An Open Letter to My Brain: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Is Just a Tumour

I used to think you were defective, demonic; evil personified. A fantastical beast plucked from the vividest imaginings of hell and jammed violently into my cranial cavity, delighting in the orchestration of little girl torment. I couldn’t outrun you, outwit you, or outlast you.

I just lay heavy, defeated.

I didn’t know why you’d chosen me as prey, nor could I pinpoint the moment you’d ceased being benign and otherwise normal. My head wasn’t a safe place with you, a monster, taking up residence.

I felt depraved, frantic, confused and entirely alone under your watch. I was only 5 years old and already forced into leading a double life, on the surface calm, even passive, but inside I ached. You’d created a warzone in my head, and I was cannon fodder.

Still, not wanting to be outed as a criminal or pervert, I did all I could to appear as any other happy-go-lucky kid, laughing and smiling and playing dress-ups with my friends and younger sister. Often there was genuine fun to be had, but most of the time I silently grieved for the innocent childhood you made sure I would never have. I still do.

My obsession with sex was, at the time, my most closely guarded secret. It was also my deepest shame. Sometimes I found myself being turned on when I didn’t want to be turned on and by things I didn’t fully understand, and sometimes I welcomed this sensory pleasure and sought more information in the dictionary or on Google. I was a naturally curious and inquisitive primary schooler, but I knew explicit images and words took up much more of my headspace than was typical or healthy. When they bothered me, I felt sane. When they didn’t, and I wanted to know more, be aroused more, I felt at once alien and predatory – as if I was the only one of my kind, deserving imprisonment or banishment.

Equally disturbing were the graphic murder scenes that roared in my head, thunderous and unapologetic. Only, I wasn’t just a blameless witness ‘seeing’ from the outside – I was in the thick of it as the sole villain, and my family, helpless victims. I’d been cast as the lead of a psychological thriller series that I didn’t want any part of, a series that you made sure I had no control over. I guess I was a helpless victim too.

Mum’s begging and screams were the hardest to hear. I wished they’d at least been silent movies.

On the odd occasion in these early years, you let me rest. I only had to count to 13 to prevent loved ones from dying or rearrange my toys in height order. These were the good days. Even still, I was at your mercy.

As I got older, I got better at stifling your creativity. I had intently studied your many disguises, seemingly adept at delicately separating them from purely ‘me’ thoughts, like leeches from damp flesh. I’d gotten to really know you and I’d gotten to know myself. I was also excelling at university after excelling at high school, and I had great friends. My romantic life may have been suffering, probably a residual effect of my particular brand of OCD growing up, but I figured I had plenty of time to perfect dating and find the right guy.

Just as I’d torn up your old playbook though, you had written a new one.

All these steps forward had made you angry, angry that I was doing well and by all counts, winning, and you needed to seek revenge. I was loud and proud about being happy and finally finding some peace, but this wasn’t ok with you. Not even a little bit. So, you instilled in me arguably the most powerful emotion there is – fear.

I hollowed out.

All that was left was a gaunt frame, tired eyes and a tireder mind so consumed and rattled by fear it could contain nothing else.

If I wasn’t fearing for my immediate safety at the hands of terrorists, trains, planes, buses and cars, tall trees or climate change, I was despairing for the safety and wellbeing of others – at my own hands. I was too afraid to leave my childhood bedroom because of all the possible dangers that beckoned outside of its four walls, and I was afraid of myself, convinced I had molested a child when I myself was a child. It didn’t matter that I had no recollection of the event, I assumed I had just blacked out at the time. The world was a scary place and I was one of the wicked that made it increasingly so. I no longer recognised the expressionless, motionless woman staring back at me. She felt like a lie.

I had been swallowed by shame for two decades by now, reticent about the least digestible facets of my mind, and it was only when I started being completely, disarmingly honest with the people trying to help me that I realised I wasn’t evil – and neither were you.

I learned perhaps what I’ve always known, in that OCD is a tricky beast. It is calculating and deceiving, capitalising on our naïve faith and desperate hope that ‘everything will be alright’ should we just take more ride on the merry-go-round, indulge one more of its horror stories. I couldn’t separate it from you for a long time. I couldn’t separate it from me, either.

I have a different perspective today though.

I no longer see OCD and you as one and the same. To me, OCD is just a small, detachable part of you – like a tumour, a cancer of the mind, in a way. It is not a hopeless situation and it is not inoperable. It’s a formidable opponent, sure, but so am I.