I am not particularly secretive about suffering from OCD. I have had it, whether I knew a name for it or not, for my entire living memory, and it is a very key part of who I am. I wrote about it last year for Mental Health Awareness Week in far more detail, but the crux of it is this – I was seemingly born an extremely obsessive person, which, as time went on, turned into OCD. My obsessions varied – I was convinced someone would set my house on fire, I couldn’t stop thinking about money, I thought my dog was going to drop dead – and my compulsions were ridiculous. I was already the poor, nerdy kid, but being the seven-year-old who compulsively steals paper from school to “stop bad things from happening” increased the bullying. OCD stole my entire childhood, and when I was 17, I started to very seriously attempt to recover.

Fast forward to now, when to all unknowing eyes, I am “recovered”. I moved out, and being in control of only my own life helped things a lot. I no longer hole up in the house for days on end, no longer have hours of rituals to perform before I go out, no longer run home in case it’s on fire. I don’t try to jump in front of cars! My hands aren’t cracked and bleeding! I am no longer in therapy, because OCD isn’t a daily threat to my life! The best way I’ve learned to recover is by reminding myself how absolutely monumentally ridiculously stupid OCD is. It doesn’t feel that way when you’re trapped in a prison of obsessive thoughts and violent images and fears, but trust me. It is stupid. It’s ridiculous that I, an otherwise mostly not-dumb person, would actually consider cleaning or tapping to be an appropriate way to fix anything. That’s helped a lot, and to an outsider, I seem to be doing very well. I even permit myself to go out every once in a while! But despite my life being a bit less shit, I feel a little bit conned by recovery.

“I can give up all the behaviours – and I have, a lot of them – but I still have a brain that forces me to think things I don’t want to and that obsesses and fixates over every tiny detail of everything, even if it doesn’t matter”

Because, despite being ‘recovered’, I am still the anxious, obsessive wreck I was at seven and 12 and 18. I thought that would have waned by now, but I am still obsessive. Even enjoying something good becomes a prison. I have never, in my life, been able to just be into something to a normal extent. From the second I could read or watch films or communicate with people, the things that I got hooked on would rattle around in my brain and fill me up with guilt in one way or another. School friends could not understand my persistent panic, my need to hang out with them lest they decided they hated me and disappeared. More often than not these obsessions would come hand in hand with a compulsion – touch every lamppost on your way home and Paige will want to have a sleepover this weekend! That’ll work, kid! I would watch the same films, read the same books, listen to the same CDs for days on end, having a breakdown if anybody interrupted my ritual. If I didn’t do it, then something bad would happen. I thought that after recovery, I might be a little bit less obsessive.

It’s also hard to recover properly when your behaviours are technically good. Cleaning my house is good. Handwashing is good. Being rigid, organised, and dedicated is good. What isn’t good is that when I break away from that, I want to fucking die. It’s hard for me to give up my compulsions because so many of them are things that I have to do anyway. When I went through CBT (briefly, I was bad at it) they told me not to do things because I was being told by my OCD to do them, but when I was depressed, often my OCD making me do things was the only way anything got done. I would have lived in absolute squalor if I didn’t have a voice telling me I was going to die unless I cleaned my house. It’s hard to give up “good” behaviours. It’s hard to want to.

I have had OCD, visibly, since I was about four years old. That was twenty years ago. I have never known a version of myself that isn’t panicked, obsessive, afraid – and I do not honestly know what I look like outside of that. True recovery for me ultimately would be a world in which I could be obsessive in the ‘right’ ways without being told that something horrible was going to happen to me if I wasn’t. I can give up all the behaviours – and I have, a lot of them – but I still have a brain that forces me to think things I don’t want to and that obsesses and fixates over every tiny detail of everything, even if it doesn’t matter. I still find it impossible to enjoy things properly. I don’t know if that will ever go away; whether it’s my OCD, or just who I am. I am, to an outsider, very much “recovered”, and yeah, I can now leave the house without believing it’s on fire! That’s something! I thought being obsessive was a symptom of my OCD, but seven years into recovery, it’s becoming clearer that I am innately, congenitally obsessive – and I have to just try and not be crushed under the weight of it again.