i'm waking up, i feel it in my bones, love to make my systems go
This is mostly for me and it’s ridiculously long, so I apologize for that in advance if anyone decides to read this. But it’s something that’s gone a long time without being articulated. I haven’t talked about it to many people, and herein was part of the problem, and what I would change if I could. So here it goes.
One of my roommates told me that they could live in the carpet, the furniture, could come back again and again. And for the next two years, I felt like a crazy person. I became convinced that they could live in anything. I'm talking lampshades, wood-grain, paper, things that don't even make sense. The rest of that year, I refused to sit on furniture in the room except for my bed, and this one chair that belonged to a roommate who hadn't caught lice. Anywhere I had been was hot-zone, the dining hall, classrooms, the library. I finished out the year thinking, "if I can just get out of this building, this place where it all began, I'll be okay." Next year would get better. All I needed, I thought, was a few months of distance from the university, and everything would get okay again.
It was worst next year.
Some of the problem, I think, would have been resolved had I been firmer when I told my roommates I didn't want to live where they wanted to live the following year: in the same building, on the same floor, right across the hall. I even told them I was having problems. But they didn't understand the depth of my mania, and to be fair to them, neither did I. Not yet.
Come September, I went to school like I was prepared for war: with chemicals and a ton of excuses. I went through bottles of Lysol, hand sanitizer, shampoo, body wash. Nothing that actually killed lice, but it had almost stopped being about the lice at that point. I didn't even know how to explain it, and I'm still not sure I do. The campus had become "contaminated." That's how I thought of it, in my head, that's what I called it. With what it was contaminated wasn't specific anymore. And because I was living so close to where everything had happened last year, I had to find a way to live around the contamination. Not with it, but around it. To say the former would have suggested that I was coping, which I was most definitely not doing. I practically stopped going to some of my classes. I couldn't sit on one specific side of the dining hall, and I can't even remember why. I was still only sitting on one chair in the entire apartment. I spent 50 minutes in the shower every night, going to bed earlier than everyone else so that I could get appropriately clean and dry before sleeping, leaving everyone else bonding in the living area. I wouldn't brush my hair after I'd left the dorm. I wouldn't even get up to pee in the middle of the night. I was tiptoeing, skirting the edges of the social circle of my friends. Slowly losing touch with them. Slowly feeling desperation, and depression, sinking in.
My saving grace was going home. I had a car on campus that year, and I put a good amount of miles on it driving home every other weekend. Then, every weekend. And, after winter break, long weekends where I just fucked my Friday classes, and some of the Monday ones too. I saw my friends three, maybe four nights a week. I regret that, I really do, because I never told them the truth. They may not have understood, but they would have at least had the truth of it. I still haven't told them, and I wonder if they ever thought I hated them. But I couldn't be there. I'd compartmentalized things and places, in severe degrees. At home, for the most part, I felt safe. At home, I felt clean. School was danger, and I can honestly say that there wasn't a day or night on that campus where I didn't feel uneasy.
There were some things at home that were I problem, especially that first summer. Things that I had brought home from college that were back in my room, clothes, shoes, my lamp, I wouldn't touch those. I was still going through more soap than was possibly healthy. Both of my parents noticed something big was wrong, but it was my mom who really stepped up to the plate. She finally got me to talk to her about what was going on up in my head-space, and she went on an exorcism regiment on my behalf. Everything I wanted out of my bedroom, she moved for me. She went through my clothes, got rid of anything I asked her to get rid of, although it probably killed her to do it since we were going through some extreme financial difficulties at the time. She cleaned everything, vacuumed everything, made it easy to sleep at night without getting up to wash my hands 30 times before I felt okay. I love her for it, quite possibly more than she knows. She helped make the house a safe-place, and having that to come back to after a few days at school soothed every nerve that place set on fire, if only until I had to go back.
It was a terrible place to be mentally, and I knew it. Therapy probably would have helped a lot, but at that point I still felt deep, immense shame about it. I couldn’t rationalize my behavior, to myself, or to others; there is nothing rational about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It doesn’t make sense, and it’s not easy to understand unless you know what it feels like to have your mind that fixated like that, the compulsion to perform in a certain pattern because that pattern-exactly that one, only that one- lets you focus finally on something else. More normal things. So I kept it to myself the best I could, waiting it out. Unwilling to go to therapy, the only thing I had hope in, still, was time. Time would pass, and so would the compulsions.
