Sharing my OCD diary from last summer

By Hattie Butterworth

TW: OCD

I found these two diary entries I wrote last summer when my OCD entered my life again. It shows the depth of its darkness and also how emerging from an episode can feel. I hope it might provide some solace to those in a dark place.

02/07/2022

I don’t know how I got here again. I believed my life to be so secure. I was living with such freedom but my illness was always there. It gets better and worse and I forget its tendency to get really bad again.

It’s a type of bad that makes life a very messy place for a time. The sort of bad that means things need rearranging and little in my life is able to be fulfilled in the way it usually is. I struggle to be with people, to work, to go shopping and to take showers. Obsessions are everywhere and often very uncontrollable. I look for the least upsetting and triggering spaces and never know whether risk taking will bring strength or set me backwards in recovery.

I feel stuck and like my brain is working to make my life unliveable. I am isolated- my body feels a cold sweat when the thoughts are so intense they feel like they might be the death of me. I don’t know what might help except to cry to someone about how horrifically bad it all is. Being honest about the mess with the right people has always helped me beyond anything I thought possible. Intensity of despair turns into the beginnings of a deep ok-ness. It’s still red, hot, revolting and painful, but it’s more ok than it was before I told you.

To have these people close to me. To find the strength within me to trust them when it all gets bad. It is a gratitude and privilege to live with this knowledge. OCD holds no privilege. It understands nothing about your state of being and how much you love those around you. It doesn’t care about how fulfilling your work is or how much meditation you do. It holds you like a trap within which the only exit for me has been time.

I don’t feel like I can do it again. Can I really live a full reality of this painful illness at its worse yet again? It doesn’t seem fair. I am medicated more now and I think it will help me but it doesn’t come without some real grief and sense of failure that I couldn’t survive on the ‘standard’ dose. But I have to because I see the other side and love is there. Freedom and experience and connection is so close. I can live with this as long as healing takes. Again.

09/07/2022

To be alive and writing just a week later is unbelievable. I am getting better. I have felt the web of obsessions slowly fade day-after-day and I am seeing a beautiful life again. I still see obsessions every day and wonder if I’ll get through to the next moment without replying to the thought. I make it through, I move on and I have true moments in the day where I forget the burdens of my obsessions and live. A week ago I really couldn’t see this possibility.

The miracle of medication got me here. How simultaneously scary and amazing that is. That I can have my life change for the better so soon. That I know who to ask and know the warning signs. Am I just medicated to be more capable? I know that there would be little I could sustain on another extended period of intense OCD illness. I did the right thing.

Will this medication continue to lose its effect every two years? I can only increase my dose once more and then what? Maybe I’m finding myself in a pharmaceutical trap, but it’s a space giving me functioning and some happiness. Then there’s long-term effects. I can’t see myself stopping this for risk of another episode. We don’t know the effect of long-term anti-depressant use on the body but I’m not sure it’s terribly good. I feel a compulsion to say it’s worth it. Perhaps that’s testament to how horrifically difficult it has been.

Are people sick of listening to the mentally ill? Are we really irritating with our endless battling for a voice and desperately trying to make people listen to the crises we face? Sometimes I wonder if anyone feels a difference is being made by people speaking out. Maybe some people cope better alone- with only their friends and family aware of the deep trial. It’s therapeutic for me to write and speak about it, so maybe it is selfish in some ways.