Wash your hands before leaving.
Every afternoon the television would have a woman in tears
Spanish dialogue, pastel colored sets
Tongue in cheek, modern romance sipping iced tea by the pool
The antagonist wearing a suit and three rings on each finger
Pause.
Soap bars are made of fat, the grease found in
Breakfast diners and sweat off a teenagers face
The lipids turning gelatinous and all I can think of is
Jell-o; the strange colored dessert that doesn’t taste like anything real
My hands begin to itch and I stand up
Wash your hands before leaving.
My hands have become open desert, dry animosity
The skin around the knuckles is delicate, one clench of a fist
I am sure that it will tear, like the skirt of a girl I once knew
But there are creatures lurking everywhere
In the handle of the bathroom door, in the shake of another hand
In the touch of a frame, in the grip of a key
Wash your hands before leaving.
The scattered murmurs on the screen remind me its 5p.m
The women are arguing with their manicured hands
Their eyes all having the same spidery lashes, spiders
I feel insects crawling under my bones
Termites clipping at my heels as I sit in this couch of horrors
I didn’t know the last time it had been washed
It smelled of the 1970’s and I want to go home
The babysitter is on the other chair reclined
Snoring, letting out bacteria through her mouth
At 8 years old I should be on the floor with a coloring book
My lips are dry, the screen is too bright, I can feel the filth everywhere I turn
So I stay
I hear the door knock and it’s my mother picking me up after work
My lungs sigh of relief
Time to go
But first
let me wash my hands before I leave
So that was a small poem I decided to create about my experience as a child growing up with OCD. What I find interesting is that I didn't know it was a disorder or something to be concerned about while I was young. It was only later in life that I realize how much of a troublesome notion it was. In retrospect, I was always a very organized and clean individual, even in primary school. I liked things a certain way, I didn't like my dinner touching on my plate, I was constantly cleaning the surfaces of my parent's house and I would spend hours meticulously organizing my toys and rarely playing with them. However, this escaped the attention of the adults in my life and thinking about it now it's difficult to draw the line of when something becomes obsessive. Dealing with this, even now, I realize that it's a very internalized concept. It's such an engraved feeling, a close attribute to me that it's hard to distinguish between what is abnormal and what is just part of my personality.
There was a point in my life where it got overwhelming. Somewhere around the age of 18, my habits had slowly started taking over my life. I had just graduated high school and it was the summer before I would enter college. I had a lot of freedom but somehow I was chained to staying home all day. I would cancel hanging out with friends and somewhere around early July it spiraled into a routine. I had started a new job but after two weeks stopped showing up altogether.
As soon as I would wake up, I would write a list, I would write that list over and over again. Sometimes I would write it until there was no crooked letter at all. From the minute I got up there was no sitting down. I would start from my room and proceed from there, making sure that everything was how it should be. Unfortunately nothing was ever how it should be. As soon as everything looked the way I wanted it to, something was off kilter. The blanket was not folded precisely or not placed correctly and then suddenly I would see the smallest of stains and in the washer it went.
When I was finally able to leave the room, I would often think about the things I wasn't doing or should be doing. I would think about why there was only 8 planets in our solar system, why buildings were only shaped a certain way, I hope my mother is not in an accident, I don't know when I'll die but I don't want to die, am I happy with the way things are? should I get a job? what am I doing to help others? am I bad person? what if I accidentally hurt myself?This would make my hands sweat. Thus, I would have to go to the bathroom and spend five minutes with my hands under the sink washing and thinking and washing and thinking.
This is what I later learned to be intrusive thinking. Thoughts that are usually unwelcome and obsessive in nature, in turn causing one to do compulsive actions. One thing I would do if I wasn't cleaning would be to touch my ear. It would start when the feeling of anxiousness was too much to bear and so I would touch my earlobe and then my whole ear in a repetitive manner until the feeling of being uncomfortable went away. Other times it was biting the skin off my bottom lip, if I did it too often it would bleed but still I would persist.
A lot of people think that OCD is just about being overly clean or liking your silverware a certain way but it is more complex than organizing your pens by color or your books by the alphabet. It can be sinister and halt you from living your life. It can make something harmless as taking a shower take hours because you're clean but now you can see the grime on the bathtub and there's a smudge on the window and oh there's dust particles on the floor and you can't move on when you know you there's this to be done first.
