you cannot share the whirlwind inside? I actually feel tense at this moment thinking about it. How the breakdown of 2009 was the culmnation of (literally) decades of denial, hiding, transferral and stress.
Of course now the truth is out, my family and friends know I have been unwell, and I know the signs to look out for. However, still, in the back of my mind I know how hard it is to share the feelings, the rawness of OCD and Depression and I feel guilty at the thought of burdening anyone else with it. It's lonely, and the weird thing is, loneliness is the thing I am most scared of now. I don't want to be alone. So I have to find a way of sharing and it not causing consternation, or we are headed back to square one and I've been there before. It's not somewhere I'd recommend to anyone.
I've been watching Every Number One Of The Eighties on MTV classic, and it made me wistful for that decade, as if transporting myself there would be the solution to all of life's problems - a decade when my memory would have it that I had no responsibilities (or responsibility) and everything was relaxed and fun. Of course, being who I am, and having the reflective nature I do, I couldn't let it lie there, and now find myself disecting the past and reflecting that it wasn't all I crack it up to be.
I look at things through the prism of what I shall charitably call 'my mental issues'. In truth, they are not some recent phenomenon (indeed I don't think I ever thought they were) - but of course, back there in the past they had no name. I was just Dave, not understanding why my mind worked the way it did.
I've spent a great deal of my life trying to hide parts of myself away. Always terrified of being questioned or probed about why I am doing something or what I feel the need to say. As a teenager it is not east to explain why you have to walk the same way to a location, and it was torture trying to undertake one of my little rituals without being seen and mocked. Looking back I cannot begin to really recall how much stress I was under, but there was always that numb sensation at the back of the mind that the floodgates will not hold out forever, at some point the world will burst into my bubble and I would be lost in it, unable to cope amidst the noise and the chaos when all I ever wanted then was peace and order. That's the thing with OCD, everything needs to be in order, just so. I used to physically recoil at, for example, a car backfiring. I was so wound into stress at coping that I was a ticking timebomb. It amazes me to this day that I held out so long before everything disintegrated.
As a young adult in the late eighties and through the nineties, again I suppose life was not as rosy as daydreaming about it suggests. Perhaps this was when I was first truly aware that everything was wrong. I've never been good at sharing pain, especially so to people I feel closest to. How do you tell someone you love that everything is wrong? How can you face up to them when you are blue and explain that it is not them, it really is not them, but that you cannot be anything but blue? Then of course I was still hiding rituals away to get me through. I must have appeared so distant at times as I tried to cope with it all in secret.
I tried different ways around the problems back then. Drink was one way, something I relied on very heavily until I was about 30. Drink suppressed the immediate feelings, and offered temporary reprieve, as well as being a handy cover for my occasionally bizarre behaviour, but of course it is a depressant itself and only served to add to the spiral. It also has the side effect of making you act like an arse to the people you love the most sometimes. If that's you, just know that I am sorry now and I was back then too. It wasn't jsut drink though, I detested myself, or rather, I detested being ill and being permanently stressed and I tried so many ways to numb the feelings. There were so many ways I tried to be different so that I was no longer ashamed of being different, so that 'different' became my norm. What do you do when you cannot share the whirlwind inside? I actually feel tense at this moment thinking about it. How the breakdown of 2009 was the culmnation of (literally) decades of denial, hiding, transferral and stress.
Of course now the truth is out, my family and friends know I have been unwell, and I know the signs to look out for. However, still, in the back of my mind I know how hard it is to share the feelings, the rawness of OCD and Depression and I feel guilty at the thought of burdening anyone else with it. It's lonely, and the weird thing is, loneliness is the thing I am most scared of now. I don't want to be alone. So I have to find a way of sharing and it not causing consternation, or we are headed back to square one and I've been there before. It's not somewhere I'd recommend to anyone.
Friday, 17 December 2010
A good airing
I had intended to write the short story today that I have mentioned in a previous post (the excellent idea), however as on so many other days, time has slipped through my fingers and I have found myself completely preoccupied with other thoughts.
