Lately, for whatever reason, my OCD has been up. I have what’s called “Harm OCD,” wherein I have ruthless, violent, harmful, often incessant intrusive thoughts about myself and others that circle the cognitive drain like madness.
OCD, I’ve read, stems fundamentally out of a perfectionistic desire for life certainty. And certainty, of course, is never a realistic goal in life. Things are always in a constant state of continual change. Life is perennially in flux. The one thing you can count on in life—besides the fact that at some point it ends—is change. Ergo, 100% certainty about anything is essentially hogwash; it doesn’t exist. This is the existential limitation in which we live.
The OCD is nasty and spiky and sticky; circular and layered and full of ego and trepidation. Every time I think I have it beat it comes back. Tragically, I often try to use commonsense, language, facts, truth to battle the mental affliction. But that’s what’s so hard and ruthless and painful about genuine OCD; it isn’t rational. That’s the point, it’s completely irrational, in fact often even delusional. But the way it works is, the more you feed it, the more attention and energy you give it, the bigger and nastier and more megalomaniacal it becomes. Despite the fact that, deep in your heart, you know it’s all a hologram, a mirage, assiduous bullshit, it snaps something deep down inside you every time.
The solution, I have learned, is “taking action.” Just like sobriety, recovery and AA. You can’t just sit there “in your head.” You have to move. Physical movement helps. Calling a friend. Getting on an AA zoom meeting. (Which I haven’t done lately.) Going on a run or walk. Writing. Reading. Etc. Anything to break the lurid, cryptic concentration of the OCD. Sometimes, when it the disease’s thrall, I feel like some sort of zombie, eyes loose and obsessive, mind whirling, thoughts circling the drain into eternity.
Kierkegaard wrote that sanity comes down, always, to faith. Doesn’t have to be in Jesus Christ. It can be faith in the self. Faith in nature. Faith in some Higher Power. Faith in letting go. Etc.
One of my obsessions is that I have back cancer. I have these two “lipomas,” or “muscular lumbar knots,” or “cartilage balls.” They’re harmless. Three doctors—including one doctor two times—have felt these lipomas, asked me many questions about them, and done blood work. I’m fine. They’re normal. It’s nothing.
And yet I worry.
Ditto skin cancer. I worry that I don’t wear sunscreen often enough. I wear it probably 50-65% of the time. My father just died five months ago of skin cancer. But I worried about this even before that, even before he was diagnosed.
Such is the nature of the disease. I take meds for it. I started taking them in the summer of 2019. When I was living in Manhattan. And thank God, just before the Pandemic hit. I don’t think I’d have survived during Covid without the meds. So thank the Lord for small miracles.