Another habit that was frequent of mine was checking the locks once it was nighttime. I would walk to the door to make sure it was locked. To make extra sure I would unlock it and lock it again. I would check the locks on the windows to make sure that they weren't faulty. That they were doing what they were supposed to be doing. I would check the stove because I thought I could smell the leaking of gasoline or I would imagine an open fire in my kitchen without being aware of it. I would check every closet door and under every bed and couch because there might an intruder I wasn't aware of because of the faulty window locks and I was back to checking the locks again.
It was exhausting having to do this every day but absolutely inundating when I wasn't doing it. When I would break out of my cycle and forced myself to go eat out with friends or do something out of the norm, I wouldn't speak. I would be too preoccupied about all the things I had to do and that I was neglecting to do and how dare I. It made me feel guilty and anxious about my duties, because that's what they ultimately had become and if I wasn't there to execute them then the thoughts would start swarming back.
The worst part was that even though I was doing all of these things I wasn't really doing anything productive. I didn't have a job, I didn't do the things I genuinely enjoyed. Reading a book was tedious, every time I finished reading a paragraph I would have to go back and reread it because halfway through I had become distracted with the thought of rearranging the furniture for the 15th time that week without even realizing that I had.
You don't realize how much power your thoughts can have over you and how they can shape your life because everyone has them and it's difficult to differentiate between what is reasonable and what is unreasonable. When removing and applying all the lids to the Tupperware and cleaning the already clean clothes seems sensible then it's simple to make it normal. You don't see is as a coping mechanism for something more serious you just see it as anything else, like shopping for new shoes or writing with your right hand. You conclude that everyone must deal with it because it's so personal, it's not something that can be explained or uttered. You just assume.
After a year and a half of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy I learned better coping skills and understood that worries can have a negative effects on one's life and it's extremely tiring to break out of habits and ideas when they seem logical to you despite how unhealthy they may be. Although I do still struggle with this and it's a very big aspect of my life even with all the more appropriate coping skills it takes a lot of effort to do it instead of resorting back to decade old routines and thought processes. It's hard work to retrain a brain.
What's very upsetting to me is seeing other people make light of such a delicate and complicated disorder that actually affects a lot of people. 18% of the population in America struggles with some kind of anxiety disorder and that's just in the U.S alone.
So when I hear someone say how OCD they are because they're rearranging their file cabinet or what a "neat freak" they are for picking up their trash or being a complete "germaphobe" for using hand sanitizer it makes less serious of the matter of people that actually do have OCD and what they suffer through. What most fail to understand is that all these things, cleaning, washing hands, organizing are not habits that we choose to do. It's not something that's enjoyably in the common sense of the word. We have to do it, forced to do it because if we don't we're stuck with a debilitating anxiety and the only way to make it better is by executing these rituals. In turn, giving us a sense of relief if only for a short time. Hence the name, Obsessive-Complusive disorder. The thoughts and notions are the obsessions, and the acting out of these worries are the compulsions. i.e worrying that someone might break in therefore checking the doors repeatedly.
However, a big part that goes untold both in the media and in psychology classrooms that discuss this disorder are the hoarding aspects of it. When you think of hoarders you think of sloppy people with a thousand items in their house, the walls moldy, the rooftop falling apart and every inch of what is floor covered in items. But that's not true. A lot of the characteristics of hoarding can appear in people that have OCD as well. For instance, they might keep articles or school tests they've taken years ago in boxes because the information might be necessary for a later time. Other times they can keep insignificant items like mail, magazines, water damaged books in fear that it's already been contaminated by them therefore it's more difficult to discard. Although I've not dealt with this facet of OCD it comes to show how elaborate and intricate it can.
Although this was in part written because I wanted to explain my experience with OCD as well as an introduction to someone who might not be familiar, have a misunderstanding, or might think they have this disorder to further investigate and learn about it. I hope it encouraged you to seek more information on it and give you a look into understanding people that deal with it. As well as recognizing misconceptions and realizing that it's not interesting or quirky to deal with any mental disorder and that it is a very real and serious thing.
Thank you always for reading.
Sincerely,
your shy narrator
No comments:
Post a Comment