A Vicious Cycle (What It's Like to Have OCD)

One of my biggest anxieties surrounds the idea that I'm an attention whore.

I know exactly where it comes from: Years and years of an abusive sibling commanding attention from our shared single parent. Depression causing me to withdraw, and having an ambiverted personality thats craving for human interaction would cause the withdrawing to have harmful effects. Somewhere deep inside of me is a part of myself that believes that a person's attention is finite, and any amount that gets paid to me is taken away from something else that probably deserves more.

The problem is, that "something else" isn't identified, nor is it really identifiable. I just spent so much of my life with that lurking Thing that needed the attention, and if it wasn't received, bad things would happen.

I guess part of cognitive behavioral therapy here is realizing that those bad things would have happened whether or not it got what it asked for. It wasn't my fault for receiving attention that could have been directed at the Thing, like a sacrificial virgin offered to a volcano god with the hope that an inevitable eruption wouldn't occur.

Nevertheless, I still grew up with that anxiety looming over my shoulder. I was quiet and shy because I didn't want any undeserved attention. And then the anxiety evolved and worsened when I started worrying over the fact that my mere existence, especially being as quiet and shy as I was, was burdensome. I was excess weight, taking up space, because I wasn't providing enrichment for the atmosphere.

I'm not quiet because I don't have anything to say. I'm quiet because I'm worried that what I have to say isn't good enough. Any time I pause, or hesitate, or have long periods of silence during a conversation, I'm either beating myself up over saying the wrong thing, or I'm obsessing over what to say next, making absolutely sure that what's going to come out of my mouth deserves the attention it's going to get.

Of course, it's never going to be good enough in my personal opinion, but pushing forward despite that fact is a behavior that I'm still learning. Unlike my bipolar, which I'm used to because I've had it for so long, obsessive compulsive disorder is a new diagnosis, only having come up in the past couple of months.

My obsessions come in so many different forms, but they all have the same thing in common; my mind gets caught up on an idea and repeats it, over and over again, until I'm sick of it, until it's the only thing present in my conscious mind, because for whatever reason, my disorder has claimed it to be the most important thing right now.

Intrusive thoughts run rampant. The worst one I've had has scared me to tears, and it just came up out of nowhere one day: I wonder what it would be like to get run over by a train. Specifically, how it would feel to lie down on the track, to have my head positioned on the rail just so, to have the wheel helped by the force and the speed and the weight of the train to rip the skin off my face before shattering my cheekbone, my nose, my eye socket, and crushing the pieces of my skull into my brain before losing consciousness and dying.

Why did I think of this? Who knows. But it haunted me for weeks because I didn't know how to rid myself of the thought.

Similar thoughts have caused me to pull off the highway while driving before: You are in complete control of your actions and your movements. At any time, you could step on the gas and steer into oncoming traffic, almost certainly killing both yourself and the driver of the car you hit. There's nothing stopping you but yourself. Are you strong enough to stop yourself?

Are you sure?

Most of the time, I am. And I can turn up the volume on the stereo, paying attention to the lyrics as I belt them, and continue to drive safely.

But sometimes, I'm not. And I pull over, and I sit in my car, and I squeeze my eyes shut until I see fireworks, and I cry, and I try to think of other things. The train thought. Anything else. Just let me get home.

They really are random. I painted my room two weeks ago and I imagined chugging the paint straight out of the bucket so fast it would fill up my stomach and my esophagus and it would harden and I would suffocate and die. Although logically I know that's highly improbable - the poisoning would almost certainly get to me before the paint had time to harden.

Take a bite out of the abdomen of your cat. Feel the blood rush from the open wound. Taste the raw meat. See his guts spill out as he looks at you with utter betrayal before dying at your hand. You could do that at any moment. Sure, you love him. But do you love him enough to stop yourself?

Are you sure?

Things like that.

I think part of my subconscious believes that I'm not worthy of good attention because the fact that I consider these things makes me some kind of monster. The fact that I ward them off and negate them with counter-thoughts means nothing, since they have to come from somewhere. The subconscious is a gateway into a person's soul, right?

I'm not blind to the irony in the fact that I've counseled others on feelings of inadequacy and guilt from craving validation. Logically, I know it's human to want to share experiences. I'm interested in others; I want others to be interested in me too. And it often feels like the latter isn't the case. Like I'm just there to provide validation for others and not to receive it in return.

It's tiring. And the more tired I get, the more I withdraw, and the more opportunities I diminish for myself to find someone who will validate me.

It's not selfish, it's human. But that thought process is something that's much, much easier said than done.