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.