Oh Chaotic Dust

I thought I was going somewhere

I thought this was a path laid out for me

Stars aligned

And I read the signs

Packed my bags and left my home

for nothing but an empty desert.

Months of walking farther in,

trusting what had brought me this far

would see me through

the endless expanse of sand

That even though

this journey had taken me into

depression

and loneliness

this was where I was meant to be.

Till one day realising

the person walking this desert

wasn’t who I wanted to be.

Bags half depleted

Happiness fully fled

I returned to what was home.

A direct route

out of the dry sea.

The nights of my return

still brought the same stars

I’d read signs in before

But I don’t know if I’d got it wrong

or if they just weren’t there anymore.

It made me dwell on the maker of those signs.

If I’d read signs where signs weren’t

what did that say about anyone having made them?

Was there some terrible hand

writing dead-ends for me to follow?

Or was it wishful thinking

masking hollow absurdity?

Either way,

it shook my faith, my certainty.

Nomad in a lonely bedroom

Company of passersby

who used to stop for longer,

Realise that I was growing weaker,

not stronger

That while they’d tread miles of straight highways

I’d completed circle after circle

after circle

Some of them not even complete

Not even particularly circular.

Too lost

to even double-back on myself

Too lost

to ever want to find my way again

Too lost

to remember what direction tasted like.

Wasted days

followed by wasteful nights

And I never left the bed I slept in

but neither did I find my way home.

The paths it seems I’ll take next don’t promise anything

None of the paths now do

Save the one I walked away from.

Save the two I walked away from.

So sing to a deaf house

about where and how things went so wrong

Too lost

for purpose to be a place to which I can belong

Where are you sign-maker?

Not that I can ever again trust

what was written in the stars

Coincidence will forever be coincidence.

It’s better than believing

I walked away from the correct path

With life getting terrible and awful

forcing such a catastrophic mistake on my part.

So laugh to an absurd universe

held in the hands of divine purpose

Laugh because you thought yourself the latter

and find yourself fallen short.

Signs void

Three year plan destroyed

Faith still waiting for the jury to return

But damaged,

damaged at the very least.

It was easier

when the promised land was 

clearly demarcated.

That television preacher rhetoric

of “walking in the promise”

meaning promised land

is good stuff.

I lapped it up

till I failed to find any milk or honey

and realised

the promised land

was birthed through fleeing and war

not spiritual satisfaction

or contentment.

I’m fleeing now

Not in a direction

or anywhere in particular,

just fleeing

Fleeing by staying in my room

Fleeing by refusing to job search

Fleeing because it’s easier than building,

than fighting

Fleeing because depression is a vicious cycle

and stepping off is hard

even when you know what you have to do

Fleeing because I am lost,

Too lost

to even flee properly

And weak,

Too weak

to fight

To even type the few emails

that could set everything off.

And I don’t know why,

because when the dust of Egypt

still coated my sandals

I could’ve defeated the giants myself

Yet now

I can’t even raise my lips to a trumpet

and walk around the block each day

So pray at divine purpose

and laugh to an absurd universe

over how I became this way

Then turn to the only one that can take control

and refuse to live this out another day.

Oh Chaotic Dust,

Remember how brave you were? You were very open about being in therapy. You talked to your friends about it. You talked to your girlfriend about it. You even spoke about it at events on campus. But you never really spoke about it, did you? Everyone just thought you were talking about what happened during your teenage years. They didn’t know what you really spoke about in therapy. As proud and brave as you were, you were a fraud. And so, when that Christian counsellor failed you, you didn’t have a group of people to talk to, but a group of people who thought you were done with therapy, all cured.

So you were alone with your thoughts again, alone with the demons, and through those religious therapy sessions a subtle shift had occurred in your perspective. As useless as those sessions were, they reinforced your view that the intrusive thoughts in your head needed to be prayed away. This was a spiritual battle and so it would have a spiritual solution. You needed to pray and have faith and, in time, God would heal you. Bizarrely, you actually got a little ego boost out of this. Being worthy of a “spiritual attack” meant you were in some way doing something right. Oh the lies you believed.

That Christian counsellor didn’t even use the terms ‘mental health’ or ‘intrusive thoughts’. It’s all too easy to pick up the vocabulary and the ideologies of those around you, especially of those trusted to help. Looking back, if someone had just used those words you’d probably have been able to put it all together. You’d at least have known the correct phrases to google.

