I learned I had OCD from watching Maury. At least, I think it was Maury. The mid-90s was the age of daytime talk shows, and now they have all blurred into my memory. What I do remember is this: I was eleven years old, and suddenly my entire world made sense.
Iâve heard that mental illness is often genetic. However, this wasnât the case for me. I was raised as an only child, and whenever I tried to articulate what I was feeling to my parents, I got the distinct impression that I was starting to sound insane, and that if I kept talking this way, I would be sent away. I thought I would decline and decline until any capacity for joy was gone from my mind.
I canât remember a time when I wasnât anxious about things that hadnât happened. I canât remember a day when I didnât believe I was going to die in some rare and violent way. When I was six, my parents were impressed that I had stopped asking for McDonalds as an after school treat, but the truth is that I believed all food that wasnât vacuum sealed was poisoned or crawling with toxic germs.
The numbers didnât begin until I was in fifth grade. Iâm not sure how exactly it started, but it had something to do with my bedroom window. One day, for no discernable reason, something told me that I had not closed the window properly. So I closed it again. But this time, when the window locked into the frame, something about the sound it made was not right. So I did it again. An itch manifested in my mind. Closing a window was no longer about closing a window. There was something bigger than me, and it was sitting on my shoulders, and it followed me even after I had walked away from the window.
Bit by bit, the entire world changed and morphed around this new Thing that followed me everywhere I went. This thing that taunted me mercilessly. It had no body, so I was its body. My hands were made to tap the walls and the tables and the windows a certain number of times. And if I didnât do it right (which I never did), I would have to do it again, until someone entered the room and my embarrassment won out over my fear, or I was too tired to remember this sequence I had now performed over a dozen times.
By the time I was twelve, I no longer remembered what a warm shower felt like. The bathroom tile had a chaotic pattern of little shapes that went in all directions, and I had to make sure my feet aligned with them in a certain way, and if they didnât, I had to do it again. And then again. The water was always cold by the time I set foot beneath it. Washing my hair was its own particular kind of hell.
Coincidentally, this was at the dawn of puberty, when I could blame the amount of time it took to shower and then get dressed on the fact that I was becoming a teenager. I pretended that I had suddenly become obsessed with fashion, that I had tried on a hundred different shirts and thatâs why I nearly missed the bus. The truth is that it had taken me all morning just to get both arms into the sleeve of one shirt, because this monster on my back was telling me that if I got it wrong, my house would catch fire and weâd all die in the flames.
It wasnât the kind of thing I talked about. Not in 1996. And especially not since my family was the religious sort, and I had been taught that this sort of thing only happened to people who had yet to atone for some great sin. I knew somehow that this wasnât that. I knew somehow that no one was going to understand. And I assumed I was the only person in the world to have contracted such a bizarre creature that had managed to zap me entirely of my will.
Then an episode of Maury (I think) featured sufferers of OCD. Mind you, this was long before the internet was a thing in my house. I had no way to contact this young woman who couldnât get out of bed unless the numbers on the clock were even. I had no way to say that I understood, that we shared this monster. I felt at once like I was not alone and the most alone Iâd ever been.
Even knowing this, I didnât tell my parents. I didnât think that they would understand. Instead, I told myself that I would be better. I knew what I had and it was just a matter of not doing it. This sounds excellent in theory but not so much when put into practice.
OCD latches on to its host. It locks around their brain like fingers in clay. The clay hardens, and thereâs a kind of permanence. Alone with this monster of mine, I began to observe it the same way it had observed me. I took notice of when it seemed to scream for my attention versus when it left me alone. It wanted my attention most of the time, but it got bored enough with me when I was writing my little stories in my notebook. It also seemed to leave me alone when I was blasting music from my Walkman. I guess it wasnât a big fan of Jewel.
For a while at least, I was able to tell stories of people who Were Not Me. I wasnât present, and therefore nothing that plagued me was present.
There were times, over the years, in which I tried to put what I was experiencing into my writing. It just never seemed to make sense on the page. Conclusion? Write about other things. Feel better for a while. Repeat.
By my late teens and early twenties, the OCD had calmed considerably. I credit this on the stability of my life at that time. Things were a bit more predictable. A bit safer. And the monster, as a result, had quieted. But it was still present every day, in some small way that was imperceptible unless one knew where to look.
When I wrote my first book, Wither, I was twenty four and life was a bit tumultuous. It was my escape, as ever, from myself. I enjoyed writing it and will forever be grateful for the things it has brought me. In the years to follow, I have told more stories and they have all meant something different and special to me.
When I wrote THE GLASS SPARE, however, I was in the worst state of my life to date. It was as though I woke up one morning and had become a magnet for all the little Things Iâd managed to avoid over the years. The monster was back and it had grown some muscles. It knew I was bigger and stronger than Iâd been when I was twelve, so it had grown bigger and stronger to match me, wit for wit.
I spent four months in my bed. I barely slept, and when I did, I dreamed of panic attacks and woke up to panic attacks. A relative brought me groceries, sometimes leaving them on the porch because my anxiety was such that I could not face another human being unless I had just taken a dose of my anxiety medication. I wasnât sure if I had lost myself completely, or it I was the most myself I had ever been. Iâm still not sure, because anxiety is so braided into every fiber of me, if someone were to reach in and pull it out, I would collapse into a heap of skin and bones with little sentience remaining.
This time, I could not separate myself from my writing. My story was not about a girl with mental illness. It was about a girl who woke up one morning to discover that everything she touched would turn to stone. âThis is not a metaphor,â I told myself. âMetaphors are a clichĂ©.â Eventually I came to terms with it being a metaphor. Whatever you want to call it, there is a very real chance that writing this story saved my life. It gave me a place to put all of those things poking at me, trying to make me break. And when that monster reached for me, I grabbed it by the neck and slammed it into the page.
Writing this story was not a cure. I still have OCD. I still have anxiety. Sometimes I hyperventilate and speed past the highway entrance and circle the block so I can work up my nerves. Sometimes I sit in my car and cry because I canât work up the courage to leave the driveway. Sometimes thereâs triumph and sometimes thereâs failure.
But every day, thereâs a place to put it.
Even though THE GLASS SPARE emerged from a dark time for me, and even though my memories of writing it are sometimes too horrible to address, I did not want to write a story wherein the truth was a burden. It is not, traditionally speaking, a story about mental illness, and quite possibly, only I would see the accidental metaphor. Wil turns all living things to stone with a touch, and as she gets stronger, whatever is causing it gets stronger too. Her mother counts and taps things in threes and fives. Her brother loses himself in the logic of Why Things Happen as a means of coping with what he canât control.
I wanted to write a fantasy where readers could fall in love, and cry, and celebrate, and mourn. I wanted to write a story that was honest. A story where what I struggle with doesnât disappear, but rather, it manifests into something that makes sense to me, and will maybe make sense to someone else out there. Iâve got this monster on my back, and I needed somewhere to put it.
romaincrisis
gummygunk
vaporwave
discoholicmusic
snowghoul
ellievsbear
stormborns
kianamaiart