'Preoccupied with other thoughts' is, as you might guess reading my earlier entries, my euphemism for depression. Depression is a rotten, sneaky and thoroughly wicked disease. I hate it as a whole, I loathe every aspect of it, but one of the things that most angers and upsets me is the way depression makes me feel, the havoc it wreaks on my emotions.
Sometimes I can stand looking at a winter wonderland and feel snowflakes gently land on my skin and slowly melt and I, in turn, will melt at the sheer beauty of the world even in the depths of winter; at how the snowy landscape, in it's own way, is every bit as beautiful as a cornfield playfully kissed by summer breezes on a sun-drenched July afternoon. Then there are depression days and I look at the same scenery and there is nothing, nothing but a yawning chasm where joy should be and a lingering and inescapable feeling of sadness for myself that I cannot feel as I should feel.
The sadness that depression imparts is not like the feelings one gets at the end of a tear-jerker, or watching the news show the world finding another thousand ways to let itself down. Depression sadness is destructive and long-lasting (indeed in the depths of it, it feels perennial), it absorbs anything positive around it and turns it into emptiness. When I am like this, I yearn to feel something, anything, to break the hold sadness has over me, but everything that would normally work will not - it either has no effect, or depression turns it negative, I become even sadder that something I love has not made me better, hasn't seen off the demons.
Then there is the guilt, the awful self-loathing and guilt that I cannot respond appropriately to loved ones or friends. Guilt that I don't speak up or cry for help and guilt when I do, burdening a happy spirit with my decline. This is all depression's doing too, a further twist of the knife and a tightening of it's hold on me. An ever-decreasing circle of sadness and guilt, a maelstrom in the water of life dragging me down and down and down. I would find it hard, perhaps impossible, to describe the blackness of the furthest depths or the bleakness of being there.
Why am I writing about this today? Last night I went out for Christmas dinner with my friends. It was a fabulous night, I thoroughly enjoyed it and it is always wonderful to have reason to remember why you love the friends you love. At one point I talked, very briefly, about being ill this year and I caught my hand shaking. My hand has never been a shaker, not even when I was a heavy drinker in my youth. It scared me a little to be honest, especially as I had left my medication at home and knew I had missed taking it and would not take any until today. In and of itself neither I suppose are terribly dramatic, but the seed of doubt had been planted in my head, and that is all depression needs sometimes.
Today I have been fretting about it, thinking about it, obsessing over it. I have already gone through a cycle of terrible guilt. I had a great night last night with 5 wonderful people and I hate that I have spent today musing on my illness. I hate the amount of medication I take and I hate how long I have been on it and will remain on it. Of course, when Bagpuss goes to sleep, all his friends go to sleep too, and Professor Yaffle, my OCD, has taken the oppurtunity to seize on my weakened resolve and state and I have found myself stuck in some weird little routines today. All part of the spiral.
I know it, I name it, I can write about it and I can hold on to yesterday and tomorrow as places where it has no hold. Right now though, in this moment, here, its not where I wanted to be today. It never is.
'Preoccupied with other thoughts' is, as you might guess reading my earlier entries, my euphemism for depression. Depression is a rotten, sneaky and thoroughly wicked disease. I hate it as a whole, I loathe every aspect of it, but one of the things that most angers and upsets me is the way depression makes me feel, the havoc it wreaks on my emotions.
Sometimes I can stand looking at a winter wonderland and feel snowflakes gently land on my skin and slowly melt and I, in turn, will melt at the sheer beauty of the world even in the depths of winter; at how the snowy landscape, in it's own way, is every bit as beautiful as a cornfield playfully kissed by summer breezes on a sun-drenched July afternoon. Then there are depression days and I look at the same scenery and there is nothing, nothing but a yawning chasm where joy should be and a lingering and inescapable feeling of sadness for myself that I cannot feel as I should feel.
The sadness that depression imparts is not like the feelings one gets at the end of a tear-jerker, or watching the news show the world finding another thousand ways to let itself down. Depression sadness is destructive and long-lasting (indeed in the depths of it, it feels perennial), it absorbs anything positive around it and turns it into emptiness. When I am like this, I yearn to feel something, anything, to break the hold sadness has over me, but everything that would normally work will not - it either has no effect, or depression turns it negative, I become even sadder that something I love has not made me better, hasn't seen off the demons.