You did great at school, learning all the curriculum required, but when it came to mental health and wellbeing you were absolutely clueless. That’s one of the sad things about mental illnesses: so many of them are avoidable. And many of the ones which aren’t are very treatable, but we don’t prioritise learning about mental health; not in schools and not anywhere. Despite being a studious, attentive student, you had a complete misunderstanding of the condition you were suffering from.

They say admitting you have a problem is half the battle. You’re not sure that applies when you don’t even know what the problem is, or believe the problem to be something it isn’t. You’d admitted to having a problem, but instead of being halfway there you’d taken two steps backwards. Here’s a heartbreaking fact for you, Chaotic Dust: after that Christian counsellor it would be another two years before you spoke to anyone else about what was going on in your mind.

Oh Chaotic Dust,

Remember the last religious therapy session? You’ll lose track of how many sessions you had with the Christian counsellor, but the important parts – it’s a spiritual attack, you need to pray and chat and keep doing what you’re doing – are stuck with you. That last session is stuck with you too, because the Christian counsellor didn’t tell you to continue praying with him, or by yourself, or even with trusted friends, but with another member of the church who had been trained to pray over spiritual attacks: some form of spiritual prayer warfare or whatever that was. You don’t know, because you never went.

You never went because opening up to one person had taken everything – as it often does. It took months for you to feel comfortable sharing with that Christian counsellor and now he was ending your sessions and wanted you to open up (and open up pretty much immediately – no first few sessions of mind games and figuring out if this new person would turn you over to the police) to someone else.

He just didn’t get it.

How many others have felt like that? How many times have you felt it? You’ll feel it a lot over the years. You may always feel it, or have moments when you feel it. Moments when people talk about how they love to just sit and listen to music, or read a book, or even just lie down doing nothing. Worst of all, you will always feel it – a sharp, frustrated pang – every time someone says they’re “just a little OCD”.

No, that Christian counsellor, after you had opened up so vulnerably, didn’t get it at all. But you were numb and you were lost and you were still fighting every second of every minute of every hour of every anxious, guilt-ridden, intrusive thought-filled day, so you thanked him kindly and took the contact details of this person/group who would do a deep-cleanse prayer therapy of your soul. As you left that office you knew you would never, ever have the courage to contact them, and neither could you rely on that Christian counsellor again. You had stepped out, you had opened up, you had done the (religious) therapy, and now you were back out alone in the cold, just you and the intrusive thoughts (or demons depending on interpretation).

Would the prayer therapy have worked? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Years of praying and therapy and opening up to people has told you that, no, it probably wouldn’t have worked. Though perhaps the steps of opening up to more people would in itself have helped. More what ifs for the pile.

You’ll remember that walk back after your last Christian therapy session for years. You walked through bustling, sunny streets and a new feeling enveloped you with its cold grey arms. It wasn’t abandonment or loneliness. It was depression. The sun shone and the people laughed and smiled and chatted away and you felt nothing. Hopelessness engulfed you, a numbness like you’d never known before. There was no more therapy. The Christian counsellor had put the ball back in your court, and you just didn’t have it in you to pick it up. You didn’t have the strength to take that next step.

When you walk with a person through similar trials you have to promise that you’ll be with them to help them take the next steps. People don’t need you to heal them or validate them or save them (you’ve tried that before and you know it doesn’t work). People need you alongside them, helping them to take the next step, and then the next one, and so on and so on and so on until they don’t need you there any more. That Christian counsellor thought you didn’t need him anymore, but you did. You did. Because of his actions you believed that the only options were now closed to you. That’s abandonment, and it was going to lead you down ever darker thought patterns.

You reached your university campus and you sat in one of the cafes and you were depressed. There’s a picture in your mind of that moment; other students swelling around you, passing by in blissful ignorance, and you sat there feeling absolutely nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Oh Chaotic Dust,

Remember what the Christian counsellor told you? He told you the intrusive thoughts were some form of spiritual or demonic attack. Seriously. He looked at you, caring and sombre, and told you the intrusive thoughts of hurting yourself and others were a demonic attack. He told you the answer was prayer. What, exactly, did he think you’d been doing all this time? Praying was one of the few tactics you had stuck with: over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

Jesus is my rock and my redeemer.

