Bottle Up And Explode

A reader said that I shouldn't say I'm in "mental pain" without explaining myself. . . and that I shouldn't talk about it at all in a place where other people are reading. But sometimes it's hard to just keep it inside, learn how to hide your feelings, fly high and proud, and All That Jazz.

So I thought I'd give anyone reading an example of what OCD means to me both to get out my rage in a healthier than usual manner and let people know what it's really like to have "that Monk thing." It's not about washing hands (although I do like clean hands). Most of my OCD happens in my head. . . organizing all my thoughts into complete sentences, repeating a series of words and statements over and over, obsessing over diseases, replacing "bad" words with good words, and making connections and seeing things that aren't necessarily there.

For example, Saturday, my birthday, I went apple picking with my family. It reminded me of the scene in BABY BOOM where Diane Keaton picks several bushels of apples at her orchard before asking her daughter, "Do you think we have enough for a pie?" And then I remembered that the last movie Diane Keaton was in, she had cancer. And so started a compulsion that hasn't yet gone away: Naming four Diane Keaton movies before thinking of The Family Stone (the one where she dies of cancer, sorry for ruining the ending.) Depending on the moment, I might also have to throw in the name of someone who didn't die in the movie, say, Claire Danes. . . but then I have to think of a movie where SHE doesn't die, like, say, ShopGirl, but not, say, Romeo and Juliet. If I mess up, and I always think I do, even if I don't, I start again. And it goes on. . . all day. On Monday, I was thinking about this particular compulsion when I got on the train, and the woman across from me had an NPR bag. . . just like one of the characters in the Stone.
Then I saw an ad for a cancer charity. I was sure it was all connected.

Sometimes I count letters in words people say. And if I think of a bad word while I'm counting, I go back and count it again till I get it right. Sometimes it takes several minutes for me to get into or leave my apartment. If I think of a "bad word" or someone who had died while I'm unlocking or locking the door, I'll stand there doing it over and over again. It's very time consuming. Sometimes I do these things in my dreams. I wake up counting.

And there are people who will say that I've been on medication and in therapy and it's worked before, and I have only myself to blame, and I'd say that's partially true. . . but medicine only does so much (in my case, very little, and when it helps, I eventually feel that something terrible is going to happen if I'm in a good place, so I revert to my old ways), but until you've walked a mile in another person's shoes (and stopped along the way to walk back to a place where you had a "bad thought" and rewalk those few steps--and I haven't even been able to BUY new shoes, because anytime I pick up something and think of one of those "bad thing" before thinking of a "good word", I have to put it back), you can't pretend to know what it's like to be afraid and jittery all the time, while at the same time completely exhausted, to not be able to concentrate to the point that you go to open a file at work, and by the time you're on the server you forget what it was you were opening because your mind has turned to mush with all this nonsensical stuff. It's a living Hell, and I don't see an end to it.

So that's what I meant when I said I was in "mental pain." My next step is to find a new psychiatrist--I got rid of my last one this week. I was not "running away" as I often do--I genuinely think he was not the right doctor for me. (And he had to use paper and pencil to figure out a 20% copay on $120. It's $24, genius.) I'm also looking into alternative therapies, like acupuncture and, outside of that, maybe exorcism? Because, to quote the great Shirley in Sweet Charity, There's got to be something better than this.