OCD is not my conscience

But neither is it my divinely-ordained punishment

Yesterday was the funeral of Karly, my kidney recipient I eulogised in my post last month. I’m really glad I was able to go as it was a beautiful ceremony and I believe my being there was useful and meaningful for her parents.

However, the high emotional stakes of the event predictably triggered my OCD. I felt physically sick through the ceremony as my brain kept chanting and chittering away with the grotesque notion (which feels almost obscene to write, but it is important that people know the reality of OCD) that I had caused her death through my kidney being somehow “tainted” by my evilness. I am thankfully sane enough to recognise this makes no logical sense… and yet these magical thoughts are miasmic, with a horrible, seductive pull. Even though you know rational scientific inquiry would fail to pinpoint the taint, fail to capture it under glass, still you fear that you’re trapped in a fundamentally irrational universe in which, somehow, you poison everything you touch (and can, in turn, be poisoned by everything that touches you). At heart OCD is this feeling of taintedness, which your brain then scrambles to find explanations for, against which the sufferer engages in compulsions to ward off. It has a near-physical, tangible reality that is hard to explain to someone without OCD. In adverts for cleaning sprays, in which objects or people glow toxic green, yellow or red with bacterial infection… well, that is how it feels.

One of the most seductive, insidious tricks of OCD is that it pretends to be the voice of your conscience. Obviously, OCD often cautions you that it – and it alone – is able to keep you safe, but it also regularly warns you that it – and it alone – is able to keep you good.

(I recognise here that I am writing as though OCD is an entity seperate to myself and I can only plead that this is how it feels. A friend used to get frustrated with me for speaking like this, reminding me that OCD is ultimately part of my brain. She told me that while autism is a constitutive part of her, my OCD is a condition I can get over. I’m inclined to think these discourses are socially constructed and that there is significant overlap between the brains of many individuals with OCD and the brains of many individuals with ASD, though I appreciate that if you treat having OCD as your identity, you won’t challenge the behaviours and cognitive distortions it saddles you with).

However, if I think back to the actions in my life I most deeply and sincerely regret (which are invariably those actions who have hurt someone I loved), they have often been – in part – motivated by the distorted thought processes of OCD, not least catastrophising and all-or-nothing thinking. Even in cases where that was not the case, my OCD has rarely furnished me with greater compassion or decency, I fear, but with a tendency to obey the letter of the law rather than the spirit – a tendency I have had to reach beyond to develop morally.

Part of having OCD is, for me, a confessional impulse. As such, I probably shouldn’t spend too long once again self-flagellating over topics already covered on this blog. I will just state that broadly OCD will latch onto whatever issue causes you the most pain and discomfort. It does not fight fair. Real-event OCD is very possibly the hardest fight of all. It kicks you when you are down and tells you that you deserve the kicking.

Weirdly, the solution is not to fight back, but to shrug your shoulders and respond “So what?” It is easier said than done, however.