Jesus is my rock and my redeemer.

Jesus is my rock and my redeemer.

He didn’t just say prayer, though. He also said that you needed to talk and discuss your past and current anxieties: all those other cliches. Years later you’ll realise the ridiculousness of his take on your situation. Then you’ll grow angry – really, deeply angry – and rightly so. Then you’ll become sad that you were failed so monumentally, that you opened up to someone who styled themselves as someone who could (who would) help, and received nothing. There’ll also be times you laugh at it. You were told it was a demonic attack. There is, in the right light, something horrifyingly funny about that.

Later in your life a professional will diagnose you as most likely having OCD after a brief phone call in which you only alluded to your symptoms. But that Christian counsellor, with far more information, got it catastrophically wrong.

Ultimately, you’ll probably always have mixed feelings towards those sessions and that Christian counsellor. Telling him was certainly a needed step, but telling him was on you. The botched response was on him. That botched response would go on to cause not just more mental problems for you, but also a deep mistrust of the church. It would, and maybe always will be, a block between you and organised religion.

But go back, go back, go back to that first time you heard it called a “spiritual attack”. What did you make of it then? You believed it. As shocking a truth as that is to you now, you believed it. Growing up in church, the vague notion of a “spiritual attack” was something you knew of. So you took his word that more “therapy” sessions and praying would do the trick. At the time, at least, it didn’t do you any harm, and so you kept going, perhaps because of your upbringing or perhaps because of the desperation of your condition.

Even now, years of OCD, depression and other mental health struggles later, even having stood up in churches to talk about OCD, you don’t really know if religions always get mental health wrong. Certainly, in your own experience you were let down by an organisation that told you it would always be there for you. For some people, being told their mental health was to do with demons would have been devastating, with horrific consequences. For others, it may help. Perhaps if you had done things a little differently the prayer and the talking would have done the trick for you too.

It’s easy to take cheap shots at religions these days, especially over something like mental health, and especially when you’ve been let down. But most of those critiques aren’t nuanced enough (though, to be fair, when is anything on the internet ever nuanced?), and it wasn’t a religion that let you down (question of God letting you down saved for another time), it was one man; a man who really did want to help, but who just wasn’t up to the task. 

Ideologies are important and, for your part, you didn’t go to the NHS or a therapist, you went to where you were taught to go: the church. It’s easy to then blame the church, and it’s hard to take responsibility for your actions and choices yourself, but responsibility you must take. No one gets better by blaming their mental health on others, or by making others solely responsible for healing them. As scary as it is, that’s on you.

Oh Chaotic Dust,

You don’t remember the first therapy session. You probably blurted out a lot about your past and your ex and then left it at that. But you definitely remember the first time you voiced what was really going on in your head. It remains, all these years later, a memory as clear as day.

The room was spacious and full of sofas. You sat on a large, brown one and the Christian counsellor sat adjacent on another. There were windows opposite you, looking out over a busy street. The low ceiling and dark lighting made the room feel safe and secret. You liked the Christian counsellor. He was late fifties or early sixties, spoke softly and listened to what you had to say. Still, the first time you talked about the thoughts in your head was a gamble; maybe the biggest gamble you ever made.

Therapy is all about trust. Did you trust the Christian counsellor? Enough, enough to share a little of the hell in your mind. You didn’t share it all in the first or second sessions. Those sessions are for introductions and tests. Formal tests for you: the therapist asking about your life and what’s wrong, and informal tests for him, as you try to figure out if you can trust the person who claims they can help you.

Satisfied enough by the findings of the first few sessions, you said that there were often horrible thoughts in your mind. Then you shared some (but not all) of them. And then you wept.

Bawling your eyes out in front of someone you barely know is embarrassing, but the relief that came with that particular moment was worth it. After that session you had a little more hope. The intrusive thoughts still plagued every waking moment of your life, but you had taken another step – a big step – the step where you say what the actual problem is. You don’t remember what the Christian counsellor said the first time you properly opened up. Steps where you open up often aren’t about what the other person says. As long as it’s not rejection, you’re just relieved.

