It screams for mercy, yet loves to make me suffer just the same.
You know the thing that's in the back of your head, and it eats you alive every time it speaks up. Seems like it speaks every second, yet only enough to make you suffer to the point of wanting to die, but not enough to kill you.
Every time it speaks, the words echo in your head. Only in multiples of your favorite number though, nothing less, nothing more. If it goes 1 over or under, it restarts. The headache is already forming in your head, or is that brain cancer? You don't know, so you focus on what you need to do now.
That voice in the back of your head, you feel like it is a part of you. You don't want it to be, but there's something about that voice that gives comfort to its reality. I mean you don't have to wash your hands 4 times after touching a pencil that didn't belong to you, but it's comforting when you do it. You don't have to do anything, but why sit with the words piling up around you, filling your head like the tears in your eyes, when you can just do it? Get it done and over with. That's what it wants, that's what YOU want, right?
Something so poetic and exhausting about it. There's that voice, again, that keeps repeating to you the words that cause more grief, more discomfort with every syllable that clicks together. It screams out to you until you listen until you finally give in. That voice almost becomes real, you have to listen to it, and then you can learn what will comfort the agony it screams. The agony you are feeling.
Everyone deals with this, right? Can't complain, the thing in the back of your head will suffocate you if you do, that way you can't speak up. Speaking up isn't going to help calm the agony it holds - well, the agony you hold. At least that's what the thing says, and you already listen to it like an obedient dog.
Walking out of that therapy session, closing out of that tab, shutting that book, but the words ring the same - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. That's what that thing is, or what best describes it. You think that's not possible, you have every disease known to mankind, but you cannot have OCD. That headache is brain cancer, that fatigue is diabetes, and that sting in your ribcage is a pulmonary embolism. You're going to die a disgusting death. That all makes sense, but OCD? Now that doesn't make sense. OCD means being tidy, clean, organized, and everything you're not. You're not clean, no matter how hard you scrub your hands or your skin. You're not tidy, you have everything the way you need it to be. Tidying your area means something bad will happen anyway, rather than living in organized chaos and facing what makes it chaotic, to begin with. At least that's what that voice in your head says. Organized, in 'your' way, the way the thing wants. You're still one being though, so in retrospect, it's still you! ...right?
Throughout your whole life, every painful second of being alive is explained in three words. An abbreviation, even; OCD. You finally are told that it isn't YOU thinking those awful, uncomfortable, or disgusting thoughts. Thoughts of poetic destruction. That monster living within your mental cavity seems smaller than it was before. It seems like you can almost stand up to it - like you can be stronger. It still screams at you, it wants more, it's angry.
You feel defeated, not by what now has a name, but defeated from the chronic exhaustion that lived within you for so long. Those words that filled your head were so heavy to carry alone. So today, you might not be able to tackle what lives within you, but at least it feels smaller, and you can live on knowing that wasn't you all that time.
