Author: ohchaoticdust

Oh Chaotic Dust,

Remember that moment? Mid-Summer 2015, after the bike ride through the countryside. The heat was tempered by the breeze and you were young and in the throes of early relationship infatuation. A pub lunch in the shade of a cosy beer garden. Easy laughter and conversation and fun. Then, back to the house to fall into a deep slumber, your girlfriend gently snoozing beside you in a bed bathed in the hazy sunlight of an early August afternoon.

You woke first, and that moment – that single, peaceful moment – still stands to this day.

OCD and its accompanying demons were a month or two into their siege of your mind and you fought back with your prayers and your compulsions but there was never a stillness, just a negation of opposing mental forces.

That moment though – the soft light serene on the sleeping face of a girl you adored; for those seconds there was nothing else. No obsessions. No compulsions. No intrusive thoughts. In many ways, that moment has lasted to this day. It remains a beacon of hope, a reminder that even though mental illness can sap the life out of each and every hour and minute and second, it can’t always win. It doesn’t always win. There is beauty in the lives and moments of the most mundane and mentally tortured of lives.

When life becomes about fighting, about anxiety, about fear, about therapy or plans or opening up to people, it’s easy to forget that the years the OCD took from you weren’t wasted at all. The crops weren’t eaten whole, and nor was every field spoiled. Mental illness can become the only lens people view their lives or their pasts through, but there were so many times, even with the OCD and the anxiety, in between the depression and the fear, when you were really, truly happy. That’s not just true of you, that’s true of everyone: people aren’t their demons. People aren’t their mental illnesses. Don’t let the lies tell you otherwise.

That moment was hope for you. It will be hope for you for years after, supporting you on the days the thoughts become unbearable. You’ll need it too, because as transcendent a moment as it was, as safe a respite as you had for those seconds, as with all moments, it came to an end.

Oh Chaotic Dust,

What you did was twofold: it was to fight and it was to do nothing. When that first intrusive thought entered your head – A meal outside with friends. Sunlight pouring down on the happy smiling faces of Summer gaiety. A snake slithering into an otherwise happy mind. – it was different from other thoughts. Even back then, I think you knew that. There was something off about it: a shade more unnerving, more dangerous, than anything that had floated through your mind before. You didn’t want it there. You didn’t want it at all. So you shook your head.

And shook your head.

And shook your head.

And shook your head.

Not in an obvious way, but quietly, slightly, so that no one would notice.

But the thought wasn’t a snake to be shaken loose. It was a seed. Roots subtly sunk into the fertile ground of your mind and no silent act could shake them loose. You couldn’t say anything to anyone. Normal people don’t have disturbing thoughts. Or, rather, only the kind of people you avoid, pity, abhor have those kinds of images in their heads. So you couldn’t tell anyone because that would be a bad idea; that would end in the asylum or the prison or social exile.

All that was fear: fear that those thoughts meant something about you as a person; fear of what people would do if they found out; fear because if you had allowed yourself to entertain such thoughts for even a moment it would mean you were that kind of person, and that would be a point of no return. You could never unring that bell. You’d heard before that behind every fear is a lie. Up till then you’d believe that to be true. It’s not often that mental illness can be treated by proverbs or inspirational quotes though.

So you turned to one of the religious practices you were brought up to lean on: prayer. At first, a short prayer here and there. Then, before long, it was a prayer every time an intrusive thought popped up. Always, you soon realised, the same:

Jesus is my rock and my redeemer.

Jesus is my rock and my redeemer.

Jesus is my rock and my redeemer.

An internal shake of the head. A reset of the mind.

You’ve often thought about how many times you’ve repeated that phrase, the same way others wonder how many times they’ve turned the light switch off and on, or relocked the front door, or washed their hands. It became food to you, and then water, and then the very air you needed to breathe. A rapid, repeated, anxious heartbeat of your soul. You’ll go on to wonder if you were really praying, or if the words were just a compulsion of your condition. You’ll wonder if they saved you or only made it worse. And, as the intrusive thoughts become ever darker and more frequent, you’ll wonder if God was ever even listening at all.

Oh Chaotic Dust,

In turns you’ve obsessed over and avoided those early days of mental illness. You would spend months refusing to even think about the innocuous trigger of the mental hell you would for years endure only to spend the next few weeks pouring over every detail with one question: couldn’t it have gone differently?

But that’s not how triggers work. For all your wishful thinking, you know that if it hadn’t been that Summer it would have happened eventually. More what ifs for you: what if it had happened earlier? What if it had happened later? Either way, you would have ended up ill before receiving help. And either way, you’d be forced to face the true demons; not the innocuous story or the first sickening thoughts, but the events in your past that should have been warning signs and, sadly, one of those things you have no control over: your faulty mental wiring.

