My brain is athletic and my heart is asthmatic

I’m not a religious person, in fact I find the whole idea of it disconcerting. Apart from Midnight Mass. That I am HUGELY into. Middle of the night? Big ribbon-y orange stuffed with sweeties and candles? Its all so camp and halloweeny! I digress. There’s something slightly suspicious and perhaps spiritual about life’s timings. About when life whinnies her lips in boredom and decides to press shuffle on the carefully curated playlist that is your existence; it’s always the very moment you think ‘hmmm everything feels a bit… grey.’ I think it’s because she agrees. The clearly not self-nominated God is contractually forced to watch your life, like dead-eyed interns in front of a corporate training video, except she has the power to throw a landmine onto the set whenever the boredom becomes intolerable and watch all the little first-gig actors scurry around like desperate, flaming ants (who secretly hope the camera caught it so they can put the ‘crisis acting’ footage on their spotlights.)

In many ways, I have to thank her. Professionally, said landmine seems to have forced up a bunch of opportunities that were laying on their arses beneath my feet like recently-divorced and destitute moles. Personally and romantically however, she said, get fucked loser! ….I should have known- no one has ever simultaneously had a good career and a good relationship aged 26, unless you’re also suffering from a medieval illness or are literally allergic to the sun. Then I think life is like, hmmm, I might need to cut them some slack.

I’m afraid to say it, but I’m writing about OCD again. Cuff me! Seriously, I’m not joking. Nivea my lips and handcuff me to your fence. That might finally stop me from writing 17 near-identical poems (I appreciate this article is only mildly less annoying) and crucially, turn me on. The reason for said indulgence is pretty bloody obvious to me- I need somewhere to put all my break-up feelings. No matter what I do or how many movie-moment coffee shop rants I bellow to men in my head, I feel and I feel and I feel (therefore I am?)

The thing about dating when you have OCD is that its kind of a top-and-tail anxiety sandwich. The first 6 months, for most people, is the honeymoon phase. With OCD however, it’s a constant nagging doubt that this relationship is totally wrong. I don’t really love you, you don’t really love me, and we might be the death of each other, OCD whispers. And every time that good old period comes around, she thinks to herself, we’ll kick this bitch into overdrive and have her call her boyfriend up and take her right to the brink of breaking up with him, but allow her to realize right at the last moment that she might not actually want to! Doesn’t that sound like good sport! Haw Haw Haw.

Now the breakup? I suppose it slightly depends on who initiated the breakup. Naturally, mine wasn’t my idea. Nor was it an idea I was particularly open to. I would not be attending the R&D for this one as, generally, people are not allowed to break up with me. It astounds me that people still haven’t understood this. But here I am, single, more feminine than I’ve been in 5 years, and newly first-aid trained! Perhaps this is the moment I begin a new career as a femme-fatal superhero. Superheroes can’t be tied down, after all. And crucially, must be able to fish lodged bits of peanut-ball out of peoples’ throats, like I proudly now am expert in thanks to one 45-minute first aid session in the back of a pub. I will be OCD WOMAN. She/they will lure oncoming attackers towards her with the kind of erotically intense eye-contact only endowed to those with a history of institutionalization, and then thwart imminent evil with a superpower of reassurance-seeking so persistent that the attacker swiftly stalks off to hang themselves from a utility pole! Job done.

I digress. If you’re doing the dumping (one day my friend, one day) I’d literally bet my life on an influx of swarming doubts as to whether you made the right decision for months and months after the initial split. If you’re being dumped however, your worries are compounded by the reality of not being wanted anymore, and of generally feeling the size of a kidney stone that make needing to know when, how and why they let this split happen so much more urgent, as to not be rendered a huge fucking reject. (I wonder if this level of honesty will come back to ruin my life or one day win me the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity? It’s a coin-toss really)

I’ll break it down for whoever is still reading. Invision a jacked-out brain running laps around an athletics track with bait dangling from its relay baton. Then, a few seconds later, crossing your vision, a sweaty, asthmatic heart tripping over its own legs stumbling after it. What Brain is doing is looping around imaginary conversations and scenarios over and over and over that reignite hurt, teasing tired Heart and contorting it into a kind of cardiovascular cheese twizler. At the centre of all of this, of course, is some kind of absurd self-protection. I’m supposedly readying myself for any eventuality that might come. A run in in Dovedales, where I can dish out the most refined and cutting rebuttal to seeing that my ex in fact got back with his ex ex (there is of course no valid reason to believe this is going to happen, apart from the fact that my brain wants to), and inadvertently an intermittent, totally BPD-style vilification only constructed for an eventuality where I might learn that my ex no longer gives a fuck. And that I’m the one left with aneurysm-triggering frustrations.