Then there is the guilt, the awful self-loathing and guilt that I cannot respond appropriately to loved ones or friends. Guilt that I don't speak up or cry for help and guilt when I do, burdening a happy spirit with my decline. This is all depression's doing too, a further twist of the knife and a tightening of it's hold on me. An ever-decreasing circle of sadness and guilt, a maelstrom in the water of life dragging me down and down and down. I would find it hard, perhaps impossible, to describe the blackness of the furthest depths or the bleakness of being there.
Why am I writing about this today? Last night I went out for Christmas dinner with my friends. It was a fabulous night, I thoroughly enjoyed it and it is always wonderful to have reason to remember why you love the friends you love. At one point I talked, very briefly, about being ill this year and I caught my hand shaking. My hand has never been a shaker, not even when I was a heavy drinker in my youth. It scared me a little to be honest, especially as I had left my medication at home and knew I had missed taking it and would not take any until today. In and of itself neither I suppose are terribly dramatic, but the seed of doubt had been planted in my head, and that is all depression needs sometimes.
Today I have been fretting about it, thinking about it, obsessing over it. I have already gone through a cycle of terrible guilt. I had a great night last night with 5 wonderful people and I hate that I have spent today musing on my illness. I hate the amount of medication I take and I hate how long I have been on it and will remain on it. Of course, when Bagpuss goes to sleep, all his friends go to sleep too, and Professor Yaffle, my OCD, has taken the oppurtunity to seize on my weakened resolve and state and I have found myself stuck in some weird little routines today. All part of the spiral.
I know it, I name it, I can write about it and I can hold on to yesterday and tomorrow as places where it has no hold. Right now though, in this moment, here, its not where I wanted to be today. It never is.
Monday, 22 November 2010
Fear
Sometimes you have too much time to think. I think I have had too much time to think lately because I have been thinking about fear. Fear is very sneaky in that it uses being thought about as a way to get a toehold and start that niggling, nurdling and burrowing it does into the subconcious and suddenly from thinking about fear, I am afraid.
I've never been scared of things, or people. I have always been most scared of myself, of what I am or what I might be, of the things I could do, or would do or even sometimes will do. Fear of myself is my nemesis, it is the antithesis of everything in me that smiles, and makes those around me smile, it is selfish and introverted and deceptive. It feeds off every perceived weakness and provokes weaknesses that were never there before. Fear is, quite literally, the thing that has driven me to just about every poor choice I have made, it is the source of my mistakes and many of my regrets.
Yesterday I wasn't afraid, and the world was as it always is for me; soft, slow moving, friendly and entertaining. However, somewhere between falling asleep last night and typing this blog entry this evening, fear got in and started causing mayhem. Every thought I am having as I write these lines, or in moments of contemplation between paragraphs, it is there, just off to the right, just out of eyeshot but brooding, laughing and plotting. I can't blank it or ignore it, all I can do is beat it, send it away, not be scared any more. That is the rub, however, what do you do to beat fear? Today's answer might not be the same as yesterday's, or last month's.
For all the time it sits there, wallowing in it's own insipidness, it will cheapen everything I am. All my plans will be worthless or doomed to failure, all choices will be fraught with danger, every decision will be the wrong one - even when it is the right one. ESPECIALLY when it is the right one. I find it terribly difficult to put into words what it is to be scared, I am trying here, but it isn't easy. Giving fear physicality and a location at least helps me to start to understand a little better and I will find the right response. I will find, at some point, what set fear running and I will deal with it, dissipating the presence off to my right and setting me back on my merry way. The usual Dave with the usual jokes and the usual smile.
Right now, however, I am scared and I don't know why, and I hate feeling like this.
I've never been scared of things, or people. I have always been most scared of myself, of what I am or what I might be, of the things I could do, or would do or even sometimes will do. Fear of myself is my nemesis, it is the antithesis of everything in me that smiles, and makes those around me smile, it is selfish and introverted and deceptive. It feeds off every perceived weakness and provokes weaknesses that were never there before. Fear is, quite literally, the thing that has driven me to just about every poor choice I have made, it is the source of my mistakes and many of my regrets.