That’s one of the goods that often comes out of mental illness: it forces you to face all that you’re scared of. Of course, often it does this by bringing you to the brink of sanity and life itself, but when you step up (and it is a huge stepping up) you face it all: the abuse, the wiring, the predispositions, the habits, the self-harm, the doubt, the depression, the suicidal thoughts, the addictions, the upbringing. Not all of those were you, but all of them have been someone, and many wrestle with more than one of those.

That’s another thing about mental illness – one of the really horrible ones – birds of a feather flock together. It’s rarely ever just one thing. You know that. You’ve been told by one therapist that she wants to just focus on your depression, then told by the next that he wants to just focus on the OCD. And you’re sat there, screaming at them that you’re a person – whole and raw and complex – and that it’s you they need to be treating, not the names and diagnoses. But that bit, the treating you, well, that can’t be done by anyone else, not really. It’s a scary thought, because while every single therapy session, no matter how painful or seemingly mundane, was worthwhile, at the end of the hour the session always ends and then, after a bunch of months, all the sessions end and it’s on you alone.

That’s where all the wondering about if it could have gone differently ends too. No matter when or how it happened, realistically it was inevitable, and it would be on you to get the help you needed. The trigger of Summer 2015 was a random crack in the damn, but given your past and yourself, eventually a crack was going to form. The important question over what could have gone differently is over what you could have done differently. You know those things now, but back then you didn’t.

And what you did do made it all so much worse.

Oh Chaotic Dust,

Let’s start from the beginning; not at birth or adolescence or adulthood (mental health doesn’t allow for such chronological openings) but the start as chance or fate chose it to be: Summer 2015, an unnoticed mental breakdown.

Your second year of university had ended as successfully as any academic year could. You achieved good grades, played for a university sports team, lived with your friends and, by some miracle, got the girl. Friendship turned to excitement and romance in the last weeks of Spring, and when you left for home it was infatuated.

That exterior of happiness and success is often how it goes. For some, the signs are so visible others are screaming at them to get help, to open up, to change. For others, the signs are only internal: no one else knows their pain or their need for help. That’s how it was when you were seventeen, going on eighteen, with a girl who was nothing but bad news for you, and that’s how it was at university. The breakdown of Summer 2015 exhibited no signs and that’s one of the scary things about mental health: it can be invisible and silent to all.

Prior to the breakdown, though, you went home happy and told your family about how much you were enjoying university, and they were happy too. Through that Summer you texted and called and skyped your girlfriend as those infatuated do. One more year of university, with friends and romance and a person by your side who you could talk to about anything.

Except you couldn’t tell her everything, for over Summer something strange happened. A second-hand story from an acquaintance. Laughing in a garden over drinks and food. Then the next day you woke up with a single, sickening thought in your head; a slither of a moment which would spiral so inexorably that it would go on to envelope and consume literally every waking moment of your mental life. That’s how it can be with mental health. The skies can be a brilliant blue and then suddenly it’s rain and lightning and darkness overhead, without a single whisper of thunder for a warning.

And this was only the beginning.

Oh Chaotic Dust,

Remember before; before your mind was a menagerie and your impulses erratic? Summer 2015 and you didn’t know what it was; wouldn’t know until 2018. Three years is a long time, and now it’s been four since you’ve known.

In childhood, you now realise, it lurked in corners and crevices. A thought here or a reaction there: a feeling that you just have to do x or y or z, or any of the other illogical actions you felt so inexplicably compelled to do. But happiness reigned in your childhood nonetheless. In adolescence, more sporadic, though those stories are for other times. And so, when it hit – like a truck screeching into your mind, tires tearing smoke into your eyes; a deafening, suffocating isolation – it hit as though from nowhere.

That’s when this chapter of your life began: at 20. In time you’ll see that the years before and after can only be understood by the key you were given through those three years: a cipher to help you untangle the webs and the lies, the past and the future. You’ll learn that others are like you too, though their particulars may differ. And that’s okay, for while in some twisted way the mental hell made you feel special, you’ll learn that you don’t need to be unique like that to have worth.

Oh Chaotic Dust, it gets better, I promise you – and I know how painful it got. The deterioration of mental health is a horrible, horrible thing. The OCD monster is a cunning, clever creature. The stigma, the shame, the self-imposed silence. Its defeat is not inevitable, as many sadly attest, and even after the endless therapists and therapy sessions, you’ll still find yourself alone, a nagging compulsion in your mind, and you’ll wonder, now you’ve gone through all the healing motions: what happens next?

That’s when you’ll discover your voice.