Tuppence Middleton on living with OCD: ‘It’s a little bit more than a personality type’

I’ve been guilty of it myself. Admiring a stranger’s colour coded closet, entering a well-made bedroom, perusing an alphabetised bookshelf categorised entirely by genre. Attributing all these things to the curator’s tendency towards “OCD”. I have uttered as much, even as I privately run through a mental checklist of my own paranoias. “A touch of the old obsessive compulsive disorder?” I‘ve remarked, when stumbling across a precisely labelled Tupperware collection housing a vast segregation of dried pasta shapes. This provocation occurred in the kitchen of a friend’s apartment, shortly before she launched into a story about a mundane encounter with her sick nephew. This is the last thing I really remember hearing, because at this point in the story my mind began to spiral uncontrollably.

For my mind is full of scorpions. Devious, nimble little beasts that have occupied my head for the best part of 30 years. They wield their own special power over my brain, shaping the architecture and rhythm of my thoughts. I am their dutiful puppet, stuck inside an endless loop of sleepless nights and watchful days. You cannot fail to ignore the presence of this unwelcome visitor. As you talk with your friends, it is in the room. Lose sight of it and a panic begins to take hold. To live a contented life alongside an uncaged scorpion requires a delicate balance of trust, will and surrender. This is the image I return to when attempting to articulate my experience of living with obsessive compulsive disorder.

OCD is a mental illness that affects around 2 per cent of the global population, but the proportion of people touched by it is far higher. As a society, we often inadvertently classify certain mental health disorders as less acute than others, in particular OCD. It is sadly still trivialised and many people falsely believe that it can be filed under a personality type characterised by traits or quirks such as liking things to be clean or being concerned with order. For as long as I can remember I have struggled with obsessive thoughts, checking compulsions, and an extreme fear of vomiting. Manifesting and evolving in different ways at each stage of my life, OCD has affected me with varying levels of severity over the years.

Outwardly, when speaking to my friend — the one with the Tupperware — I nodded, I made affirmation noises in all the correct places, I even managed to ask a question or two. But inside, the intrusive thoughts were gathering steam. Did my friend wash her hands thoroughly before she left his house? Is the virus already incubating in her system? Has she left traces of the contagion all over her apartment? Did I touch the light switch? Did I touch my nose or my mouth? If I make a deal with the universe, can I prevent the illness spreading? If I count to eight while resting both my hands on the stove’s cold induction plate, will I be spared the horror of a stomach bug?

The fact that she was about to cook us dinner came suddenly into sharp focus. As I watched her fail to wash a bagged salad, I was drawn to the milky remnants of freshly chopped mozzarella on her fingers. I had seen no evidence that she had contracted any sort of virus but I also saw no evidence that she hadn’t. The silky cheese residue coating her hands transformed before my very eyes into the thin, ectoplasmic consistency of bile. I had triggered the centrifuge deep in the centre of my brain and my thoughts began to resemble the swirling blizzard of monopoly money inside Richard O’Brien’s Crystal Maze dome.

Given that knowing incubation periods for most common illnesses is a specialty of mine, I knew that the nasty little germs (at that exact moment in time) could already be making their way into my immune system. It is still somewhat unclear to me why my brain has chosen to fixate on vomiting as the primary driving force behind my compulsive behaviours, but fixate it does, and I have now lived with emetophobia for more years than I haven’t. This fear of vomiting has underscored much of my life and generated some truly bizarre thoughts, compulsions and avoidant behaviours as a result.

As a person with OCD, I live like a secret squirrel. Double narratives. Unnecessarily complicated thought spirals. Bizarre rationalisations. It is such a private process that often loved ones of obsessive compulsives are shut out from the true nature of an intrusive thought cycle, or the hidden compulsions that can make us late, anxious or unable to function.

Like every mental health condition, there is a spectrum and OCD can present in myriad ways. My own can manifest as mental counting, excessive checking of appliances and locks, health anxiety and emetophobia, but it can also of course stretch to my need for order, to keep things clean and tidy, which is really just the tip of a very particular iceberg. A reminder to myself as much as anyone that Titanic assumptions have the potential to lead to further alienation and misunderstanding for those unable to communicate what is really going on beneath. Perhaps we are all a “little bit OCD”, but for some of us, it is more than just a personality type. If educating ourselves through opening up the conversation can enlighten even one person to the complexities of this disorder, then that would be one small thing checked off my very extensive checklist.