Yesterday I wasn't afraid, and the world was as it always is for me; soft, slow moving, friendly and entertaining. However, somewhere between falling asleep last night and typing this blog entry this evening, fear got in and started causing mayhem. Every thought I am having as I write these lines, or in moments of contemplation between paragraphs, it is there, just off to the right, just out of eyeshot but brooding, laughing and plotting. I can't blank it or ignore it, all I can do is beat it, send it away, not be scared any more. That is the rub, however, what do you do to beat fear? Today's answer might not be the same as yesterday's, or last month's.
For all the time it sits there, wallowing in it's own insipidness, it will cheapen everything I am. All my plans will be worthless or doomed to failure, all choices will be fraught with danger, every decision will be the wrong one - even when it is the right one. ESPECIALLY when it is the right one. I find it terribly difficult to put into words what it is to be scared, I am trying here, but it isn't easy. Giving fear physicality and a location at least helps me to start to understand a little better and I will find the right response. I will find, at some point, what set fear running and I will deal with it, dissipating the presence off to my right and setting me back on my merry way. The usual Dave with the usual jokes and the usual smile.
Right now, however, I am scared and I don't know why, and I hate feeling like this.
Thursday, 21 October 2010
And the flipside is unchecked mania
Thought it was time for another piece all about what is is to be me. The deconstruction of a legend, or something similar. I have written previously on my blog about the OCD I suffer from and the depression it has caused over the years. On the other side of depression though, and just as troublesome, is what I call mania.
Mania is the emotional opposite of depression, but they are definitely siblings. It is the state I find myself in when the emotion is pulsating and forcing its way out of me, everything needs urgent evacuation or it will fry me from the inside. There are times when I just have to react, dramatically, to events around me - whether that be to shout at the TV news or to laugh outwardly, loudly and embarassingly at a sub-par joke, as if the laughter were the vocalisation of anger at the paucity of the material.
It is not, however, just the big and outward gestures and signs of mania that are troublesome to me. Mania is the little man with the stick who pokes and pokes and won't let up at every opportunity. The force that makes me go that little bit too far, further than my comfort zone in what I say or do. I find myself telling lurid tales just that little bit too lurid for polite company, I am telling tales to shock and I know it. It makes me crave the reaction, sate myself with other's raised eyebrows or disapproving looks. Mania gets off on disapproval, mania is typing these words right now.
I want people to be shocked, I want them to recoil, I want the damn mania (and just who do you think made me type that? poke, bloody poke). It feeds the depression, it is fuel, it is a diaretic for the soul, the two of them are so in cahoots, it is surprising I have ever managed to present a sober and level headed front. At least, that is how it feels when I am manic. Of course it subsides and of course I then find my level.
Why write about it? Well, the mania has coloured parts of my life just as much as the OCD and the depressive episodes have. Every time I have fallen in love I have committed myself to it (at least to my internal satisfaction) completely, the buzz from it is narcotic and I feel it's withdrawal for a long time after the details of her face have faded from memory. In that sense it is helpful - when I get withdrawal pangs when someone goes away, I am normally already starting to fall. Mania is what made Friday and Saturday big nights out in the nineties - hang it all out there and let the weekend blow your mind. It felt like the only option - be out of control and let the emotions rip their moorings.
Mania makes me write poems that illiterate - lest the words miss out on a welcoming world of wonder. Every word I write or say has a purpose when I am manic - it is crystal clarity to depression's haze. This whole piece, by the way, was conceived in a flash on the A47 - one moment's complete overreaction to undimmed headlights and I was writing the why all the way home in my head.
When I am depressed, I don't know how to know myself, when I am manic I HAVE to know myself - a different type of raw necessity - evacuate those emotions and ride the wake behind them waiting until it all subsides into the crushing lows in the immediate aftermath. There's truth, there's truth without reason and there's reason without truth, and I spend my life juggling all three.
I am Dave, and I am manic. And this is an evacuation in words.
Mania is the emotional opposite of depression, but they are definitely siblings. It is the state I find myself in when the emotion is pulsating and forcing its way out of me, everything needs urgent evacuation or it will fry me from the inside. There are times when I just have to react, dramatically, to events around me - whether that be to shout at the TV news or to laugh outwardly, loudly and embarassingly at a sub-par joke, as if the laughter were the vocalisation of anger at the paucity of the material.
