The Bee Blog
Flying through life obsessively and compulsively...
As we know, OCD can totally ruin lives. My OCD drove me into many rock bottom situations, all in different ways because OCD is a shape-shifter. Just when I thought I could cope with one form of OCD, it blindsided me and I was back to rock bottom. It took me years to realise that all these moments were caused by OCD because it’s super sneaky and pretends not to be OCD. It took me years because I didn’t know what OCD was or the fact that my thought processes had been obsessive-compulsive my whole life.
The first time I sought professional help, I was a very anxious 13-year-old. Not long after that was I diagnosed with depression. I know now that that diagnosis was inaccurate and therefore the professionals I saw were quite simply ineffective in helping me. I felt as if I was one big quandary to them- nothing they were doing was helping me. One psychologist noted my ‘very dark thoughts’ but this was presumed as depression and not the intrusive thoughts they were. I was depressed but that was because OCD had spent my entire life telling me that I was an inherently bad human being that doesn’t deserve to live on this planet. Unsurprisingly, I was miserable, had no self esteem and was exhausted of trying to prove it wrong every second of the day through compulsions. OCD told me how evil I was from the second I woke up to the second I allowed myself to finally have my two hour sleep. This OCD voice was accompanied by my rather unhelpful school telling me to work harder and do every single extra-curricular activity known to man. My brain could not handle the amount of things being thrust into it by both OCD and by the outer world and it drove me to attempt suicide at 14 years old. OCD then shape shifted and latched onto food, or lack of food I should say! My thought process was along the lines of: I should starve the bad inside of me because fat is bad and skinny is good. I had been fed (excuse the pun) this idea, mainly by the UK government, funnily enough. When I was growing up, there was a huge push on healthy eating and tackling obesity. It was put in the curriculum and drummed into us. As a very under confident, self-conscious soul I took this very seriously. So, OCD latched onto my food anxieties and escalated them to the point of anorexia. Lack of any nutrition and energy drove me into a more “exhausted, existential, what is the point of life” type of depression, as opposed to an “over-thinking, overwhelmed by everything, can’t cope” depression. The amount I lost when OCD latched onto food was more than just weight and I attempted suicide again, aged 15. I looked and behaved like the girl with the eating disorder but I was the girl controlled by undiagnosed, unrecognised OCD. OCD would not let up; I was so believing of everything that it said I didn’t even think it was a mental health problem, I thought it was the truth. I had no idea I had OCD because it was all I’d ever known. OCD decided to ramp the bad person thing up a gear and convinced me I had done something completely awful but couldn’t remember it. I was paralysed by guilt all the time, it wasn’t just me being a bad person, it was now me having a done a bad thing and not knowing what. I rang the police twice, hysterically crying saying how bad I think I am and that I might have murdered someone and forgotten all about it. The police probably had a good laugh about that once they’d redirected me to Samaritans. I really struggle to describe the feeling of intense and unpinnable guilt. It was all-consuming. I was in complete and utter turmoil. I was so confused, I couldn’t talk to the people I loved about this because I didn’t want to frighten them or let them down. The only people I felt should know were the police and they laughed it off, quite understandably! I then turned to self-harming after a year of being self harm free and attempted suicide again. I had still not been diagnosed with OCD at this point. OCD persisted but at a lower level. I started a new college so I was out of my toxic secondary school and I was managing to keep my head above water. Then I was hit in the face by OCD telling me that if I don’t die, someone else will and it will be my fault. This broke me. I had been regaining a will to live and now OCD was telling me that living will be fatal to someone I love. I spent a lot of the time dissociating, I did not feel like I was in my body at all. I was so distressed, I could hardly move and my mum took me to hospital. This was when I was finally diagnosed with OCD- hallelujah! It was the first time OCD didn’t feel like me and felt like more of a voice on my shoulder which I think changed the game both in terms of how I coped and how I was diagnosed. But, it was also the first time OCD ‘looked’ like OCD. Contamination anxiety became an ever-growing problem and plug sockets caused so much distress. Before, everything I did to ease my obsessions were in my head like counting, for example or they presented as an eating disorder/ depression. I wasn’t diagnosed until OCD shape-shifted into the stereotype. We have to be aware about the ability mental illnesses, specifically OCD in my case, have to present on the surface as something else. Not every illness will always live up to its stereotype. By spreading awareness of the different ways illnesses can manifest will hopefully help others seek treatment sooner and fully understand themselves.