There’s something kind of stumping about being nearly-recovered. If such a thing even exists. Because you’re well, really, generally, so you don’t deserve nearly as much leeway for your questionable behaviours that might be granted to those still at the centre of an OCD storm. But you’re still a bit mad. You always will be. There will always be a small hint of erraticness that you’ll inevitably have to try and accessorize like a compulsory and intrusively ugly wedding fascinator.

Let’s start a support group for those who have been victim of the phrase ‘I’ve been hoping you’re doing well’. Both my exes have said it to me, and both times it’s made me want to eat cement. I like to think this comment means ‘I’m really sad that I’ve had to hurt you because that hurts me, because there’s still a bond there, and I feel guilt for this so therefore I’m really hoping you’re doing well because it makes me sad to think you aren’t’. But of course, my brain likes to translate it to, ‘poor little loser, I hope its not too chilly down there in the mouldy, crumbling basement of humanity. Maybe if you press a glass up to the ceiling you’ll be able to hear the rest of us gabbing and chortling over lunchtime champagne and it might at least help you feel like you’re there? Perhaps that might be comforting?’

Sometimes the anxious thoughts get so loud I can’t even hear the person in front of me.

What if the whole thing was a lie? What if that sense of security, trust and home I felt was only one sided? Because how could it have ever been a mutual feeling if they didn’t even want to fight for our relationship in the end? Because you would, if you did, wouldn’t you? How abhorrent did I become to them? Did I accidentally present myself as a totally different person to the one I know I am? Some kind of angry monster? Everything they’ve said to me implies I became a walking ick, surely? Did I become a total source of discomfort? Did they ever even see me for who I was in the first place? Was it totally surface to them? How am I ever meant to do this again if all the above is true? I don’t understand how a fundamental sense of security and deep bond can disappear. Intellectually, sure. But emotionally, how could that ever make sense? How do I unthink these thoughts? How can I go back to trusting what we had, like I did before they started? I can’t undo a potential-realization. I can’t reverse back through the other side of the looking glass. It’ll only be me who gets hurt by trying to pull the wool back over my eyes.

These thoughts feel so terrifying that I can’t sleep or do anything else until I’ve done the impossible task of disproving them or neutralizing them. Lists. So many lists comprised of evidence that these worries aren’t true. So many antidotes scrawled in my little book in the middle of the night. Because it’s not like I can ask, because I’ve already asked for too much, to the non-OCD brain. How could there possibly be any questions left.

I’ve been toying with the idea that I don’t experience ‘falling in love’ like a lot of people do. I don’t get the cloud of butterflies. I don’t feel ‘in’ anything, therefore can’t really fall ‘out’ of anything. I just love, like a steady, upward-bound plane. It embeds itself with time and is extremely difficult to rattle. It laughs when someone poses the term incompatibility, and simply digs its claws in deeper. Even if we don’t especially get on anymore. Why would that matter? My heart naively ponders. Just sit on your end of the sofa, and I’ll sit on mine. And every few moments I’ll glance up at you and feel the thorns in my tummy soften into little splints of lavender. Because you’re you and you’re different to me but we’ve shared so much and I’ve woken up and shifted my body onto your chest first thing in the morning and you’ve held me when the world still feels blurry and you’re sitting right there and that makes things ok.

I suppose one thing that people with OCD can do is commit. People like us tend not to let things go until all avenues of effort have been exhausted. Only then will we accept defeat. I heard a breakup story the other day where someone lamented, ‘we had the same conversation over and over again and nothing changed so we just knew we had to break up.’ My main takeaway was that I was so jealous they got to have that conversation, let alone multiple times.

I sound like a mad woman. But maybe that’s ok. there’s a lot to celebrate about being someone that shows up, with their full emotional self, and tries. Even if this effort is being directed totally towards the wrong thing, like some kind of moronic fireman accidentally pointing his hose through the wrong window and drenching the old man on his sofa innocently trying to watch Springwatch.

I love love. and while I hate my brain and the breadcrumbs it leaves, I’d take a ravenously hungry heart over a tamed one any day.