That’s what people who open up are looking for: acceptance. Acceptance doesn’t require an answer, and it certainly doesn’t need a solution or a plan, or to raise questions. It needs to be affirmation; a quiet, ‘I’m here’ or ‘I hear you’ or even no words at all; a hand on the shoulder, a gentle nod.

The Christian counsellor accepted you, and that was liberation. Of course, what he went on to say was not helpful. It wasn’t hurtful. It was loving and kind, and he really did have your best interest at heart. But while telling someone and still being accepted may have stopped you from taking your own life, you went on to find that not all therapists and therapies are equal, and that no matter how good a person’s intentions, the ideologies they subscribe to can cause terrible harm.

In short, the Christian counsellor was out of his depth, and you would learn the hard way (years later) that when you are mentally unwell and go to someone for therapy you should always, always go to a proper professional. So much for that first big step.

Oh Chaotic Dust,

While that relationship was to last a while longer, you couldn’t tell your girlfriend what was going on in your head. Friends were also too risky, so you chose to tell a half-truth to someone you thought may be able to help.

A large living room, awkwardly sat on the sofa. The pastor at your church thinks this is just a routine catch-up, but you have an agenda. Six years on, he still doesn’t know either. You chat away and eventually allude to wanting to speak to someone about events in your past. You daren’t say it’s to do with you, so you talk about an ex instead and some of what she went through (other people’s dark secrets are so much easier to tell). You say you’d like to talk to someone in order to process it. He smiles warmly and says “of course,” starts talking about someone he can put you in contact with, an ex-doctor turned Christian counsellor, but you’re already filling up with hope and relief (plus fighting off the ever-present OCD demons).

That was your first step, Chaotic Dust. It was tiny: tiny, tiny, tiny. But don’t despise small beginnings. That tiny step led to other steps: some bigger, some even smaller, but each one a step nonetheless. Look at it for a moment. In that first step you didn’t say “OCD” (you didn’t and wouldn’t know it was OCD for a couple more years). You didn’t say anything about what you were struggling with, just that you wanted to talk to someone.

People often think the first step has to be this outpouring of thought and experience to someone, or that it only happens in the thunder and the rain. Your first step was a fraud and a sham. You were pretending to need help for something else. It was yours though, the same way everyone’s first step is, and as such that first step can be whatever a person wants it to be; as big or as small, as revealing or as guarded, as true or as false as they want it to be.

The cliche is that the first step is “admitting you need help” or saying “I need help.” But first steps can be smaller than that. An easier phrase is, “I think I’d like to talk to someone.” Requiring people to say “need” can turn people off the idea. Stigma is complex, and deconstructing the unhelpful practices rampant in society is about making mental health help as accessible as possible. You didn’t say “need.” That step would have been too big for you. But you found another, smaller step, and you took that. You should be proud of that. You should be proud of every step, as everyone with mental illness should be.

Of course, in many ways that first step was a step in the wrong direction. You would take up your pastor’s offer of help (and to be fair to him, he played his part well) and find yourself beginning a therapy of sorts. For you, church and Christianity were the supports of your upbringing. Mental health was tied into faith (Rock and redeemer. Rock and redeemer. Rock and redeemer). So it made sense to have therapy with someone who understood all that. You still think that’s important, but the next few months would show you that it can also be catastrophic; an experience that, far from saving you, would stall (and perhaps even set back) your recovery by years.

Onwards, to religious therapy.

Oh Chaotic Dust,

Remember that peaceful moment? Waking up beside a girl you were crazy about. The relationship didn’t fall apart after that, but you weren’t in it anymore. You knew, as sure as you’d ever been, that you couldn’t tell her about the awful, twisted images and thoughts that plagued your mind. Her breaking up with you would be the least of it: she’d tell others and then you’d lose your friends, your acquaintances: everyone.

But everything else with her was great, and you couldn’t break up for no reason, so you stayed, continuing with your tactic of doing nothing, praying you’d weather the storm.

A relationship with one person with severe OCD is tricky enough. When the other person doesn’t know, it becomes something else altogether. Six years on, that girl still doesn’t know. Mental illness makes secret-keepers of us all.

You had a lot of fun during those months together. You went on walks and holidays, had picnics and parties. You laughed and hugged and supported each other. But, as ever, there was other stuff going on in your head. You never thought about it from her side – there wasn’t time for that. Time, when you have a mental illness, is for surviving. But what was it like for her? Most people aren’t as good at acting as they think they are. In your moments together, did she wonder why you weren’t fully present? Did she ask your friends if they had noticed anything off about you?

