“I’ll keep working on my mental health issues for as long as I need to if that’s what it takes to overcome them.”

When I was ten years old, a spider fell on my head. A big one, brown with a tiny body and ridiculously long legs. I didn’t notice it until I went to the bathroom and caught sight of myself in the mirror. That’s when I screamed. 

After the incident, I kept on checking for spiders. I’d always been afraid of them, but I’d never been paranoid up until then. I checked under the bed before going to sleep, I looked in corners of rooms and brushed a hand through my hair whenever my brain whispered for me to do so. I still do. In fact, I’m brushing my hand through my hair right now. 

The spider incident wasn’t the start of what I learned was OCD, but it was the moment that led to the, “Something is wrong with me” epiphany. It went downhill from there and no one took me seriously. Maybe it wasn’t their fault; I’d grown up in a nuclear family with very typical attitudes towards mental health issues. I loved them, though. Still do. They’re amazing, even if their attitudes aren’t always. 

Because of this, my efforts at trying to tell them about the ‘habits’ failed. “Just tell it to go away,” I was told. “There’s a girl out there who claims to have these habits you’re talking about. She named her OCD Olivia and whenever it came back to her, she stopped it in its tracks. Why don’t you try that too?” 

I had tried that: Olivia, William, Lexie, The Monster… None of the names had worked and, no matter how hard I tried telling these imaginary people to go away, none of it worked. Either they were very stubborn or I wasn’t a severe enough disciplinarian. 

When I was fifteen, it got even worse. It didn’t exactly slam into me, but the realisation did. I started to worry about illness. Not in the way usually discussed with OCD, the whole, “Oh God, germs” way, although I’d battled that for a while too. This was in a “Why do I have a headache? Oh no, it says headaches are caused by brain tumours” kind of way, a black-out-panic sort of worrying, which hit every few months. 

It was always cancer. Always, caused because I’d watched a movie about a girl who died. The girl was my age, fifteen, so naturally that meant I was at risk. I’m shaking writing this because it still terrifies me. The constant, “What ifs?” followed by another futile round of games against fate. 

To stop the worries from coming true, I made lists in my head, lists of numbers – always avoiding five and fifteen. If I wrote or said any number ending in a five, or even saw one written down on paper, I had to follow it immediately with another number. Usually it was six. It still is six. I write numbers with a five backwards so I can evade some of the rules. 

Those rules don’t make sense. They can change and warp and send me spinning around in mad circles, but they always come back. It happens with words too, bad words. It, ugly, blood, death, suffering… the list grows with every book I read and my eyes rake the page until I see a different word with a positive meaning. Three good words for each of the bad. 

It goes on. There are too many mental rituals to name. 

With people in the street, it’s no different. This is the part that I never usually mention when I’m asked about my rituals; I feel terrible about it myself. People who are ill, people who are disabled, people who have any kind of connotation with ‘badness’… I always have to find someone else to ‘take the badness away’ after I look at them. It’s like the other people cancel out the bad luck in a twisted game where the temporary prize is not dying.

It’s always about not dying. I’m terrified of hospitals, not because of the things they can do to me – although there’s that too – but because of the people in them. They reek of death, even the nurses. Badness is a constant shadow. I can’t think straight, I can’t look straight, I can’t worry about anyone other than myself until it’s all over and I’m surrounded by positive things again. 

Sometimes I wonder what would have to happen for everything to fall to pieces. But giving up isn’t really an option. I refuse to let it be an option. 

It doesn’t help that I’m not medically diagnosed. I’ve had help from charities over the years and all agree that OCD has a major impact on my life, but there isn’t much hope of getting an official diagnosis until later. I’m currently on a waiting list for CBT, though, which I hope will help me in the long run. I’m a maladaptive daydreamer and there’s a whole lot more to sort out, but I’ll keep working on my mental health issues for as long as I need to if that’s what it takes to overcome them. 

Stigma-wise, I’ve kept what goes on in my brain quiet for a long time. I was completely unaware of a lot until recently, and I’m still learning even now. As I mentioned earlier, I grew up in a very typical family where mental health was for snowflakes or attention-seekers. If you wanted to succeed in life, you had to ‘pick yourself up and carry on’.

I remember I had a friend who was going through OCD when we were little – not that I ever mentioned mine to her – and she was constantly called a drama queen. She could be one sometimes, I admit, and that definitely didn’t help ease the stigmas associated with mental health issues. The attention-seeking and the disorder were never related in any way. She’s still extremely spotlight-orientated now and her OCD has faded into the background long ago. 

The usual response with me has nothing to do with being attention-seeking, which I suppose is lucky. It’s typically, “But you don’t look like a tidy person!”. It’s true. I don’t look like a tidy person. Actually, I’ve never obsessively cleaned my room in my life. I am still freaked out by spit and left-over food remains, but my OCD is more internal than anything. I don’t lock myself away in my room with a pack of cleaning wipes. I’ve never torn the skin off my hands with cleaning fluids and I couldn’t care less about the order of coloured pencils. In fact, the idea that coloured pencils matter in OCD makes me shake my head in frustration. 

I have my patterns and my symptoms, of course, and some of my rituals are very physical. But most of them, like me and my general personality, are so quiet you would hardly notice, even if I told you about them. Even I hardly notice sometimes as they have been ingrained into me for so long, but hopefully I’ll be able to unpick some of the patterns in the future. The best place to start is now. 

As this has been a little dark, and to fully cover the idea of, ‘the good, the bad and the ugly’, I’d like to end it with an anecdote about one of my most memorable (and recent, come to think of it) discoveries about OCD. I’m not sure if anyone else has ever experienced this, but apparently compulsive de-cluttering is another symptom of OCD that I didn’t realise was connected until a few weeks ago.

Instead of cleaning, this is an, ‘I can’t work with all these normal objects around me, so I’m throwing them away’ thing. Recently, I had one of these de-cluttering bursts and deleted my whole email account – probably one of the more extreme things compulsions have led me to do, as it was a pretty important email account. It got even more extreme, and also quite alarming, when I realised that all my documents were attached to the account and that I wouldn’t be able to get back into them. 

Luckily, it was all sorted out quickly and I got the account and all of my documents back, but it’s something I’ll need to watch out for in the future, among a lot of other things, but I’m sure I’ll pick it up as I go. Observation is key, as long as it doesn’t involve obsessive checking for illness or spiders and lead to endless counting in your head.