Obsession, Compulsion, and The World of Disabilities

Wednesday, February 9, 2022

4:35 AM

I often wonder where the limits of insanity get crossed. Do I cross them when I wash my hands with soap twice instead of once?

Four years ago, sitting in the clinic of a psychiatrist, I folded a piece of rectangular paper into a calculated half, making sure no edge or corner could be seen after one half had eclipsed the other. Then, that wretched doctor purposefully unfolded it and re-folded the paper quite off the edge. Honestly, it was a shock. Why would someone ruin a perfect fold?

I looked at the paper and I looked at him. I did that repeatedly. There was no figuring out the answer to my anguish. I broke down crying and he diagnosed me with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) from trauma. I wonder if he was impressed, after all, as I had pointed out my obsession with grammar and predicted I might have OCD just ten minutes before.

Being diagnosed in person was an entirely different experience from just strongly vibing to the disorder and its sufferers. I realised why I could not use pens unless emergencies struck. I had not been able to write without panicking about my alphabets not touching the line for as long as I could look back into my childhood. I had been stuck to rituals like governing my blinking pattern for hours for the sake of equally distributing the sight of any scenery into two parts - one for my little brother. I used to measure my lines by millimetres before drawing biology diagrams. I used to do a lot of things - which meant that I could not do a lot of things.

I still cannot do a lot of things. As a law student, I am unable to stay in WhatsApp groups because I compulsively end up reading every text out of hundreds and get frequent mental breakdowns as long as I am a group member. I spend a major chunk of my time fretting about whether the alignment of a particular document is correct or not, even though repeated editing of the subject matter will force me to alter it again every single time. Instead of studying from books, I end up finding grammatical errors in between the information and have headaches over how to correct those. I study and the thoughts invade. I study and it happens again. This loop goes on till I get stressed enough to have another meltdown.

As a family member, I feel like I consistently let my family down. I check the gas knob enough times to make sure that I've turned it shut. Then, I check the RO switch and I recheck it again for another 5 times. The bottles I fill in the kitchen lie on a glass table in a colour-coded manner. And if any bottle threatens to promote disharmony in the arrangement, I take that bottle to my room to drink from. My room is a cluttered space with hoarded items aged more than ten years because I struggle with letting go of objects of my interest. I cannot even clean, contrary to popular notions of OCD, because once I start, I cannot help seeing dirt everywhere no matter how aggressively I clean up and end up having a mental breakdown. I end up not being able to do even basic chores without burning myself out.

What a lot of people do not understand about OCD is that obsessions are not always external. I have had gory and violent thoughts about my family for years. I have spent years forcing myself to stay awake because my intrusive thoughts have caused me terrifying nightmares. What can be worse than being obsessed with one's trauma and abuser? More specifically, what if you went back to experiencing your hurtful past every single day no matter where you were or what you did? At this point, I do not know whether I am still talking about OCD or have crossed the lines to end up in a pool of somatic flashbacks.

OCD has a high comorbidity rate. This means that anyone with OCD will have a much higher chance of being diagnosed with other disorders than a person without it. This means that it is quite possible that while I am writing this, I may also have anxiety, attention deficit disorders, autism, or maybe something even worse like complex-post traumatic stress disorder. However, I will not confirm or deny the possibility of having more than one disorder in my very first article.

While you comfortably take a break from your studies and come back in 10 minutes to continue, I end up symmetrically sorting pistachio slices on top of sweets for another quarter of an hour. While you focus for half an hour and get your revision for the day done, I end up spending a full two hours on it with my one hour going into tasks like sorting out the folds in the curtains, arranging and re-arranging the objects on my table perpendicularly, etc. It is not that I do not realise the unreasonableness and futility of my endeavours. However, I find myself compelled to sort things a certain way because I am obsessed with the idea of symmetry. It feels as if I cannot do anything without ‘fixing’ what is hurting my vision because I get obsessed with the ‘uneven’ easily. Thus enters the compulsion of performing things a certain way in order to be able to focus on higher-priority matters. It can be said that I am disabled and it affects my everyday life beyond my control. When this happens, one crosses over to the condition of requiring medicines.

I have taken serotonin pills for almost a year. Of course, I have also tried sleeping pills and anti-seizure pills. As I write this knowing it would be published, I feel sudden disgust and shame gripping me. I do not want to be the only one who knows feeling helpless and broken without my pills. I have not taken medicines for more than two years now, I think. I am scared of them now because they made me sleep for fourteen hours a day. However, it also makes sense because any extremely stressed person would sleep at the slightest encounter with stability, no matter whether it has been induced by some external environment or pills. Plus, recuperation takes longer for any stressed person.

It gets lonely being disabled alone. I do not want to be the one dragging my moot teammates to the ground because I could not keep up with my deadlines. I avoid my batchmates in fear that they will not like who I am because I might be too different. For anyone to see me hiding objects I could potentially use to hurt myself would kill my entire confidence. I do not hurt myself anymore. I have not done that for years and yet, I see myself doing exactly that in my obsessive-intrusive thoughts multiple times a day.

Does one learn to deal with OCD better as time goes by? Well, desensitisation to pain does not stop the internal damage. Even if I do not act on my urges, I feel immense discomfort and an inability to focus on what is more important. If I somehow do manage to rein in my concentration, I am still rendered incapable of enjoying my free time peacefully. As I interpret it, OCD is a defence mechanism against instability felt chronically in life. Hence, unless a person addresses the underlying issues, the disorder can just be managed over the surface using medicines and therapy. Even the best therapy would only work to end the manifestation of the disorder in a person after the underlying issues have been sorted, solved, and reduced to a past that simply does not affect anymore. That usually takes years, and sometimes lifetimes, since a traumatic past does not consist of the sufferer in isolation.

As such, the chance of freedom looks bleak to a person who has already developed an entire disorder as a coping mechanism to 'control' and 'solve' their unstable life. How do I bet my chances on some life I have never experienced? I do not have an identity without my disorder - I never got the chance to develop one. It is scary when facts are put this way. People do not consider that while terming their preferences for hygiene as OCD-like.

I often hope for a horizon where my reality will match up to yours. When will I touch it? Will I even get to see it?

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Written by

- Arushi (Associate Editor, RGNUL Cosmos)