0 Comments
As a child, I felt like I stood out because of my body and, as an anxious person, standing out isn't really what you aspire to do! I am a tall person and I have only recently made peace with that. I have always felt like everything I did wrong physically (such as accidentally hitting someone on the nose) was because of my body being 'bad'. Anything to do with my body was a bad thing according to OCD, because I am bad. I have many recollections of being praised for 'thinning out' which then cemented my very black and white belief that skinny was good and fat was bad and, on my OCD-driven quest of total goodness, I became preoccupied with the size of my body.
My self consciousness was increasingly interfering with my life, causing me anxiety and depleting my confidence. OCD was loving it- making me obsessed with what I ate and making believe that my weight made me a bad person. I was a lot slimmer than I had been at this point but it wasn't enough. I first started restricting my food when I got to secondary school but it was an off and on restriction, I guess you could call it sporadic fasting or crash dieting. It was my 16th birthday that that changed and I quite literally renounced food. After 6 weeks I was underweight, in the grips of Anorexia Binge/ Purge Subtype and disappearing before people's eyes. I felt victorious. It's only recently I've realised how much my eating disorders have been influenced and triggered by OCD. My eating disordered thoughts are in the obsession, compulsion pattern with the obsession driving my eating disorders being the same as many of my other compulsions- the idea that I'm bad. I correlated 'fat' with 'bad' and OCD had no mercy in making sure that I went to every measure in order not to be bad. I truly believe that if I didn't have OCD or the obsessive-compulsive neuro pathways, eating and self-consciousness would not be an issue for me. If I didn't have the constant obsessive voice in my head, telling me I am fat and that makes me bad, I doubt I would be self-conscious. People are also so quick to judge others without even considering what that person's life may be like or what is already going through their mind. The judgement of others intensifies self-judgement; when you are cruel to someone that is already cruel to themselves, the damage you inflict is magnified. Success was what I wanted to achieve. I'd push myself to always do better and be better and I wouldn't stop until I thought it was perfect or 'just right'. I was totally that 5 year old child who bounded into the classroom and announced 'I can recite the months of the year backwards' and it's safe to say that I was referred to as the 'teacher's pet' rather regularly. I wanted to be best friends with everybody and I wanted to please EVERYBODY. I worked so hard and was therefore classed as a Top Achiever. Here I first greeted what I now know as pressure. Being regarded as a Top Achiever was a very bitter sweet thing. You're happy because people think you're achieving and doing academically well but it's also a weight. I would say to myself 'I can't make a mistake because then I won't be an achiever' and then when you (lo and behold) made a mistake you would doubt every ability you somewhat believed you had. You used to feel confident but now you just feel like you cannot attain what people think you are. I then lost the desire to achieve; it was more a sense that I needed to achieve. It's funny how something most teachers think of as beneficial and valuable to 'high flyers' actually crushed a lot of us- it wasn't just me. It was almost like my whole year group was being suffocated by a bag full of A-Stars and slowly but surely we flaked and couldn't cope with the strain of the education system anymore. In hind's sight I wish that I could have not been so hung up on 'letting my teachers down'. I was really unwell but I couldn't face the prospect of failure and imperfection. I sat a grand total of 28 exams while in the pits of OCD, Anorexia, Depression and Anxiety with no exam support or anything. I was put on a pedestal to achieve and that was what I had to do- whether it killed me or not. If I learnt one thing from this academic mess is that one should achieve for themselves and not for anyone else. Make yourself proud before wanting to make others proud. You and your health is worth far much more than an A-Star. I do not remember a time in my life where my thought patterns were any different to how they are today - what I now know to be OCD. I was always carrying around this heavy feeling of guilt about something I didn't know about 'yet', that I might be accidentally naughty next week so I'll feel guilty and make people happy now so that it's okay and that I'm a good person.