It worked, to a degree. Mostly what helped were those long stays at home (although it was kind of a miracle I didn’t lose my scholarship), and the change-up in the living situation the senior year. We moved out of the dorms to the apartments across the street, and I got a single room that I could make into a sanctuary. The carpet was new to me, the furniture was new, and even though I still spent more time at home or the library than in the apartment, I sat on the furniture in it. I sat on the floor. I used the kitchen. My showers shortened to 20 minutes. I went to all of my classes and enjoyed them instead of worrying about the unspecified contaminate on the cloth seats, and got my GPA back up to respectable place. With only one year to go and the new scenery of the apartment the backdrop to it, I finally felt a little something in me break, loosen to the point where, although I could still feel the grips of the compulsions, didn’t feel suffocated. Or maybe, there were just less stimuli around me to prompt them. The compulsions need triggers, after all. OCD, based my experience with it, works like a trip in your brain’s circuit. My brain works normally unless something trips the circuit, after which point it gets stuck on a loop. Senior years, the circuit was tripping less and less, and I felt almost normal.
And almost happy.
Graduation day wasn’t a day of pride for me. It was a day of relief. I’d made it through my own personal hell that none of my friends knew about, and that made me feel guilty. I smiled, cried, told them all how much I’d miss them, but inside, I was just happy I was out, away for good from the things that tripped that circuit in my brain, that made my life feel overwhelmed.
There was time, yes. And then there was distance. Concrete, permanent distance.
I’m better, now. I touch things that were once at the school, a stained-glass butterfly light that made its way back into my room. A drawing a friend made for me. I know it’s still there, waiting for a trip to make itself known, but it’s been two years, and for that I’m grateful. It’s also been about one year since I realized what depression, what over-sleeping to skip class, and staying in to avoid places on campus had done to my body:
This is November 2010, right about when I was at my heaviest: 203 pounds in a 5’0” body. I told myself I didn’t care, that it was what on the inside that mattered, but I was lying to myself. That’s not to say that everyone isn’t beautiful just by being human, but that was just it. What I had been feeling on the inside the last 2 years was panic, mania, and constant fear and distress. And my body was reflected all of that. My body was in distress.
Finally, I was tired of living around things.
At the end of March 2011, I joined a gym, and went 3-4 times a week. I stopped going back for seconds, a major kryptonite of mine. I stopped eating white bread, cut back on all my portions, steamed my vegetables instead of boiling them. I cut desserts out except for special occasions. I found a focus, and a sense of control that was constructive instead of detrimental, and that? That felt amazing. That, just as much as the 40lbs I’ve dropped, felt like a victory.
May, 2011
Late July 2011
Late July, 2011
Mid-September 2011
October 2011
Thanksgiving 2011
T-Day 2011
December 2011
It’s more than just the weight I lost. I feel better now. Mentally, emotionally, and physically, I feel more in control, more equipped to deal with the compulsion to panic. Or, even if I do panic, I hope now I have to the means by which to dispel it. To feel normal more often than not.
One of my roommates told me that they could live in the carpet, the furniture, could come back again and again. And for the next two years, I felt like a crazy person. I became convinced that they could live in anything. I'm talking lampshades, wood-grain, paper, things that don't even make sense. The rest of that year, I refused to sit on furniture in the room except for my bed, and this one chair that belonged to a roommate who hadn't caught lice. Anywhere I had been was hot-zone, the dining hall, classrooms, the library. I finished out the year thinking, "if I can just get out of this building, this place where it all began, I'll be okay." Next year would get better. All I needed, I thought, was a few months of distance from the university, and everything would get okay again.
It was worst next year.
Some of the problem, I think, would have been resolved had I been firmer when I told my roommates I didn't want to live where they wanted to live the following year: in the same building, on the same floor, right across the hall. I even told them I was having problems. But they didn't understand the depth of my mania, and to be fair to them, neither did I. Not yet.
Come September, I went to school like I was prepared for war: with chemicals and a ton of excuses. I went through bottles of Lysol, hand sanitizer, shampoo, body wash. Nothing that actually killed lice, but it had almost stopped being about the lice at that point. I didn't even know how to explain it, and I'm still not sure I do. The campus had become "contaminated." That's how I thought of it, in my head, that's what I called it. With what it was contaminated wasn't specific anymore. And because I was living so close to where everything had happened last year, I had to find a way to live around the contamination. Not with it, but around it. To say the former would have suggested that I was coping, which I was most definitely not doing. I practically stopped going to some of my classes. I couldn't sit on one specific side of the dining hall, and I can't even remember why. I was still only sitting on one chair in the entire apartment. I spent 50 minutes in the shower every night, going to bed earlier than everyone else so that I could get appropriately clean and dry before sleeping, leaving everyone else bonding in the living area. I wouldn't brush my hair after I'd left the dorm. I wouldn't even get up to pee in the middle of the night. I was tiptoeing, skirting the edges of the social circle of my friends. Slowly losing touch with them. Slowly feeling desperation, and depression, sinking in.
