[bee-thinks]

My name is Bee, and being in therapy for OCD and generally disliking myself means I’ve been writing a lot - this is where I’m putting my general observations on life and myself :)

I’m really hoping to learn that I’m generally not insane in my thoughts/ less special than my OCD seems to think I am. So, hopefully, some of this will seem familiar to someone more put together than me that will tell me their secrets, or I’ll make someone else feel less alone.

[bee-thinks]

a therapist prescribed task: an essay about who i am, in the hopes of seeing myself in a better light:

I’m pretty sure that I was born shy. I rarely cried, and I took longer to speak than most, and when I did, it was so infrequently, so quietly that my Dad told me once he had genuine concerns (until he took me to see Balimore live and I finally seemed like a kid). Some of my earliest memories are hiding behind my Dad’s leg when people asked me my name, and getting frustrated with myself in play parks for being too nervous to make friends.

Nervous might be a better word for it now - Shy implies a personality trait, a coyness to my person which doesn’t feel accurate. I enjoy people’s company a great deal too much to feel truly shy anymore. I enjoy talking to my friends, going for coffees or watching movies together. I enjoy simply sitting in silence, doing our own tasks but in the same room. I enjoy going to work and talking nonsense with my gaggle of old men regulars. I like to make people laugh. I like listening to people talk. I in fact, don’t really like to be alone anymore.

I take a moment to warm to people though. My longing to be around people only really extends to the people I know well. Really, I’ve always much preferred animals to people. Most customers I recognise at work have dogs that I said ‘hello’ to first. People make me nervous, but animals never have. The only thing I can be certain of in my future is that I will have a dog. A dog, a library and a herb garden on my window sill. I don’t know about my career, or marriage or kids, but I’ll have a room only of books, with an arm chair in one corner, and a dog bed at its foot.

I like physical media: books, records, DVDs. If I like it, I want to hold it in my hands. When I am down, I watch Pride and Prejudice 2005 on DVD, or I listen to the soundtrack on vinyl. My bed is more teddy than mattress. I like trinkets, and rocks and shells - I like things. My room is a mess because of all my things that I won’t let go of. That is a part of me that has never changed. I am a messy collector of things. Despite my mess though, I love lists, and spreadsheets and data. My collections of records and DVDs and trinkets feel like data really - that’s my data. The contents of my messy room and my chaotic shelves are the data that would be used to analyse me. For example, I have three copies of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, with three different covers. Along the front of my TV stand are tokens of everything I have ever loved: models of my favourite animals, a child’s tea set I painted with my Mum as a kid, and several “wee guys” that I find myself collecting at every inconvenience. My wardrobe is covered in photos, postcards, dried flowers and prints of the movies, musicians, video games and even infectious diseases I find interest in (I promise it’s pretty). I give the impression of being better-read than I am - certainly recently. I have a sticker covered trolley of over twenty unread books by my bed.

I’m not sure what conclusions can be drawn from that set of data. If I remove myself from my body and brain and look at my untidy and chaotic room, I'm someone who likes to read, who likes animals and nature and morbid diseases. Maybe I’m interesting: with all my little guys and rocks and things. Maybe I’m lazy, with my messy room and my unread books . I don’t read anymore, and I don’t know what my hobbies are. I go to work, I sit on my phone, I go to sleep and I drink coffee with my girlfriend and friends. I might be lazy - that might be who I am. I wanted to be an author at one point, then a nurse, then a doctor. When I didn’t get the grades for medicine I stopped knowing what I wanted altogether. I couldn’t tell you what job I’m working towards anymore.

So from what I can gather, without talking to any of my friends or my girlfriend, I am nervous, not shy, and I am a lover of the people I know, and wary of the ones I don’t (isn’t everyone?), and I like animals more than strangers (again, most people do). I like things, and I’m messy and lazy. When I ask girlfriend, she tells me that I’m kind, and helpful. I can’t help but think of the steps I took to make her believe that, and if wishing to be that for her, negates the honesty in her descriptors. But at the end of the day, I’ll continue to open doors and make her dinners, and to help her navigate the overwhelming chaos of a craft store, whether I’m doing it dishonestly or not.

So I’m anxious, and messy and interesting in more of a peculiar way than anything else. I do truly dislike myself, and even writing this I am unsure why, because nothing here is that different from anyone else really. But every thought I have is followed by some twinge of guilt. Even the thought of liking myself feels selfish - I am just like everyone else, so I am not special enough to like? My therapist asked me to write this to analyse myself in a way that might make my self perception a little more positive. Funnily enough, she considered this paragraph unnecessary - like I’d written it to cancel everything else out. It feels a little like a failsafe really. Thinking too highly of myself makes me feel that guilt I've become so expert at, so this little disclaimer is here as a counterweight, perhaps?

If I let myself, and my OCD, spiral out of control, that counterweight in itself feels like a manipulation: “Aha, you’re making sure they think you aren’t full of yourself, you big fat liar!”. At every re-read of this, that guilt re-roots itself in my gut. But like every other intrusive thought about my evil, convincing plan to make the world like me, if I lived by this guilt, it would destroy me. So, I disagree that the disclaimer is unnecessary, because I was asked to write about myself, and the guilt is as big a part of me as my messy room and little guys - and I’m not likely to get rid of it anytime soon. However, I can accept that whilst I can’t ignore it, I can work in spite of it, and it might even get a little smaller.

[bee-thinks]

Thoughts on Normality

Does anyone actually feel like they know how to be human? I've been told my whole life not to strive for normal, because there is no such thing - everyone is a little weird. I've always felt though, that my weird is subhuman, like l'm missing some line of code that makes everyone else work seamlessly. When I was sixteen, I wrote a "Guide to Existence" for an english assignment: an essay on how be more than just alive, but remembered too. I assumed then, that I would grow into the humanness that seemed innate to all my peers. At twenty-two though, I find myself longing for manual after manual on how to be alive:

"Holding Conversation Without Making It Weird 101,"

"Crying: How Much is Too Much?"

"Dating: What to Expect for Those Nobody Wanted in High School."

The older I get, the more abnormal I feel. Which lessons did I miss on the art of being human? Was I sick the day they taught us how to function? Or was my wiring done wrong before then? Was I simply born with a missing part? I have to imagine there are more people out there who feel the same as I do. Maybe everyone feels like this, like we're all missing some sort of instruction manual. Maybe normality is one of these big lies we just know to subscribe to - the Santa Claus of the human psyche.

How is it then, that some people seem to breeze through life? At sixteen, I identified the role of confidence in existing. Maybe being normal only needs you to be confident enough to exist however you want to. Confident enough to live without the need to ask yourself if you're normal or not in the first place. But it's been six years and I know I'm most confident l've ever been, and I still feel just as alien amongst my peers and the many strangers who've passed through my life.

Does normality come with confidence, or confidence with normality?

So who has the answers? Are we all strange little creatures with no idea how to function? Is the answer to my life's biggest mystery just simply to wing it? Do I just have to accept that we're all different, without questioning the degree by which we all differ? Maybe we reach an age at which life finally starts to make sense, or does this lonely feeling of being the weird kid never leave?