Oh Chaotic Dust,
Holidays are different when you’re mental ill. When your survival plan involves keeping yourself constantly busy and distracted, relaxing on the beach, or by a pool, or going on long walks through the countryside, is the last thing your fragile mind needs. That being the case, your family holiday of Summer 2015 was without a doubt one of the darkest times of your life.
Nothing provided any relief from the intrusive thoughts: not swimming, nor board games, nor reading, nor watching television. By then, every waking moment was a battle. You’ll tell people that, when you become brave enough, you’ll tell lots of your friends, and family, and even strangers at events. But you won’t ever tell someone who fully understands. So let’s explain it now, for you and for others who are mentally ill:
Every single moment was a struggle. That doesn’t mean at one point during the day, every day. It doesn’t mean once an hour of every day. It means every single second an intrusive thought was making its way into your mind; a thought that was horrible, that brought with it anxiety and fear.
Read that statement again. It’s a terrifying truth. You know that truth by now, but others don’t. You don’t begrudge them for it, you truly are glad that many people won’t and can’t understand what you went through. If you keep getting better at the rate you are, perhaps in ten or so years you won’t be able to understand it any longer.
That holiday you would distract yourself during the day, and then night would come, and that was when the real terror took hold, because when you have a certain type of OCD, there is nothing worse than trying to go to sleep. If you distract yourself with your phone or television or a book then you won’t fall asleep, but if you just lie there, with the lights out and no around, it’s just you and your thoughts; and that’s something no one with OCD wants- ever.
There was something else that holiday though: a viral infection that left you physically drained. That’s an awful combination: being both mentally and physically ill. People don’t tend to think about how a person can be ill in more than one way, but you couldn’t escape that reality.
You found yourself in a random hospital in the middle of nowhere, late at night, being prodded and poked by doctors. Too serious, they said, for here, better ship you off to a larger hospital. Remember what you felt? Hope. Hope, because, and this remains tragically sad to this day, you thought that maybe, if you were lucky, it could be terminal. That’s how rapidly and totally OCD had shifted your perspective on one of the most fundamental human values: life itself – you didn’t want it anymore.
You slumped into the car and your Dad drove off, left the hospital at midnight and drove till it was light. All the while, resting against the cool glass of the passenger window, you fantasised about being told what you had was terminal, about the peace it would bring, about what people would say at your funeral. The weird thing is, it worked. Those daydreams, as dark as they were, brought some relief from the demons. Morbid idealisation turned out to be one of the only (temporary) curatives.
Then you arrived and they told you they could treat it (though they couldn’t figure out what it was) and you were crushed. One day in the hospital hooked up to some drugs and then back out – “you must be so glad to be better!” – without the convenient, and desperately wanted, salvation of death.