A Daily Fight

CW: discussion of specific OCD triggers.

Today I find myself raw with an ocean of emotions, trying to find a place to begin in writing to all of you again after more than a month away from any blogging at all whatsoever.

You have never been far from my thoughts. Time and again I thought of something to share, ponder, talk about, but the effort of writing it down seemed too Herculean to follow through. There are a variety of reasons for this...for one, I have been focusing for the last few months on finishing a short story that wouldn't leave my mind, but also didn't seem to want to satisfyingly come together. It's absolutely so frustrating when they misbehave like that. As another, constant distraction, I also had my full time job and the many hours a week spent on that. Tom switched jobs twice in a month (for legitimate reasons, the first job he changed to didn't allow spousal insurance, so he had to seek elsewhere) and we are still adjusting to his work hours. And I also had to start thinking about Christmas: gift planning, decorating, and all the wonderful tidbits that come with it.

But behind it all, there was another reason. My Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Friends and fey, it has been terrible this year. Having a mental illness means that that thread of fear and concern is with me virtually a hundred percent of the time, but it comes in waves. Sometimes it is just a very quiet whisper that is relatively easy to ignore. Sometimes it is shouting terror in my ears all day long, and trying to create with its presence is incredibly difficult. Imagine, if you will (some of you won't have to, because you experience it too), that you work a job (that you may enjoy, mind you) that takes you away from any ability to pursue your personal creative works for about 40 hours a week. During the time you have left, there are of course the daily life obligations on your plate as well...dinner, house cleaning, self-care, and so on. But imagine if during those stolen moments when you get to sit down to do something that satiates the hunger for creation in you, you find a different monster whispering in your ear. "Was that crack there before? Is that a stain in the ceiling? What if the industry professional you got to do xxx job didn't do it right? Maybe you should check, maybe you should check, maybe you should check." So you close your computer, you put down your sketchbook, and you find yourself kneeling on the floor with a scrub brush and a towel you've almost worn through, scrubbing and scrubbing at a stain only you can see.

It's madness. It's a mental illness. And it's my life.

Way back in May this year, we discovered a problem on the outside of our house. The expert we brought in confirmed it should be addressed, but assured us that it wasn't any worse than other examples he had seen, and he could easily take care of it. But of course my brain didn't hear those words. My OCD rubbed its slimy hands together and prepared to give me literally six months of a constant thread in the back of my head of fear and doubt. Because that expert never came to do the job. Month after month, we contacted him and he told us soon, I promise soon. Then I contacted him again a month ago, and he said "can I just do it in spring?" I couldn't live like this till spring. So we called another professional, and they just completed the job yesterday.

Six months of my fear that things were worse than the expert told us are now over. And while I should be looking back on those six months, and learning the lesson from all that time I wasted worrying about something that didn't end up being the case, instead, I feel like I'm writing to you in a gulp of air between waves. Because I can feel the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder ramping up again. Am I sure they did a good job? Was that gap in the siding there before? Get up on a ladder and check. Crawl around the attic in the middle of the night. Stick your hand into the basement ceiling and feel for damp.

There is no wonder or magic in OCD. It is an illness. It is a disease. I fight it every day, and it is completely exhausting. But there is wonder and magic in my life. Tooth and claw, I fight for it day by day. I go out to the hawthorn in my backyard, and touch the bark of the tree with hands raw from scrubbing. I go back to the sketchbook after I inspected the crack in the ceiling, and I tell the OCD to fuck off, because I have art to make, and stories to write. And sometimes I mourn too. I mourn all the wasted time, all the stories unwritten because of this insidious and terrible disease. But not every year will have a six months in it as terrible as May to November was for me this year.

I recently read a quote that said "A woman must be careful to not allow over-responsibility (or over-respectabilty) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. She simply must put her foot down and say no to half of what she believes she ‘should’ be doing. Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only." (Clarissa Pinkola Estes) And I do see the point she was trying to make. But the final line was like a cut to my heart, and I refuse to let it make me feel guilty. Because some of us are fighting against more than our responsibilities. Some of us are also fighting against monsters in our head that don't want us to succeed. That would want nothing more than for us to be curled up in fetal position in a dark closet somewhere, not fully living, never creating. And I refuse to let them win. My moments of creativity are always stolen. Every. Single. Fucking. One. I fight for them, and I am proud of that fact. I am proud that I fight the monster of my mental illness in order to see and share the beauty, magic, and HOPE of this world of ours.

I will really try to be here more often. But if I am not, I promise you that I am still out there creating. I'm still fighting and making new acts of magic and wonder bit by bit, in the ways that I have to, in the moments that I can.