It is not, however, just the big and outward gestures and signs of mania that are troublesome to me. Mania is the little man with the stick who pokes and pokes and won't let up at every opportunity. The force that makes me go that little bit too far, further than my comfort zone in what I say or do. I find myself telling lurid tales just that little bit too lurid for polite company, I am telling tales to shock and I know it. It makes me crave the reaction, sate myself with other's raised eyebrows or disapproving looks. Mania gets off on disapproval, mania is typing these words right now.
I want people to be shocked, I want them to recoil, I want the damn mania (and just who do you think made me type that? poke, bloody poke). It feeds the depression, it is fuel, it is a diaretic for the soul, the two of them are so in cahoots, it is surprising I have ever managed to present a sober and level headed front. At least, that is how it feels when I am manic. Of course it subsides and of course I then find my level.
Why write about it? Well, the mania has coloured parts of my life just as much as the OCD and the depressive episodes have. Every time I have fallen in love I have committed myself to it (at least to my internal satisfaction) completely, the buzz from it is narcotic and I feel it's withdrawal for a long time after the details of her face have faded from memory. In that sense it is helpful - when I get withdrawal pangs when someone goes away, I am normally already starting to fall. Mania is what made Friday and Saturday big nights out in the nineties - hang it all out there and let the weekend blow your mind. It felt like the only option - be out of control and let the emotions rip their moorings.
Mania makes me write poems that illiterate - lest the words miss out on a welcoming world of wonder. Every word I write or say has a purpose when I am manic - it is crystal clarity to depression's haze. This whole piece, by the way, was conceived in a flash on the A47 - one moment's complete overreaction to undimmed headlights and I was writing the why all the way home in my head.
When I am depressed, I don't know how to know myself, when I am manic I HAVE to know myself - a different type of raw necessity - evacuate those emotions and ride the wake behind them waiting until it all subsides into the crushing lows in the immediate aftermath. There's truth, there's truth without reason and there's reason without truth, and I spend my life juggling all three.
I am Dave, and I am manic. And this is an evacuation in words.
Thursday, 14 October 2010
Monochrome World
One thing you might notice if you stop by my blog regularly is that I try not to take life too seriously. I've always used humour and I'll be very honest here, it is a useful shield. That is what makes the contrast with my illness and depression so stark and painful.
Humour is levity and light and I can find little wrong with the world when I am laughing with it, or at it. However, when a bout of depression strikes, it is like a shadow descends over everything and emotion is drawn out of the world as if it were a poison. It is worse than sadness, it is the absence of sadness or happiness, an empty yearning for some sort of emotional response, but the emotion will not come. I have sat and stared blankly at the TV screen when a comedy I would always enjoy is showing, but even classic gags that would have me rolling on normal days wash over me without registering. My face will contort into a phantasm of a grin, a cruel mockery of real enjoyment. Or I will catch something sad on the news, or a moving film and watch dispassionately. At times I have felt a tear run down my face but inside I have no feeling of it - it is merely condensation.
People seem unfamiliar and drab as I desperately scramble to build a cocoon to hide in, they have no impact and are empty shells, vessels drained of all content. A collection of words and movements I long to hide from. Open the window and everything is coming at me through a muffler, the clarity of individual sounds rolled into a constant dull hum, even noise cannot escape the bleakness, it is being strangled. My surroundings are the same, but the colour and vibrancy have fled, leached out by the depression, a pencil sketch of what was a magnificent watercolour.
That is how it is, day after day, living a film noir, forcing myself to do a bad impression of emotional investment into conversations and all the time feeling hollowed out, ruinous. The irony is, I can't even get angry about it as emotions are stuck on the event horizon, inaccessible. In the world but not of it, distant and utterly alone. Then it passes, and I wake one morning as if the previous days hadn't happened and the colour, sound and laughter flood back with the tears.
So, that's really why I use humour - self-diagnosis. If I can laugh, then I'm OK for today at least. That's something I guess.