I constantly strived to prove to myself that I was a good person. I was very self conscious and shy and would not be the epicentre of the playground. I felt more grown up than the other children; I related more to the teachers than my friends. I remember feeling like I wasn't real (derealisation) which was very distressing to me and still is. I punished myself for things that I might have done but wasn't sure about- the whole guilt thing just rested on me. I sat myself on the stairs, I used to make myself fall over, I jumped off of climbing frames to break my bones and I remember scraping my right arm along the side of the wall just because I felt like I had to. The feeling of guilt and obligation combined was incredibly powerful. Every time I spoke to someone I was worried it would be the last time, that I'd be kidnapped in my sleep and never see any familiar faces ever again, that someone was going to die, someone was going to hate me and never want to talk to me again or someone would kill me. This sparked a long and dangerous quest for perfection. Everything I said and did had to be perfect. I was sensitive to any criticism because of this and in a constant state of anxiety. Things stuck in my head like the most annoying song but more often and more disturbing. I remember watching a documentary on Michael Jackson and the image of him dangling his baby over the balcony stuck in my head and was incredibly distressing to my 9 year old self. Every time I closed my eyes or saw my little sister, I was plagued by this image. The same thing happened with words too- I remember someone calling me chubby (classmates can be so kind!) and that word stuck and orbited my mind no matter what I was doing. I quickly learned that the best thing to do is to do whatever you can to get rid of thoughts, so I used to close my eyes and imagine I was called Elizabeth and I went to a boarding school and rode ponies... When being diagnosed with OCD it is perfectly normal to not feel 'normal'.
When I was first told that I had it, my mind immediately went to the character, Emma, from Glee who cleaned every grape individually before eating it and spends an hour cleaning a pencil sharpener in one episode. I felt like I'd just been told I had something from another planet. That character from Glee wasn't a real person so the disorder did not seem real to me. I wasn't cleaning sharpeners for hours therefore I can't have that. I didn't really fit into a specific stereotype as my OCD had so many 'branches'. Anyway, I was confused and felt invalid. I had to repeatedly (maybe compulsively) ask my therapist what it was and if it was really what I had- it was. I did a lot of reading about OCD and watching YouTube videos to get a better understanding of my struggle. I can recommend the YouTuber, Kati Morton, who is a licensed marriage and family therapist and has loads of great videos as well as Katie d'Ath who specialises in OCD. The more I came to terms with it on my own, it became clearer and clearer to me that this is what I had been struggling with, unknowingly, almost all my life. The more I read, the more I related and the more I understood, the more frustrated I became with people who didn't understand! I became increasingly sensitive to the throw away comments people make about being 'so OCD' and the signs in wannabe quirky gift shops saying 'obsessive coffee disorder' or that 'obsessive Christmas disorder' jumper floating around the high street. I've never known anything to be quite so stigmatised. Be prepared but don't be ashamed. Hello to all,
You have most likely landed on this blog either because you have OCD yourself, know someone with OCD or are just generally intrigued as to what the hell that strange acronym is. Well I am here to enlighten those who are (fortunately) not in the know as to what this illness is and to provide support and comfort to those actively or passively suffering. It's a disorder of loneliness, that's for sure, so I spontaneously decided to use my words to spread a little relief to those afraid that these 3 letters are the most abstract thing on earth. They're not, I promise you just as I promise myself. I have a core diagnosis of OCD, along with a cocktail of other mental illnesses I will elaborate on in another post. I am not writing this as an 'all-knowing' figure who has a million qualifications in psychology. No- I am writing this as a sufferer finding my own path and sharing it as I go. Everything I will write about is highly likely to be from personal experience not as a random outsider with no understanding of what OCD entails. I'm not going to sugar-coat it because it sucks and it needs to be exposed as this otherwise no awareness will be spread. Through doing this I will learn and as I learn, grow and progress in recovery, I will hopefully be able to help more and more people which is what I always strive to do. |