Mental illness isolates. Or, rather, the shame and the stigma of talking about mental illness isolates. But isolation isn’t exile. Mental illness isolation means kissing your girlfriend and smiling as she smiles back at you. It means going for a run with your mate and chatting away. It means sitting, taking notes in a lecture. It means that life on the outside goes on just the same, but inside you’re terrified, ashamed and cursed to silence. It means living in one world externally and another internally.

Churchill said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” There’s a certain defiant resolve in that statement; one that all people need. But what lies implicit in those words is, and has been, death to so many: keep going by yourself. That’s what you did, for years and years, and it never helped.

You had a beautiful relationship, but you couldn’t fully submerge yourself in it. You kept going in that relationship by yourself. That wasn’t fair on her. Many people with mental illnesses do it though: they keep their mental health secret for their own sake. Maybe for some, they get treatment, or get better some other way, and the relationship continues with the other partner none the wiser. That didn’t happen for you though, and after an explosive conversation, OCD would dash that particular hope for happiness.

You’ll learn a very important truth after that. Not straight away, but years later you’ll see how different things could have been, that if you’re going through hell just keeping on going isn’t always enough. No, if you’re going through hell then tell someone.

Oh Chaotic Dust,

Remember all the habits you picked up along the way? Not the cliche habits, like taking sleeping pills or other drugs, but the more subtle ones; habits people didn’t realise were coping mechanisms.

People laughed at you as you became pseudo-addicted to mobile games. And you’d play music all the time, not because you particularly wanted to, but because the music acted as a moderate distraction. You stopped reading articles for your course in silence and kept headphones on instead. That was a difficult skill to learn, but learn it you did. All other reading, of course, had to stop. Sitting alone with a book is not in the intrusive thought OCD sufferer’s comfort zone.

When you did return to university after the Summer break, distractions came easier. At first, you were still recovering from your stint in the hospital (probably a good thing considering how much easier it is to sleep when you’re shattered – another habit you’d pick up; ensuring you were overtired as a way of being able to sleep), but you quickly threw yourself into the life of a university student again.

Reading, as mentioned, was tricky, but you figured it out. Seminars were hard but, in a way, you got better at them. The awkward silences after the lecturer asked a question were no longer just awkward for you, they were genuinely unbearable: the ticking of the clock, the anxiety of answering in a group of peers, alongside the anxiety of the intrusive thoughts and the general social anxiety too. What a concoction. A concoction that led to you becoming more vocal and involved (or else it was the insufferable silence); an indirect consequence of your condition that stands in contradiction to how society views mental illness as a wholly negative force. But mental health is as complex and, at times, paradoxical as the intricate humans who experience it.

So, in some ways you did better at university. The silence before sleep remained a bone-chilling terror, but late nights overworking in the library helped to fix that – “Wow! You’re really taking final year seriously! Good on you.” Good on you. Good on you. Oh how misread many of the habits you picked up were. They weren’t classic cries for help, they were just what you needed to do to survive.

Six years on and many therapists and conversations and life events later, you’ll still have some of those habits. You’ll still struggle to watch a film without playing on your phone. You’ll still automatically put music on as soon as you wake up or start walking somewhere. You’ll still work really hard.

Sometimes the habits picked up to survive an illness outlast the illness itself. The jury is still out on that one for you. So many of the actions you perform can be traced back to your mental illness. Even you’ll come to misunderstand them, or sever them from their origin and have them as part of you, free from the illness they once combated.

Sometimes you’ll think about someone you know and their habits – innocent habits just as you have – and you’ll wonder how and why they picked them up. The girl on the bus with headphones in, staring at her phone. Your friend who’s always late. The man humming to himself as he shops. The colleague who keeps themselves perpetually busy.

 It’s not just scars that remain after mental illness but habits too. Or perhaps the habits are scars: marks left on our lives by a time we’d rather forget.

Of all the extra habits you picked up though, there is one you’ll kick. Again, it’s a little thing that, held onto, is hope incarnate. You will read again, Chaotic Dust, and not with music blaring in the background, but in the quiet of your room, in the comfort of your chair, in the peace of your own mind.