Humour is levity and light and I can find little wrong with the world when I am laughing with it, or at it. However, when a bout of depression strikes, it is like a shadow descends over everything and emotion is drawn out of the world as if it were a poison. It is worse than sadness, it is the absence of sadness or happiness, an empty yearning for some sort of emotional response, but the emotion will not come. I have sat and stared blankly at the TV screen when a comedy I would always enjoy is showing, but even classic gags that would have me rolling on normal days wash over me without registering. My face will contort into a phantasm of a grin, a cruel mockery of real enjoyment. Or I will catch something sad on the news, or a moving film and watch dispassionately. At times I have felt a tear run down my face but inside I have no feeling of it - it is merely condensation.
People seem unfamiliar and drab as I desperately scramble to build a cocoon to hide in, they have no impact and are empty shells, vessels drained of all content. A collection of words and movements I long to hide from. Open the window and everything is coming at me through a muffler, the clarity of individual sounds rolled into a constant dull hum, even noise cannot escape the bleakness, it is being strangled. My surroundings are the same, but the colour and vibrancy have fled, leached out by the depression, a pencil sketch of what was a magnificent watercolour.
That is how it is, day after day, living a film noir, forcing myself to do a bad impression of emotional investment into conversations and all the time feeling hollowed out, ruinous. The irony is, I can't even get angry about it as emotions are stuck on the event horizon, inaccessible. In the world but not of it, distant and utterly alone. Then it passes, and I wake one morning as if the previous days hadn't happened and the colour, sound and laughter flood back with the tears.
So, that's really why I use humour - self-diagnosis. If I can laugh, then I'm OK for today at least. That's something I guess.
Thursday, 19 August 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, 18 July 2010
Compulsion
This is my first posting on Blogger so an introduction is in order for anyone who strays this way. I'm Dave, I am 38 and I live in Norfolk in the kingdom of East Anglia, now subsumed into the UK. I also suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, so if you see this post 8 times in 4 colours, that's why.
Sorry, that was just a little OCD joke. I also have a macabre sense of humour. Just as well given how abrasive OCD can be on your day to day activity. I know I don't need to check the door is locked over and over again, the cats playing in my front garden know it, the birds singing in the trees know it and the curious neighbour walking their dog who stops to watch the strange man checking his door knows it. Doesn't alter for a moment the compulsion and the fact of doing it.
And there is the rub. It's getting 'caught' that hurts. It is being seen. It is having to justify your actions which sit squarely in the unjustifiable camp from the viewer's standpoint. It is the disappointment in myself, the shame and horror of being abnormal, unusual, watched. Suddenly you are an outsider in your own front yard, a stranger to those that know you. The guilt and the shame wash over and the compulsion feeds off the negative energy. Just one more check, just one more check.
I've lived with it for 38 years, I am determined to beat it. I'll laugh and sing and enjoy everything as I always have and I will beat OCD, remove it, end it.
I thought a little introduction was in order. Stop back and I'll have plenty more to offer. I write poetry, short stories, love politics and chewing the fat on any number of issues. I am a Mudpuddlin man who has discovered the Web Log.
Sorry, that was just a little OCD joke. I also have a macabre sense of humour. Just as well given how abrasive OCD can be on your day to day activity. I know I don't need to check the door is locked over and over again, the cats playing in my front garden know it, the birds singing in the trees know it and the curious neighbour walking their dog who stops to watch the strange man checking his door knows it. Doesn't alter for a moment the compulsion and the fact of doing it.
And there is the rub. It's getting 'caught' that hurts. It is being seen. It is having to justify your actions which sit squarely in the unjustifiable camp from the viewer's standpoint. It is the disappointment in myself, the shame and horror of being abnormal, unusual, watched. Suddenly you are an outsider in your own front yard, a stranger to those that know you. The guilt and the shame wash over and the compulsion feeds off the negative energy. Just one more check, just one more check.
I've lived with it for 38 years, I am determined to beat it. I'll laugh and sing and enjoy everything as I always have and I will beat OCD, remove it, end it.
I thought a little introduction was in order. Stop back and I'll have plenty more to offer. I write poetry, short stories, love politics and chewing the fat on any number of issues. I am a Mudpuddlin man who has discovered the Web Log.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)