What began as a series of ruminations spiraled into months defined by intrusive thinking that left me exhausted, demoralized, and with a new diagnosis.
“If we titrate any further up, we’ll have reached the recommended medical maximum limit for sertraline,” my psychiatrist tells me. His voice is harmonic and consoling. There’s a sense of deafening pragmatism. “We can try increasing the dosage, but I recommend journaling your moods over the next four to eight weeks, so we can see how you’re adjusting.”
The past three months felt like suffering the tiniest of deaths. March was when I noticed things around me were in flux, but they weren’t ashen; the acrid taste of chard carbon is a sensation I associate with depressive spells. Flowers still had color, vivacious as ever. I found small joys in leaves collapsing under the weight of my right foot.
I wasn’t catatonic. I wasn’t apathetic. I wasn’t insensible; I wasn’t unbothered. I was, however, in the midst of a debilitating obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) episode that completely and entirely broke me from the inside out.
I’m an alphabet soup of mental illnesses and disorders. I have impulsive attention deficit disorder (ADHD) — phonological dyslexia and dysgraphia, and combined borderline personality disorder (BPD), and “low-spectrum” bipolar II disorder. (I’m also 5′ 7.”) In February, my psychiatrist ladled a diagnosis of OCD into the neurodivergent stew.
It made sense. My mind was always a warzone of ruminations, now more than ever before. I’d been a worrier and catastrophizer since I could remember; a reliably pessimistic overthinker, if you will. It’s just now that I couldn’t get off the carousel that seated my rolodex of introspections.
My family is visiting me for the first time since I moved to San Francisco nearly a decade ago, what will they think? I have an apartment that I love, but do I need a second one just in case it floods? We’re overdue for the Big One, after all. That pain on my side isn’t a pulled muscle but a malignant tumor — it has to be. I want a partner. There’s a friend-with-benefits I have who could fit the bill. Conceivably, maybe. I could just be horny. I like our friendship. Hungry. Thirsty. Tired. Perhaps the accent wall I want to paint won’t look as good as I think. Etc.
Rinse and repeat… about thirty times. While I aligned the coasters the stranger I was inside of didn’t set back properly. But not before I tally up this month’s bills for the sixteenth time this week; the number still hasn’t flinched.
My mind had never been so discombobulated. The relationships in my life, both those defined and lacking definition, were suffering.
Days bent into weeks and then curved toward months of medication increases. Therapy was severe. I walked daily until my feet hurt. The detritus that was my mental health continued crumpling under redundant cognitive routines — bad habits.
I cried on buses. I shouted into the pillows. I asked friends for help and to hold space. I allowed myself to feel; to breathe; to be; to understand what was happening for what it was: the first months-long mental health breakdown I had experienced in a decade.
May brought respite. A liveliness returned; I began floating again as my mentality began shedding ankle weights. Those internalized, taxing happenings didn’t define me anymore, nor were they bloated with remorse.
Until you experience unescapable intrusive introspections — reflexive thinking patterns, often rooted in traumas connected to one’s attachment style — it’s hard to describe the sense of existential dread.
What I’ve waxed to friends who, by some means of divine fate, stand mentally well, it’s like having an itch you can’t scratch … that eventually takes over your body and dims each moment, step, and consideration, conscious or otherwise. All you think about, care about, worry about, wish for, yearn for, pray for is satiating that tingle. You believe whatever means of overindulgence will offer relief. Alas, it doesn’t. It won’t. All you’re left with is the ruins left in the wake of your need to please the said irritation.
You’re still scratchy. It’s all you can think about. The cycle reprises in a masochistic, inhuman manner.
May saw the cycle slowed as a combination of medication, mindfulness, and therapy helped reframe certain thought patterns. My shoulders started sitting lower, and my brows didn’t perch so high up on my forehead.
It was then when someone dear to me — a person I’d confided in, spent countless hours laughing in the presence of, shared vulnerabilities and interests with, texted and DM’d throughout the days; someone who I’d tasted, slept alongside, kissed on street-lit sidewalks for over six months — evaporated from my life. In just two text messages, an individual who I reveled in our intercommunication, quirkiness, and queerness became a phantom that existed only in my phone.
Not an ounce of closure. No conversation was had, either in text or in person. My calls were never picked up. My emails were never answered. They ran with a pair of open scissors in their hand — tripped and disemboweled me on the way down.
What was the flickering candle of this OCD episode was doused with a gallon of unleaded gasoline. My mind was a furnace, each flame combed over a thousand times. Ostensibly, this was the worst imaginable circumstance in my then-current state that could’ve happened.
I like living in a warm house with a tended fireplace; it’s important to think things over. What occurred was a wildfire stripping that abode to its studs.
The last thing I wanted to do was write. Lifting my fingers felt insurmountable, let alone my head. When my chest would concave, I struggled to see it convex.
Gratitude was the only thing I could cling to; the stream of cold water aimed at the blaze grew thicker after every journal entry, spoken affirmation, and shared appreciation. Contentment entered my daily motions, and a spark had returned.
A friend invited me over for dinner last week — “Come over, don’t bring anything, let me take care of you.”
She knew I’d been struggling with compulsions. I knew she’d been struggling with compulsions. We both, however, started feeling like we weren’t breathing under feet of sand for the first time in months. Our compulsions had subsided, but they were screaming on their way out.
Carving into a seared chicken breast, the charred skin sliced to reveal the white flesh beneath, she confessed it was a bad day.
“I feel deflated,” she reveals, grabbing the stem of a wine glass, recoiling at the idea she might not ever feel “right” again. “I know it’s been worse, and I’m clinging onto the progress and hope and work I have done on myself and still doing for myself.”
I pause. My knee-jerk retort would be to provide reassurance, sidestepping the present discomfort. Not acknowledging it, instead ignoring it. My delay ends with a long exhale.
“It’s OK not to be doing well,” I voice in the warm glow of candlelight. A trim smile pulls at the corner of her mouth. “We won’t always be doing well. What matters is that we’re still here, and we know now more than ever before that we’re not beholden to our thoughts. We can move through this world with newfound grace and appreciation that can only come from moving through these past few months.”
I believed it. I still believe it, too.
Feature image: Courtesy of [at]StuInSF
Thank you for sharing this. <3
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