My saving grace was going home. I had a car on campus that year, and I put a good amount of miles on it driving home every other weekend. Then, every weekend. And, after winter break, long weekends where I just fucked my Friday classes, and some of the Monday ones too. I saw my friends three, maybe four nights a week. I regret that, I really do, because I never told them the truth. They may not have understood, but they would have at least had the truth of it. I still haven't told them, and I wonder if they ever thought I hated them. But I couldn't be there. I'd compartmentalized things and places, in severe degrees. At home, for the most part, I felt safe. At home, I felt clean. School was danger, and I can honestly say that there wasn't a day or night on that campus where I didn't feel uneasy.
There were some things at home that were I problem, especially that first summer. Things that I had brought home from college that were back in my room, clothes, shoes, my lamp, I wouldn't touch those. I was still going through more soap than was possibly healthy. Both of my parents noticed something big was wrong, but it was my mom who really stepped up to the plate. She finally got me to talk to her about what was going on up in my head-space, and she went on an exorcism regiment on my behalf. Everything I wanted out of my bedroom, she moved for me. She went through my clothes, got rid of anything I asked her to get rid of, although it probably killed her to do it since we were going through some extreme financial difficulties at the time. She cleaned everything, vacuumed everything, made it easy to sleep at night without getting up to wash my hands 30 times before I felt okay. I love her for it, quite possibly more than she knows. She helped make the house a safe-place, and having that to come back to after a few days at school soothed every nerve that place set on fire, if only until I had to go back.
It was a terrible place to be mentally, and I knew it. Therapy probably would have helped a lot, but at that point I still felt deep, immense shame about it. I couldn’t rationalize my behavior, to myself, or to others; there is nothing rational about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It doesn’t make sense, and it’s not easy to understand unless you know what it feels like to have your mind that fixated like that, the compulsion to perform in a certain pattern because that pattern-exactly that one, only that one- lets you focus finally on something else. More normal things. So I kept it to myself the best I could, waiting it out. Unwilling to go to therapy, the only thing I had hope in, still, was time. Time would pass, and so would the compulsions.
It worked, to a degree. Mostly what helped were those long stays at home (although it was kind of a miracle I didn’t lose my scholarship), and the change-up in the living situation the senior year. We moved out of the dorms to the apartments across the street, and I got a single room that I could make into a sanctuary. The carpet was new to me, the furniture was new, and even though I still spent more time at home or the library than in the apartment, I sat on the furniture in it. I sat on the floor. I used the kitchen. My showers shortened to 20 minutes. I went to all of my classes and enjoyed them instead of worrying about the unspecified contaminate on the cloth seats, and got my GPA back up to respectable place. With only one year to go and the new scenery of the apartment the backdrop to it, I finally felt a little something in me break, loosen to the point where, although I could still feel the grips of the compulsions, didn’t feel suffocated. Or maybe, there were just less stimuli around me to prompt them. The compulsions need triggers, after all. OCD, based my experience with it, works like a trip in your brain’s circuit. My brain works normally unless something trips the circuit, after which point it gets stuck on a loop. Senior years, the circuit was tripping less and less, and I felt almost normal.
And almost happy.
Graduation day wasn’t a day of pride for me. It was a day of relief. I’d made it through my own personal hell that none of my friends knew about, and that made me feel guilty. I smiled, cried, told them all how much I’d miss them, but inside, I was just happy I was out, away for good from the things that tripped that circuit in my brain, that made my life feel overwhelmed.
There was time, yes. And then there was distance. Concrete, permanent distance.
I’m better, now. I touch things that were once at the school, a stained-glass butterfly light that made its way back into my room. A drawing a friend made for me. I know it’s still there, waiting for a trip to make itself known, but it’s been two years, and for that I’m grateful. It’s also been about one year since I realized what depression, what over-sleeping to skip class, and staying in to avoid places on campus had done to my body:
This is November 2010, right about when I was at my heaviest: 203 pounds in a 5’0” body. I told myself I didn’t care, that it was what on the inside that mattered, but I was lying to myself. That’s not to say that everyone isn’t beautiful just by being human, but that was just it. What I had been feeling on the inside the last 2 years was panic, mania, and constant fear and distress. And my body was reflected all of that. My body was in distress.
Finally, I was tired of living around things.
At the end of March 2011, I joined a gym, and went 3-4 times a week. I stopped going back for seconds, a major kryptonite of mine. I stopped eating white bread, cut back on all my portions, steamed my vegetables instead of boiling them. I cut desserts out except for special occasions. I found a focus, and a sense of control that was constructive instead of detrimental, and that? That felt amazing. That, just as much as the 40lbs I’ve dropped, felt like a victory.
May, 2011
Late July 2011
Late July, 2011
Mid-September 2011
October 2011
Thanksgiving 2011
T-Day 2011
December 2011
It’s more than just the weight I lost. I feel better now. Mentally, emotionally, and physically, I feel more in control, more equipped to deal with the compulsion to panic. Or, even if I do panic, I hope now I have to the means by which to dispel it. To feel normal more often than not.