Content Warning for discussions of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, specifically the obsessions and compulsions that make it up, which, in my case, includes suicidal ideation.

I write about my mental health a lot. I’ve written blog posts, poetry, short stories, and even worked on longer fiction all about my depression, my anxiety, dealing with trauma/PTSD, etc. The only thing I’ve never managed to really cover in a way that felt satisfying was my OCD. I can write about it just fine and I’ve done plenty of blog posts discussing it and the ways it impacts my life, but I’ve never really been able to capture how it feels in a way that felt true to my own experiences, as I’ve done with the other things I’ve mentioned. The only bit of writing I’ve ever found that felt true to my experience of OCD (specifically as an expression of it rather than a mechanical depiction of it) was John Green’s Turtles All The Way Down, and even the best mechanical depictions of it are still fairly rare given how often it’s falsely depicted as different types of fastidiousness in popular media. Green’s excellent book felt incredibly reflective of my own experience, even if it still fell short because of the inherent distance between Green’s experience (which he wrote about) and my experience (which I’ve yet to ever convey in a way that feels true and complete). It’s frustrating to want to capture something that has such a strong and particular feeling to it and be unable to do it in a satisfying way no matter how often I’ve tried.

The main problem that has prevented me from writing something that feels accurate is that my experience of OCD is never about my OCD. It’s always about something else. I never get caught up in obsessive thoughts about my OCD, nor can I ever feel around in my head for it. I have to specifically look for what I know are my obsessions or my compulsions and hope that I haven’t missed anything over the years or that nothing new has cropped up because I have no innate way of recognizing them by sensation alone. I have ways of figuring them out over time, of course, since they tend to fall into patterns that can be recognized once the data pool gets large enough, but that’s not identifying my OCD so much as tagging patterns of thought or behavior as being the result of it. I mean, I have begun to be able to sense when something is the result of my OCD thanks to all the work I’ve done, but it’s not a feeling I can properly capture that reflects all of my experiences. Plus, this sense is mostly just an educated guess based on my ability to recognize patterns quickly and my own understanding of the patterns my OCD creates in my behaviors. It’s not something like my depression where the metaphor shifts over time to reflect my current experiences but that is still broadly applicable in the time before and after I came up with the metaphor. It’s fairly concrete and I can easily explain it, but I just can’t really capture the feeling of being within it like I can with my depression or anxiety.

The reason I can’t capture it is because it feels different for all of my major compulsions and obsessions. For instance, my main obsession (something I’ve been dealing with since I was a child to the point that doing so does not require much conscious effort on my part anymore) is suicidal ideation. I rarely get caught up in a spiral around that, but when I do, it feels spectacularly awful, but mostly because I know when it’s happening at this point and most of the negative emotions I feel in regards to it are because I’m stuck in something I can normally handle just fine. Which feels incredibly different than when I get caught in word spirals, where I repeat things to myself until the words have lost all meaning or the phrases have morphed into meaningless strings of phonemes, a practice that I rarely catch before the spiral burns itself out because I also do this just to pass time and amuse myself, not only because I’m struggling with the feeling that no one will ever understand me properly or that I’ve upset someone I care about because I wasn’t careful enough with my choice of words (which is what usually prompts the OCD-based word spirals). There is literally nothing connecting those two experiences of my OCD other than that they’re both most easily described as spirals and that’s an expression that only barely applies to the suicidal ideation obsession because I’ve gotten so good at cutting those off before they have a chance to start moving, let alone build up enough inertia to become a spiral. Plus, as I said, the actual experience of them is incredibly different than the way I’d describe their function (though, to be fair, their function and mechanical action are a part of the experience of them, so it’s not like this is a useless tool to have in my kit).

And again, all of that is about those particular obsessions and the way those thought spirals feel, not about the OCD that builds them and gives them enough weight to trap me. It is tempting to brush this aside and say that OCD is nothing if not the ways it impacts my life and that there doesn’t need to be some larger, overarching element to it, but I know that’s not true. There IS a feeling to it, a kind of sensation that marks all its elements as a whole, but it’s not something I can really describe, even if I can easily work through the mechanical processes that make me certain there is a specific thing, a concrete aspect of my mind, that encapsulates it all. There’s an emotionality and metaphor to my obsessions that I can capture when I try to talk about them. There’s a physicality and underlying thought to my compulsions that I can fall back on when I need to depict them. But the thing that unites them all doesn’t really have a sensation tied to it. I have particular feelings about it, of course, but those don’t help me describe it because they’re my reaction to it rather than my experience of it.

The best I can say, at this point, is that it is a way of thinking about things and a pattern of behavior that goes along with that way of thinking. It is not one specific pattern or one specific mode of thought, because those things change from compulsion to compulsion and obsession to obsession, but there’s enough similarity between them that I can feel the resonance when I look for it. It is imperfect repetition that follows a set of rules that slightly shift from repetition to repetition. It is a series of circular loops that eventually make an oval or an egg rather than a circle (and it’s a slightly different shape every time you check). It is the pattern made by a weighted line pendulum that is ALMOST perfectly in balance. It is a picture drawn entirely in negative space. It’s not really a thing I can describe, since it is not a thing itself, but it is something I can try to show by using similar but imperfect metaphors repeated over time as I talk in circles not to feel understood but to circumscribe the thing I’m talking about without ever mentioning it specifically.

All of this is on my mind because I wrote a draft of a poem a couple weeks back that felt like the closest I’ve ever gotten to writing a poem about my OCD. I wound up taking another stab at it because of my editor/alpha reader’s suggestions and got even closer the second time. The poem, though, is about how frustrated I’ve felt with some experiences at my place of employment lately and the elements of the poem that depict my OCD are entirely subtextual except for the structure of the poem. These structures (the rules, formatting, patterns, etc) are literally built in a way that reflects my experience of OCD (which I’ve included subtextually in the poem because it plays a significant, subtextual part in why I’m still in the situation the poem discusses and feeling the way the poem describes despite how awful it all is). Which will be going up on my blog tomorrow barring any significant issues with the poem when my alpha reader gets back to me. I don’t know if it will come across, since the structural elements are not something that will probably speak of OCD to anyone who hasn’t read this blog post, but I really hope that people who know what this experience feels like will read it and sense it as being familiar. Regardless, I like the poem and I’m happy to share it, I just hope this swing at depicting my OCD as a whole pays off.